Still so much to unpack! haha. I’ll skip over some excellent (and well worth exploring) points made by all and focus on only a few.
An excellent point, which is also what makes it fun. The swinging pendulum of belief can be a wild ride, but also fun with the right attitude and the right partners for the journey.
That’s true. Another way of thinking about learning progressions though is prerequisite skills. This moves us away from linear conceptualisations of maths/science, etc, to more accurately represent the complex nature of different fields. And it does so without removing my assertion that an expert teacher is likely to have a good idea of these prerequisites are.
E.g., here’s an interesting visualisation of a curriculum…
Regardless, I think we may have some agreement regarding the benefits of an expert other used wisely (Woz, I was using the word ‘teacher’ as inclusive of the one-to-one approach, or a scenario where a group of people come to a knowledgable other, and are free to leave also), so I’ll leave that point there for now.
This approach to establishing some basic shared beliefs is a great idea. I have some things to add.
One of my experiences from speaking with many passionate educators over several years is that there are two key sources of disagreement. The first is what the actual purpose of learning/school is (learning and school as a venn diagram, not interchangeable). If agreement is sufficiently reached there, then the discussion can proceed onto the second source of disagreement, the optimum way to achieve that goal.
Kieran Egan characterises the purpose of school as threefold, each goal of which is in tension with the others, these goals are:
- Socialisation
- The development of a being who can reason with knowledge (and who has knowledge to reason with)
- The development of the unique individual (self-regulation, independent learning, realisation of passions, etc)
It would be helpful to me if your book explicitly lays these three out, then tackles each head on, explaining why free learning (or whatever framework/terminology you choose to apply) achieves each of these goals better.
There are also additional details within each to discuss before the argument can be made convincingly.
For example, my initial question related to the second goal, but it appeared that I had a set of assumptions there around what constitutes learning that don’t match with that of Woz’s. So a format that would help me would be:
a. Here’s what people usually think this means (e.g., learning to reason with knowledge)
b. Here’s what Woz, Zon and Gary think it should mean
c. Here’s why free learning does it better
I don’t mean to presumptuously suggest how you write your book, I’m simply sharing how my mind structures these debates, and therefore would find it helpful to have them presented to me in order to convince me!
It seems there’s another factor in here that relates to rights and that learning should be pleasurable. These are noble goals, but won’t necessarily grab everyone. E.g., people had very violent reactions to Peter Gray’s assertion that ‘School is Prison’ in my recent podcast with him.
If you can a. Take what people think they’re trying to achieve, b. convince them that they’re misguided in their definition of their goal, c. Show them why free learning is better. I think you’ll be setting yourselves up to do some seriously effective convincing.
That being said…
To which I definitely agree. However, I’m writing a book at the moment and I’d approached the task with this as my mindset. That is, the role is writing is to order my own thoughts (someone once said ‘How can I know what I think till I see what I say?’). However, upon finishing, I sent out some chapters to people and they told me it was too theoretical and that I need more examples. Writing examples is, for me, relatively tedious. This is because it seems obvious to me how consequences follow from the principles that I espouse. But it seems like I need to modify my communication style to account for the scaffolding likely required for readers.
Or maybe they should just read my book incrementally, find examples from other sources, and make the connections themselves. That would definitely be more interesting for me : P
This prompts me towards another provocation. Could it be that writing a book is contrary to your thesis Woz? That is, if information is optimally consumed incrementally, why produce a learning resource that prompts its users towards linear consumption. You have, in fact, already created a learning resource that takes the form of a network of links and nodes (SMguru), that can be easily uploaded and incrementally consumed via Supermemo or Dendro, and so perhaps the push should be towards the proliferation of these optimal learning tools, rather than the creation of a resource which perpetuates sub-optimal learning strategies?
I offer this provocation partly seriously, partly in jest, and partly to highlight the role of compromise in education. Even though I’m getting more and more interested in consuming information incrementally, I still want you to all write a book! This is because it’s currently a dominant mode of information transfer, and I think it must be used in order to spread these ideas more widely. Similarly, perhaps we need to consider the ways in which compromises around another dominant mode of information transfer, schooling, could be made to move the world incrementally towards incremental/free learning.
In the mean time, I’ll keep exploring SMguru. O.
