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If life is ultimately dependent on the choices we make, then Education should focus on the skills we require and understandings we need in order to make them wisely. In his poem, “The Road not Taken,” Robert Frost offers suggestions, and I have questions…
Dear Mr. Frost, I know all about your choice of the road less travelled, the grassier one. The one that wanted wear. But I wonder. In our lives, while we tend look ahead at impending decisions, we seldom arrive at those junctures with comfort or certainty or the emotional security of knowing or understanding the consequences of the choices we must make. To do so would require a modicum of prescience.
When the road splits, we choose one. What I dearly want to understand is not just the merit of a road less travelled, but how to even recognize the fact that it is! Whether I move in one or the other direction, how can I not be left ultimately with a “What if?” and with that, unrequited experience.
You see, those forks in the road, past, present, and future, have all at some point been in the future. To understand which are travelled less than others, to know which make more sense than the alternatives, to determine which are better, is, at any pending juncture, intimidating. Though the actions best taken may well be suggested by the paths that lead to forks, the implications and inexorable consequences of the choices to be made remain, for the most part, unknowable. Consequentially, the propositions are daunting.
I know! Some say, “Of course, everything suggests you turn right.” Others arrive at the completely opposite conclusion. Ultimately, Interpretation is the nearest thing we have to prescience. The interpretations that ultimately guide us to one path over another present us with perhaps the most unsettling of human experiences. Risk, the fear of loss, the unknown.
Carpe Diem! they say. We are told to celebrate risk. Challenge ourselves. Carve our own paths through life. Go where no (hu)man has gone before. These are all noble. Admirable. And yet, every decision we make leads us in a direction rife with unknowables. Each time we decide, new consequences emerge, not only for ourselves, but also for those who have been parts of our journeys to each point of divergence.
And then there are those things that are born of events and relationships during our travels along the paths we’ve already chosen. As a simple consequence of being, haven’t they also their own rights to exist. What of them? If each decision we make marks the demise of things that may have otherwise been, then each decision we make also becomes an act of sacrifice.
So how should we proceed? How do we move ahead? They say life is full of compromise. Every choice we make leads us in one direction over all possible others, the sum total of which become entire lifetimes unrealized. Roads less travelled? I would venture a parallel characterization: lifetimes lost.
The choices we make carry with them the weight and responsibility of sacrifices made and possibilities abandoned. As a consequence, each choice, every road, every sacrifice comes with it a promise and a responsibility to ensure it was the right one. “Life is like pain dipped in honey.” This is a line from another poem I did not fully grasp in my youth. Now, Mr. Frost, framed by the roads I have taken and sacrifices I have made, I think I do.
What if?
Indeed.
The most comfort in conclusion I can reach is one, driven by compromise, and perhaps, importantly, the respect owed to the sacrifices I have myself made: maybe those sacrifices are, in reflection, our best guides, to help us learn, to teach us how to make the best of the choices we do make. We owe them our dedication, effort, open minds, passion, love, and inspiration.
Perhaps, with that, our paths will lead us to new achievements and greater satisfaction. We may also discover ways to resume, in our journeys through life, paths we considered lost forever.
An interesting phenomenon occurs when you examine the behavior of light at the microscopic level. Depending on the kind of test you use to observe its behavior as light passes from point A to point B, it is, at the same time, both waveform and particle form. Without getting into what exactly that means, since you can, I suppose, simply Google it, this “wave-particle duality” is central to the field (notion?) of quantum mechanics. I would also venture it is central to, at least correlated with, and perhaps even somehow responsible for the world’s current socio-digital zeitgeist, especially when it comes to the sanctity (or lack thereof) of notions of sequence, order, and predictability in time and space.
Source
Culos, Greg, Waves, Particles, Cats, and Captain Kirk: The Quantum Impact on Social Thought in Education, Values and Meanings, Scientific Foreign Countries (НАУЧНОЕ ЗАРУБЕЖЬЕ, Ценности и смыслы), 2019, No 3 (61), pp. 138~155.
This essay is an expression of thoughts and concerns towards current trends in education. It expands upon a particular correlation between current scientific theory, advances in technology, and how their combination has, in recent decades affected both social thought and education theory and practice.
For the UNESCO Chair on Global Education at the Institute for Strategy of Education Development of the Russian Academy of Education
I’ve come to a realization. Effective education is simply, and exactly, this:
To encourage and
inspire people to communicate well; and through this process, enable them to
develop their inner selves and their potential as it relates to both their
success and that of their communities.
What we learn is not inconsequential, but to presume we can teach someone, anyone, to be good at anything in particular, is, I believe, misguided. People take themselves on those journeys and end up in places that are entirely of their own discovery, making, and determination. We can guide, suggest. Put coals on fire, and stoke it; but the direction the flames take, should there even be any, has nothing at all to do with us. We can stand by, watch, and, perhaps, become inspired ourselves by witnessing the potential people have within themselves. Our role, as teachers, is quite straightforward: to stoke the inspiration that will take people on journeys of their own determination.
This realization rests at
the core of this, my little exploration into the future of education. It’s a
simple idea, not reliant on technologies or trends or modes of pedagogical
thought that are, on many occasions, flavours of the day. Indeed, it’s an idea
that I believe has never changed. While the tools, science, social systems,
modes of thought, and resources that surround us today most certainly have
evolved, we are ultimately the same vulnerable, sentient beings that have
existed for millennia. We share the same capacities, strengths, limitations,
needs, desires, hopes, and dreams as our distant ancestors who learned to control
fire itself (something, incidentally, we’ve yet to perfect). We learn what is
relevant and necessary for survival determined by the environments within which
we live. Beyond that, we learn best those things that catch our interest and
inspire us to delve more deeply. We learn best in an effort to define who we
are, to ourselves, to others, in ways we hope to be perceived, and in ways we
yearn to be able to interact within our communities.
The future of education,
I believe, is no different than the past of education. While trends in
education will continue to come and go, trends are derivatives of a whole; they
tend to be particular aspects, qualities, approaches, activities, and
philosophies elevated to lofty cultish heights. The truth is, when separated and
formalized into “new approaches to learning,” they lose both essence and
effectiveness. Without delving too much into current trends and directions in
educational thought, theory, and application, safe it to say that much emphasis
is currently placed on the notion that our level of technological prowess
enables approaches to learning that are somehow superior to “traditional
approaches.” Here, and pointedly, I disagree. First, the notion of a
traditional approach to education is a vague one that tends to fall apart with
closer inspection. And second, while our current state of technological prowess
enables us so much further than humans have ever been enabled in the past,
those technologies are not capable in themselves to improve how and why we
learn.
So, what, in my mind, is
the future of education. This is where I return to my opening words. The future
of effective education lies in what effective education has always been: “To encourage and inspire people to
communicate well; and through this process, enable them to develop their inner
selves and their potential as it relates to both their success and that of
their communities.”
How do we proceed? We
forge communities of learning, something that has always been core to effective
learning. We create reasons for people to be together that hinge on shared
challenges. While our social and environmental surroundings define basic levels
of understanding that we share and require to participate and survive within
them, we then and together discover how each of us carries some particular
solution to the larger questions we face as a whole. There is a place for
learning skills we apply in unison. And there is a place for our individual
strengths to benefit those communal needs. While society requires us to work in
teams, in synchrony, according to requirements that apply equally to each of
us, it also gains from individual understandings and approaches that can and do
improve the ability of the community to improve how it behaves as a whole.
We all must learn to
read, write, sing, count, and strategize. Beyond that, we all should be enabled
by and engaged in the breadth and depth of the tools and capabilities now
available to us: incredible technologies, fantastic mobility, and seemingly
instantaneous access to information, anywhere, and anytime. Human society has
changed dramatically in the preceding three decades. We live in a world that I
believe is experiencing a schism of a magnitude never before seen. On one side
we have the political orders, isolated communities corralled by power
structures and defined by invisible and arbitrary boundaries determined (more
than we’d like to admit) through oppression within and beyond those boundaries.
On the other side we have an entire world of people all sharing the same needs,
hopes, desires, and goals: to live, love, succeed, survive, and to feel
included in community.
As a direct consequence
of our incredible technologies, fantastic mobility, and seemingly instantaneous
access to information, traditional borders are rendered meaningless. Power
structures of the past should remain there. I have spent my professional career
in education, and in particular international education. And through my three
decades in this field, I have concluded this: technology has brought together
people from around the world in different locations for different purposes and
to accomplish goals that are relevant to all of us. Each of us today belongs to
social circles where colleagues, mentors, friends, teachers, mothers, fathers,
relatives, brothers and sisters were, only a half century ago, bifurcated as
allies or enemies. For the most part, we were led to believe that “they” were
not “us.” The fact is, what we have discovered in recent decades, is, indeed,
exactly the opposite. The past 30 years has provided all of us an emancipation
of thought and being that changes everything… except for how we learn. That
remains the same, and rests at the core of our future together.
Our incredible
technologies, fantastic mobility, and seemingly instantaneous access to
information will only improve, and dramatically so. As a global society we will
continue to use those tools and technologies to bring us closer together in
greater diversity to face challenges of survival and social improvement that
will benefit all of us. We will continue to require education in fundamental
skills and awareness. At the same time, the opportunities available to each of
us as a consequence of our own unique talents and dispositions will increase
exponentially as well, and as a direct result of the exponential increase in
the kinds of communities we are now capable of creating.
