Education is at its essence the adventure of learning about how the world works. If so, it should be based in the real world, interwoven with experience, opportunity, trial, error, at every moment. Ray Dalio’s perspective on this is relevant. It very much represents a perspective for success in life.
The impact of the digitization of human society has led to what I believe represents a disturbing trend in education. Like the bell that conditioned Pavlov’s pup to salivate, digitization has conditioned us to seek, expect, assume, and demand immediacy of return and gratification. We have become addicted to that, and it has impacted how we teach, and how we learn.
I believe that, more than ever before, current trends in education are reflexive to snapshots and freeze frames of yet incomplete learning and development. Focus is thrust on what is, at any given moment, perceived to be missing, lacking, incomplete, or yet absent. What has otherwise been gained is neglected. The solutions pander to perception. The more we believe immediacy in achievement and understanding is possible, the more we are blinded to the unavoidable roles of time, exposure, and participation in learning.
Too often now in education, where in any fleeting moment errors or weaknesses are detected in students’ abilities, all else is thrust to the wayside. The lens and focus of perceived need shifts again and again, kneejerk, without acknowledgement of the holistic nature of learning and development, the absolute necessity of time, exposure, and participation. In the extreme, a recent article recognized a perceived ebb in children’s happiness. The solution presented: develop a class in the science of happiness in order to revive the happiness perceived lost. Hmm.
We are in an age of being pandered to by the second. The philanthropic notion of a social net, of which education played a critical role, once had legitimacy as an important societal backstop to poverty and to support those in danger of falling through very real cracks in societal structure. It has evolved into a need and perception that every discomfort, every challenge, is something to be rescued from, and where the accommodations seen as necessary are applied to all. Ironically, the ultimate consequence is exactly the reverse. People are stripped of their abilities to grow independently and become arbiters of their own existences. If happiness is waning, perhaps this is why.