What Future for Education?

I’ve started auditing the MOOC “What Future for Education?” on the Coursera platform. It’s common to think of the future of educating and school in terms of what we have available and what we value today. This course admits that extrapolating what the future will hold has failed multiple times in the past (in everything from past teaching techniques to sci-fi films of the last century).

I hope this course will open my mind to techniques and tools that I haven’t considered, as well as bring up philosophical questions concerning teaching and schools that I haven’t been exposed to in my bachelor program.

My current views about education are a bit scattershot, but overall I have a few resounding beliefs:

• Technology in education should be used primarily to teach standards and skills in the respective class or subject. A secondary goal may be to expose students to that tool. Technology shouldn’t be brought into a school unless the primary goal is served, as education is often lost when classes are forced to use objects that are “cool” and “fun”, but hinder learning.
• Schooling should be teacher guided, but student-centered. At the moment, I believe school is student-guided (students are supposed to know what part of a lesson they don’t understand, then ask the right questions to get there without being given the base knowledge to do this), but teacher-centered (teachers decide what levels students should be studying, whether or not that student is above or below that point).
• Students need to be given a reason to be in school that is useful to them. Many students have other responsibilities (young siblings or their own child to care for, work or parents’ bills to help pay, etc.) and education should offer those students skills that will help them in their alternative lives.

Future posts will follow my path in this class, where I touch on these topics as they are brought up in the lectures.

Cheers,

Pinky