"Society exists through a process of transmission quite as much as biological life. This transmission occurs by means of communication of habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from the older to the younger. Without this communication of ideals, hopes, expectations, standards, opinions, from those members of society who are passing out of the group life to those who are coming into it, social life could not survive.”
John Dewey – Democracy and Education (1916)
What makes a good education? What makes a good teacher? What are the things and skills you wished you had learned when you were younger? What were the most meaningful learning experiences you have had?
Education is the means through which we pass the baton to the next generation. In a fragile political climate it is our responsibility to critically reflect on our upbringing to better teach and mentor future citizens. We don’t pick our family, neither do we pick our school or teachers. Most of us have spent the first decades of our lives going to an institution without having any agency on it. The objective of this salon is to reclaim agency on those issues by bringing the discussion on education outside of the classroom; beyond teachers and parents as solo participants in this debate.
Discussion - What do we teach the next generation?
It’s not just an absence of learning, but a large part of my education has been unlearning. We have to spend so long unlearning the lessons taught to us, peeling back the layers on the onion.
However you do need to have an onion or a base structure in the first place, a thing to un-peel.
About changing the gain in the information that we are taught. The confidence intervals that we should use for any given learning is never given to us.
We really need to think about CT and how to question things, bc knowledge is out there already, but we need to know the question that we are asking.
- Critical thinking
- Philosophy
- Emotional intelligence, checking in with yourself to know your internet states. What is motivating you - anger, attention etc. These are skills that we don't have.
What is the technique for solving the problem. We don’t’ teach this kind of CT and philosophy.
All topics thing that they are the most important, but in fact we just need to stop teaching subjects, as they are all based on each other. We need context for the things that we learn, to see where they fit in physics, philosophy, sociology.
The problem with ‘knowledge’ is that it’s hard for us to a_ see what we don’t know, and what we are not even looking at, and b) to ask the right questions.
Critical Pedagogy
The method by which we might do this is critical pedagogy, which Ira Shor describes as:
"Habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional cliches, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media, or discourse."
What's crucial about this approach is not just that it seeks to facilitate learning, but that it seeks to unlearn one's assumptions and the prevailing ideas in and about society.
Some key works in this tradition are:
- Paulo Freire's book Pedagogy of the Oppressed
- Bell Hooks' book Teaching to Transgress
- Neil Postman's Teaching as a Subversive Activity
- Critical pedagogy magazine: Radical Teacher
Re-envisioning middle school - we don't fully grasp the developmental state of these humans. We don't actually know how e learn and we focus to much on what we learn. What are the varieties of 'how'?
What is the purpose of education?
Individualism and the hive.
It's not clear what the point of eduction is in fact. Somewhere along the way it seems that we started to think that truth seeking was virtuous in and of itself. to me this is a start but it's not enough an education is about what you do with that understanding. If it is for humans to better steward the planet, this might in fact be in conflict with truth seeking or understanding the way of things, empiricist and exploration. So we likely don't agree on what the point of education is, and even if we did, we are probably not adhering to that. We must remember that all truths are motivated - you dig in a certain direction, for certain reasons.
Is truth seeking enough, i'd argue that it is good but not good enough it's what we do with that knowledge that is the point of an education.
There is an intellectual pandering that has taken place, academics have hijacked education.
Education & Oppression - let's flip the script about how we think about education.
How do we give agency to young people rather than what we want you to know. We should be listening to young people and thinking about what we can learn from them. What do you want to learn. Who do you want to become. What do you want to leave this planet. How can you steward the planet best. We need to foster trust between young people and adults.
Young people have the ability to be autonomous, it's only when we fuck them up that they behave badly. I am personally interested in how we give young people the information, toolset and questions to be radically more effective.
No one told me that I had a short time to carry and steer this ship. and by the time i realize the weight of this, I had spent 20 years just trying to please the world.
i want to teach the next generation how to be more effectively radical, and that plays out in a myriad of ways. but more than teaching, it's it to give them the world, to say this is what we have learnt but we were created by a system that didn't represent us, so take the knowledge we give you with that context
"The only place you can find free cheese, is a mouse trap"