Synthesizing Education

As I sat at TedxNYEd this weekend, a thought kept recurring in my head, which I eventually tweeted:

@aaron_eyler: My observation: Big problem with schools is most still haven’t outgrown the backpack. It restricts learning to a sack. @ 11:34 a.m.

Now I am sure that there are a lot of people who read (or are reading) that and smirk because they think it’s yet another call for more emphasis on technology and putting PDA’s or laptops in kids hands. That’s not what I’m talking about. My concern is much deeper than that and could never be expressed in 140 characters.

Schools do everything they can to prompt for what I would refer to as a “Backpack Culture”. Students walk away with a perception that everything they will ever need to know to be successful in school can be stuffed into a backpack whether it is in the textbook, notes from teachers, handouts, or extra readings. Students walk around with this misconception that to be considered intelligent or successful they need only master the content that can fit within their backpack. Do you know what else can be stuffed in a backpack? A laptop.

Opening them up to a new medium like laptops without any real-world experiences simply says that we have changed our mantra from a “Backpack Culture” to a “Laptop Culture”. The reality is that both are wrong if they exist independently and without hybridization of the two. The same way that kids miss out on learning experiences from the constriction of a backpack will exist in an age where students are limited to the laptop.

How can students possibly be limited in knowledge by a laptop you ask? On Saturday, Amy Bruckman (@asbruckman) gave a talk that discussed, in part, how she got the name for her blog “The Next Bison: Social Computing And Culture”. While I advocate for this type of openness and action in schools, I also have a concern over the future of the human race and our ability to remain curious and investigate if, rather than maintain some curiosity over what a bison sounds like, we can run to YouTube and hear a video of one. I worry that taking all of the human experiences of wonderment (like what a Bison sounds like) and placing it online will diminish, if not eliminate, our abilities to self regulate and conjure our own ideas over time prior to validation of our own hypotheses. This concerns me. How do we keep kids curious about what it feels like to walk through the halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art if they can go online and take a virtual tour instead? How do we keep kids curious about the beauty of the Tuscan countryside if they can peruse through endless pictures of wineries and villas online?

The reality is that the problem isn’t going away any time soon and will only intensify as more technology develops and remains intricate. It’s true that it will open up these types of experiences to more people that traditionally in history could not afford to partake in such an experience, but that scapegoat shouldn’t be deemed a solution or an acceptable response. Instead, we need to attack this problem and come up with potential solutions that work to maintain student curiosity in the physical world around them based on their experiences in the virtual world.

We need to advocate for more field experiences in schools, more corporate sponsorship and funding for cultural activities in and out of school, more events that allow students to travel to varied places, and more emphasis on curiosity about the physical world that they haven’t experienced yet firsthand. What we really need is to emphasize to kids how important it is that THEY make the video rather than someone else.

Amy’s talk was a great topic for more than just her main point. An intuitive listener understands what the speaker is presenting but also identifies potential problems and extensions of the topic. Now that we have identified a problem, we need to advocate for solutions to solve it.

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