[ox-en] Self-unfolding education
- From: Timm Murray <hardburn runbox.com>
- Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2001 13:17:27 -0600
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Haven't seen this discussed on the English (and I don't speak enough German
to have a hope of understanding the other list) list yet, and I'd like to
throw out some ideas of promoting self-unfolding in an educational system.
The system I describe below is similar to how I've observed many hackers
educating themselves (in the old, MIT sense of "hackers", not the
basterdization of the word that is so popular today).
The first thing you have to teach is reading. It is all but impossible to
learn things without being able to read. Thus, I think the first 2-4 years
of schooling are for bootstrapping the process, and should resemble the
school rooms we have now in America, but the focus would be almost entirely
on learning to read. This is basically what we already have, at least in my
section of America (Wisconsin).
- From there, the "classroom" basically turns into a library. "Teachers"
become more like "advisors", finding out what the student is intrested in and
then pointing the student in the right direction. In addition to the
library, labs are available for students to work on specific projects.
Students who like computers could go down to a lab containing mountains of
old parts (I really think the best way to learn about computers is to get
older parts to be peiced together). More mechanical-oreianted students could
find labs with a car shop, or would working materials, or metal shop, etc.
In any case, the labs are available for the students to actually *do* the
projects they read about in the library section. Students are also
encouraged to help each other out in their projects, perhaps taking on a
collaberative project (such as making a whole network of computers for a
distributed.net-style computing system (or just playing Doom :) ).
Although they are often stuck in the dregs of the modern educational system,
hackers often learn in a similar manner as this. The hacker ability of
reading is ledgendary, although they still needed that first few years of
schooling to help bootstrap that process. After that, they are quite happy
doing their own thing. They are forced to get ahold of the right
software/hardware on their own (in my proposal, the school has already taken
care of that step), but once they have it they peice it together on their
own. Furthermore, they are very willing to help each other out. Although
funded by the US DoD, the Internet quickly became the hackers' favorite way
of collaberating on projects together, essentially self-unfolding the entire
culture by taking advantage of the collective knowledge of hackers all over
the Internet.
I have heard some people argue that computers have no place in the school
room. They argue that the computer is mainly a research tool, and thus
should be limited to the library and not seen inside classroom. What these
people miss is that the library represents the ultimate in self-unfolding
education, so the classroom should look more like a library anyway.
- --
Timm Murray
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