Utopia or Furture? Idea's for a new Educational approach.

Ideas' for a new Educational approach

In this article I will be exploring the current approach to education as a passive process of consumption and its primary perceived location, The school.  I will then be exploring a Utopian vision for a new way to structure education as a thought experiment, the purpose of which to generate a new opportunity for perceiving education differently. 

It Starts in School..

Lest Start with  The primary location for education to be 'done', schools serve an irreplaceable role in modern western society, that's right...caring for young people while adults get on with the business of living and working. The schools also then adopt the secondary role of delivering an education in preparation for joining the adults in life in the future. This may be a vast oversimplification, however the system is complex (not complicated, i see there is a difference) so i will focus my attention in the article around invariants and attractors of the educational system rather than claiming to understand intrinsically how they all relate. 

School system or Banking System? 

The current way in which education is organised logistically in schools relies heavily on compliance and dare i say it, coercion of all who enter. Learners are expected to play a passive role in their learning moving from subject to subject, class to class while an 'expert' delivers knowledge to them so that it can be 'banked' by the learner for future recall and response.  

Its important here not to conflate this argument with passivity in the relation between the 'expert' and the learners, while i believe the system only affords a small bandwidth of engagement for the learner this could be considered a spectrum within the teaching profession and the pedagogies used. 

So lets focus more on structure of the system itself for now. The facts are that learners don't have much autonomy in terms of what they learn, when the learn it, for how long or how they will apply their learning in a meaningful way. The outcomes of this system that are perceived as valuable are the number of qualifications' that can be banked by the learner and the value of those investments in terms of grade achieved. 

Take a moment to consider this...if an alien came down to survey our education system what would they make of it?

I wonder if they would come to the conclusion that to win at Education is to climb the hierarchical ladder of knowledge (more on knowledge here: New knowledge) and 'become' a university professor? Ken Robinson talks about this here in his TED Talk , plus some really good insite around creativity. Im tempted to go off on a tangent here about this an the impact on young people's wellbeing but lets save that for now. Back to the system we have..

So to build your investment portfolio of Knowledge you need to be willing to comply with the education system so that it can 'do' education to you, rather than be driven to intensely by your own inner curiosity and create a learning journey that is unique to you. 

Now I understand that creating a unique journey for each learner isn't possible in our current systems and we have whole industries set up in line with that system we have facilitators, employers, researchers, resource creators to name a few that create a professionsiled market to serve neo-liberal trends.

Particularly in the west the growing rise of neo-liberalism has contributed to the primary output for education being the creation of consumerism and professionalization of vast majorities of commodities. In this sense education itself has become measured by neo-liberal worth and the productivity of all 'being's' within the system (students, teachers and the institution itself) has become the main source of measuring value. The problem with this being the lack of perceived value by the individual in engaging in any behavior that can not be measured and 'banked' as mentioned above. This has extended to learning itself which is no longer seen as a way of living a life ritch in curiosity but more a means to an end in terms of qualification's banked and knowledge acquired.

So what we need to do next to challenge this norm is a thought experiment. We need to imagine a new way, perhaps you will realise though this next half of the article that a new way may in fact already be here. All its requires is for us to attend to it with purpose and it could be realised. As is often the case with Modern SCi- Fi the future may already be here, we just have to look for it in our daily lives.

So here goes..

Education as a Network 

So my proposal is that we take away the idea of a school for a moment, and with it all of the perceptions that are associated with the word. 

Lets, for now imagine education as a Network.  

Similar to the idea proposed by  the author and social commentator Ivan illich (deschooling society) and much like some of what is emerging in online learning spaces, access to education should be a combination of free to access for learners, funded by the state, as well as a system of exchange of learning and guiding services within the learning network.

The timing of this should be considered alongside the explosion of online learning resources after the pandemic, we are already adapted to one network (remember when the internet landed), lets start to attend to the global network FOR education, that is already here. We have the basic synergies needed for this to happen, We just need to create the infrastructure to allow this new education Network to fully emerge. 

Firstly the network needs to be designed not for the state, for purposes of indoctrination. It is also not for the employers to create the next cohort of 'workers' this network will be  designed for learners and providers of learning, and also co-created with them.  The end goal will be the emergence of a self-organising system that can not be used for individual gain. 

One of the principles for this network will be a clear distinction between individual 'ways' of learning and individualism. For there seems to have been a disconnect between the prosperity of the individual and the community of others that is essential for personal thriving, the network will rely on the correspondence of its community maintain its existence. 

Key Attractor's of the new system

The Role of the State 

The state would still be directing some public funds to Employ facilitators within the network. Facilitator's would be a combination of learning Mentor's,  administrators and Curator's to help guide learners, match learners to those that can guide and teach them and to create the access to libraries of resources for the learners as they require it. 

There would be a need for facilitator's to be based in community hub's so that they can facilitate the care of children as they learn and safeguard learners from individuals' wishing to exploit the network for personal gain. We will soon refer to these Hubs as Community learning center's (what we know now as schools).

Facilitator's would work with learners as a mentor to help them reflect on their learning journey direction and to help them generate connections with others who can support their learning, whether that be peers, access to resources or skillful others to guide them in an area of interest.  

Also In this new vision for education the state would deploy administrator's rather than what we have currently in the form of inspectors. The key difference being that administrator's would work 'with' network facilitators not 'above' them to help create systems to cope with the logistical challenges of distributing learning resources equally to community learning centers (schools) and to help facilitate democratic processes to elect person's to lead on learning projects, which would be a key aspect of embedding learning in the world, via the creation of community initiatives for the benefit of the local community around the learning center. 

Currency 

The currency in this System would be 'learning tokens' which may in the future take the form of an online crypto type currency. The state would distribute an equal base amount of Tokens to learners so that they may exchange them for correspondence with skillful guides which will expand on further below, for now we will imagine these skillful guides as persons who have knowledge and skills they wish to share with others.  

In this network there would be the opportunity for skillful guides to exchange learning tokens earned by collaborating with learners individually or on community initiatives for a wage from the state, however it would be the learners who must create the demand for guidance not the role of any guide to sell a need to another person, learning will be a right not a commodity. In this sense The learning network must favour the learners not become a monopoly for anyone to generate large capital purely for their own interest. This again would be monitored by the facilitators within the network. 

Skilled guides

In this new view teachers would be re-imagined ad skilled guides and this title would lead to the expansion in the background of those who could engage in guiding a learner. Rather than a 'professional' teacher this new language would afford the contribution of a broader scope of crafts to guide those seeking to learn. For example the network would allow for the introduction of a learner seeking to be guided in an area such as computer coding to be matched with a person skilled in that area who can guide their attention. the affordance in this example is the opportunity for the learner to act in correspondence with the guide.  Read more on my view of a skilled guide: What is a Good teacher?

The learning Journey

The journey of the learner through the network would be self- determined with the aid of Facilitator's in the role of learning advisors and mentor's who could help them attune to the key features of their educational path and guide their curiosity along the learning journey. Learners would use resources from the learning network engage in area's of interest and demonstrate their learning through their own portfolio of experience in creating, Crafting and engaging in community interest projects and through an apprentice model of developing and applying skills.

For example if a learner wanted to explore the skills associated with plumbing then they would be matched with a guide who is looking to share those skills and there would be the opportunity for the learner to exchange token's for guidance and demonstration or to apprentice with the guide until they have demonstrated that they can offer sufficient competency to offer this skill to others. This would ultimately be determined by the person who seeks their services rather than the amatuer plumber who sells the need to a consumer. As you can see this flips the learning journey on its head, no longer is this a system of 'banking' qualifications for later date, it is rather a constant process of adapting and becoming a skillful person within society. It is a process of de-professionalising society. The expert is no longer seen as someone who has acquired and banked enough knowledge, rather there would be more skilled others in certain areas' dependant on their own curiosity and intrinsic drives, This configuration of learning thrives on the very nature of human curiosity and collaboration for its existence. More on this here; Education in the world.

Social learning Spaces

Society would need a replacement for the 'school' in order to facilitate socialisation and development of children within communities. This Network in modern times would also not entirely negate the need for childcare and supervision.This could be facilitated in central community buildings and places termed 'learning center's' the learning center's would be central hubs within communities where the exchange of knowledge and skills could be facilitated. The learning centers would be responsible for facilitating social enterprising projects and initiatives that could would also act as a real contextual experience to base the development of skills and the understanding of key knowledge to complete the projects. The center's would be ran by full time facilitator's who would be made up of learning mentor's, nurses, administrator's and library curator's. It would be important that the learning Hub's are places for the social mixing of age and diversity there would be no maximum age for inclusion in the learning network and due to the nature of constant becoming, those that have experienced more learning can become skillful guides at any age and development stage for another learner.  

Pedagogy for the new network 

The word pedagogy originated from the greek idea of a pedagogue who was a servant responsible for guiding the wealthy child as they navigated learning about the world and the values of their father's house. This network of learning is an attempt to get closer to the original idea of others who have skills and experience to share guiding learners, but that guiding is a form of corresponding with the learner and joining them rather than dictating the paths to them. That is not to say that the guide 'skillful guide' of facilitator is equal in knowledge equity to the learner.

More experienced learners will have explored large parts of the landscape before and developed the adaptability to attune to the needs of novice learner's, they will also 'know' their subject landscape in greater depth, the key waypoints, for them are easier to perceive. Their praxis is becoming always more adaptable to this search space. 

Ultimately this return to pedagogy of old means to allow the learner to be self- determined, giving just enough knowledge at the right time in the journey to support competence and understanding. But allowing for the learner to perceive new affordances on their own. The pedagogy of the learning network is driven by sharing and guiding and without the curiosity of the learner and the desire to 'know' then there is no opportunity for  oppression of any person or group to take hold, 

Summary

Everyone is a lifelong learner, its human nature. Every human being also has the capacity to guide another on their journey. Some human's feel the deeper calling within them to help guide others, these are the facilitators in the form of learning mentor's, some have connection with artifacts and knowledge, a desire to safeguard and curate human exceptionalism these are the facilitator's who will curate the network's resources. Some have a desire to serve the civil rights of society these are the administrator's who will work tirelessly to preserve the freedom's of the network for all. 

 

So while this may be a thought experiment, I would like to finish by encouraging you to consider which aspects of the Education network are already here? Moreover, which parts of the network are most aligned with our intrinsic human nature and are being suppressed by our current system? How do we create a system that allows all the freedom's to transcend any possibility of oppression by another being. How do we create a an education that is embedded in the flourishing of an equal society. 

How do we make the utopia a reality?