Subject: Educational Leadership

Posted by Bill Ellis on 12/8/2004
In Reply To:Educational Leadership Posted by Bill Ellis on 12/8/2004

Message:

I was suggesting that rethinking should start with "learning" not "educating."
Educating is a process of transferring data or concepts from one person to another.
It is giving.
Learning is the process by which a person accepts internally new facts or concepts.
It is taking.

What we are, or should be, concerned with is learning. The development of a person's knowledge system. Public education is one modality of doing that. But it can't happen unless people wants to learn. So the beginning point is with why we learn, how we learn, when we learn, and what we learn. Fixing schools, or rethinking the strategy of public education should not be a starting point. That is the box in which most of the thinking is happening.
Public education is only one of the options for learning.

I argue that there are two areas in which learning should be considered. 1) the learning of an individual, and 2) learning by, of and for society.

For the individual I think that today we have very different reasons for learning, very different ways we can learn, and a very different knowledge of how one learns. It has become widely believed that schools can no longer provide all of the learning one needs to function in society for the rest or one's life. Information to changing too rapidly and is too diverse. So just to function in society each individual has to be a life-long learner.

Brain research has shown that each bring has it own unique development path. We are learning all of the time from birth to death, from waking to sleeping. So the school/teach/educate syndrome is an inefficient way for the individual to learn.
Another point is that learning is more than an economic function. There is a spiritual need and joy of learning that is much more than getting a job.

From the social point of view creativity rather than fact accumulation is much more important to social well being. And we are no longer space and time limited in our leaning. A century ago it took days if no weeks for a bit of knowledge to spread around the country or the world. Today it is nanoseconds. It is now reasonable for people from any position on the globe to know what is happening on any other.

Without going into more detail I think this gives and idea of why I think we should be thinking out-of-th-box on learning.
I would like to see a study of ALL learning modalities -- public schooling, homeschooling, charter schools, democratic schools, indpendent study programs and all of the rest. That was the point of our White Paper.
Bill Ellis