Re: Education's Three Conflicting PillarsI think the idea of a primary premise is something that is both interactive and in constant motion. The reason I say this is because I believe that education has to become something that is adaptive and responsive to the world around us. Given the fact that we have frozen knowledge and skills in something called curriculum, I would characterize today's education system as something that is completely static and far removed from the practical realities of everyday life. So in that sense I would say that the very idea of a primary premise is plural and inseparable from the circumstances and situations we find ourselves in. I have not read Egan's book, but I see no reason why the three premises mentioned above, and others, cannot co-exist simultaneously. Nor can I think of a reason that we would want to identify one and follow it exclusively. I'll have to look into Egan's work since I'm obviously confused here.

Today I believe we have a single primary premise in force in education and I would suggest that it is not any of the three mentioned above. The primary premise is the mass communication of a prerequisite. Various theoretical perspectives, to my thinking, attempt to carve out an existence on top of this basic structure. As a result, there is conflict but I have yet to see an educational theory that has any fundamental and durable impact on the education system at large. The problem with theory is that it is often divorced from reality and sometimes creates the effect that we are reading fiction - and essentially we are. Many theories I have scanned fail to make a meaningful connection with practical reality. This is an essential problem, I believe, with Connectivism - it is an abstraction - the lives and authentic experiences of people are noticeably absent and the idea of Connectivism seems to create another kind of prerequisite. I find it quite amazing how educational theorists when describing their theories fail to mention the lives of real people and real life events. Instead, they tend to covet the abstract.

Education is something that is remarkably ethnocentric; learning is something that has remarkable cultural diversity. The main reason I have a theme in my weblog called "People and Life" is because I believe that is where we have the best opportunity to try to find and explore learning. This, I know, would cause many academics to turn away and snicker. However, when I explore the life of, for example, Stephen Biko I see a magnificent learning "process" revealing itself. In exploring Stephen Biko's life the idea of having a common understanding of something people were trying to achieve is abundantly clear. How he went about it is inspiring. I don't see a theory of learning here, nor do I really want to. Nor do I want to apply technological metaphors to it. I do see how one remarkable individual and community of people found their way through exceedingly difficult circumstances over a long period of time. I do see how he raised a sense of collective consciousness and how learning can invite community and a greater sense of connection. This is a system in itself and exploring other people's lives we can find other "systems" and approaches to learning.

Perhaps one way to think about learning is as an open acceptance that life is a mystery full of unknowns and uncertainty, and finding our way through these challenges in life is to embrace learning as, for example, diversity, resilience and adaptation. This is not, I suspect, a way in which we would characterize our education systems.