| It is a miracle that curiosity
survives formal education.
- Albert Einstein
Wake up all the teachers time to teach a new way
Maybe then they'll listen to whatcha have to say
Cause they're the ones who's coming up and the world is in their
hands.
When you teach the children teach 'em the very best you can.
- Harold Melvin, Peace
If you want to change the way people think, you can educate
them, brainwash them, bribe them, drug them. Or you can teach
them a few carefully chosen new words with the power to change
the way you see the world (or as the Germans would say, these
words might warp your Weltanschauung).
- Howard Rheingold, They Have a Word for It
Awe is the beginning of wisdom. Awe is the beginning of education.
- Matthew
Fox, 21st
century spirituality: how do we wake up?
Engage me or enrage me.
- Marc Prensky
Give people a fun, exciting 'catch' activity and use that as
the baseline from which more meaningful dialogue can evolve.
- Tom Walter, comment posted on Storytelling
Now
There may be more than one right answer.
- Popular expression
Tell me, I forget. Show me, I remember. Involve me, I understand.
- Chinese proverb
The mind values most what it learns first hand.
- Promotion, Otago
Polytechnic
Our students have changed radically. Today's students are no
longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.
- Marc Prensky, Digital
Natives, Digital Immigrants (PDF)
Everything that one thinks one understands has to be understood
over and over again in its different aspects each time with
the same new shock of discovery.
- Marian Milner, cited by Helen
Garner
When the objective is to make children composers, performers,
and appreciators of music, it is not enough merely to place
a piano in every classroom and provide each teacher with a one-day
course on how the piano works.
- New Zealand Consultative Committee on Information Technology
in the School Curriculum, 1990
Students today are often immersed in an environment where they
learn subjects that have truth and beauty embedded in them,
but the way they are taught is compartmentalized so that truth
and beauty are not always evident.
- David Bolinsky, David
Bolinsky animates a cell
No matter how lazy you feel, you're not intrinsically doing
nothing.
- David Bolinsky, David
Bolinsky animates a cell
Institutions everywhere, from corporations to the military,
are discovering that maintaining a healthy balance of 'bottoms
up' management (i.e. listening) with the old 'top-down' management
is a far better way to be successful. It is high time we stop
hiding behind our teaching and administration desks, afraid
of our own kids, and learn to dialog with them about their own
learning. After all, isn't that what real education is all about?
- Marc Prensky, To
educate, we must listen (PDF)
I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like to
be taught.
- Winston Churchill
Real learning is not something added, it is a reorganization
of the system. New nets and assemblies occur, loops form, alternate
pathways develop. The viewed world is different and so is the
viewer.
- Joanna Macy, World
as Lover, World as Self
Awareness by itself is not enough, it must be joined by mastery.
- Piero Ferrucci, what
we may be
Anything should be studied not by what it is in itself, but
by its relationship to other things.
- Gregory Bateson
Knowledge is not the conformity of the mind to the given but
an immersion in the process of transformation and construction
of a new world.
- Gustavo Gutierrez
Be prepared to be surprised.
- Harrison Owen, Open
Space Technology
We now know that students would rather ask another student
for help before they ask a teacher, that's the normal behaviour.
But we don't formalise that. Kids just do that on their own,
after school. So I show an example today of one teacher in Los
Angeles who's a Math teacher, where students in his classroom
had designed tutorials across the curriculum available on one
YouTube-like website. So that the children, in their own voice,
can create tutorials that actually have more of an impact than
the teacher teaching. In my country, we have these things called
one-room schoolhouses that come out of the 1800s, where one
teacher taught every subject, 8 grades. And the only way to
do that is to organise it so that kids teach kids. And the research
on that model to this day, shows that one-room schoolhouses
get better standardised test scores than classrooms where the
teacher delivers everything. So we know historically it's been
a good idea. The irony is we've wiped out, now in a sense we
have these new tools, so we're going back to a model that we
got rid of, and revisiting and re-engineering it with these
new tools. When every kid has a laptop and you have them at
home as well as at school, it certainly can be an isolating
experience. Or you can actually get kids communicating with
one another outside their own circle of friends. Because when
you don't see them face-to-face,
you might we willing to share and ask questions, even ask for
help, that you would never ask face to face. Then when you come
back to school there's a stronger sense of community. So it's
not one or the other. The trick for a teacher in managing this
is to create challenges on the web for kids to collaborate,
that lead to more social interaction rather than less.
- Alan November, The
Digital Classroom
Our students have changed radically. Today's students are no
longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.
- Marc Prensky, Digital
Natives, Digital Immigrants (PDF)
Institutions everywhere, from corporations to the military,
are discovering that maintaining a healthy balance of 'bottoms
up' management (i.e. listening) with the old 'top-down' management
(i.e. demanding) is a far better way to be successful. It is
high time we stop hiding behind our teaching and administration
desks, afraid of our own kids, and learn to dialog with them
about their own learning. After all, isn't that what real education
is all about?
- Marc Prensky, To
educate, we must listen (PDF)
In 1837, Frederick
Froebel started the first school for four and five year
olds in Germany.
He called it 'kindergarten,' or a children's garden, and made
it into a paradisiacal sanctuary where teachers read kids poetry
and stories, led them in singing songs, and oversaw them as
they gardened and played outdoors. Government authorities later
shut the place down, citing the 'dangerous freedom' of the experiment.
- Rob Brezsny
Knowledge is not the conformity of the mind to the given but
an immersion in the process of transformation and construction
of a new world.
- Gustavo Gutierrez
Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything
new.
- Albert Einstein
The things that can destroy us are politics without principle;
pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge
without character; business without morality; science without
humanity; and worship without sacrifice.
- Gandhi
I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like
what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me -
so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred
to me to put them down. I decided to start anew, to strip away
what I had been taught.
- Georgia O'Keeffe
The world will not evolve past its current state of crisis
by using the same thinking that created the situation.
- Albert Einstein
You can't solve a problem on the same level that it was created.
You have to rise above it to the next level.
- Albert Einstein
There is no travel without learning and no learning without
travel.
- Michel
Serres (cited frequently by Oliver Hillel)
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than knowledge.
- Charles Darwin
In this great future, you cannot forget your past.
- Bob Marley
When a donkey flies, you don't blame him for not staying up
that long.
- Mary Tyler Moore show
You ain't going to learn what you don't want to know.
- Grateful Dead
Don't let classes get in the way of your education.
- Conversation, 1984
Some people will never learn anything because they understand
everything too soon.
- Alexander Pope
Traditions cannot be frozen in time. They need to be preserved
and brought to a modern sensibility.
- Conversation
Be curious. Don't try for consistency.
- Conversation
As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more
by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression.
- Robert Bly
One way to be successful is to stop making the same mistakes.
- Conversation
You know, when Pope Urban VIII refused to look through the
telescope of Galileo, it was because he didn't want to admit
the fact that Jupiter had moons. His argument was that if he,
the Pope, who was the top dog at the time, the top tweet in
birdhouse, if he didn't see it, it didn't exist. Remember that
the word 'real' originally meant 'royal.' It still does in Spanish.
If the king didn't see it, it didn't exist. If the court chronicle
didn't record it, it didn't exist.
- Harold Humes, Writing
on Air
Standing on the shoulders of giants, I feel so cold.
- REM
A psychiatrist had been working with an autistic child. For
a long time he had been trying to communicate with him, but
the child had remained locked in his own world. At last, one
day, the psychiatrist took a pencil, threw it on the ground
and told the child: "Now pick it up and give it to me."
His tone carried the weight of all the hopes of the failed attempts
of the past. The atmosphere was ripe; the child did as he was
asked, and in that magic moment a link of consciousness was
established between the two. The psychiatrist later talked about
this experience to a group of colleagues in a conference. Soon
after, many of them started mechanically throwing pencils before
autistic children and waiting for the children to pick them
up. Of course, what had come to be known as 'the pencil technique'
failed.
- Piero Ferrucci, what
we may be |
