Learning about forest ecology firsthand.
Seth Godin has a great post up today about learning versus schooling, Education at the crossroads. Good food for thought.
School was the big thing for a long time. School is tests and credits and notetaking and meeting standards. Learning, on the other hand, is ‘getting it’. It’s the conceptual breakthrough that permits the student to understand it then move on to something else. Learning doesn’t care about workbooks or long checklists.
For a while, smart people thought that school was organized to encourage learning. For a long time, though, people in the know have realized that they are fundamentally different activities.
Seth’s got a good point, which I would modify a bit. Schools are not necessarily organized around encouraging learning in the sense of “getting it.” The good ones, however are organized around learning. I think the distinction might be better if understood between good schools (where real learning is happening) and others that just push student through. If all that is happening is testing, then clearly there is a problem!
His primary point, however, is the distinction between scarcity and abundance in education.
MIT and Stanford are starting to make classes available for free online. The marginal cost of this is pretty close to zero, so it’s easy for them to share. Abundant education is easy to access and offers motivated individuals a chance to learn.
Scarcity comes from things like accreditation, admissions policies or small classrooms.
For us at ISDSI, we have an inherent scarcity for our semester programs – we can can only take so many students a semester, based on class size and how many students our partners in the villages we work in can accomodate. Recognizing that not all the students who would like to come can come, we’re in the process of exploring ways in which to share classes, experiences and our understanding of culture and ecology in Thailand. As one step in that direction this last year we put all of our syllabi online, and are now exploring video, photos essays and other options for sharing what we’eve learned. We hope to have some lessons and other materials up over the next year. If you have ideas of things you’d like to see or learn about, let us know in the comments!
