I attended a learning lab at the Masie Center in January 1997, the same year that Learning Trends was launched. Elliott Masie has now published the 400th Learning Trends newsletter, available as a 39 page PDF. It comes complete with a Creative commons license, which is a great advance from the previous blanket copyright statement.

Trends400 includes comments and prognostications from a wide variety of contributors. Informal learning is frequently mentioned and it is evident that there is a growing use of open source tools for learning – two subjects dear to me. The articles submitted by dozens of readers show how your audience [learners] can be the major creators of your content.

Here is what I found to be the best piece in Trends400, as it addresses some of the core issues around human learning:

Dear Elliott, A bit more than a year ago we met in the Swiss consulate in Boston and I remember how you walked around with a Sony Play station in your hand and talked about the opportunity to use this tool for locating people with similar interests in one’s environment and to learn from or in the community.

That reminds me of the situation that taught me how I learn and how my children learn best. I was shoveling gravel to create a new patio some years ago and my son, Leonhard, then 3, wanted to help level the ground. But since he was always between my legs or just where I wanted to either take or put the gravel, I decided to create a small heap of gravel just for him. It took him about ten seconds to find out that his heap was not where he could learn what he wanted to learn. The Center of Action was clearly my shoveling and that was where he wanted to be.

So, I adapted my mode of working to enable him to participate at the Center of Action. I learned a lot from participating – maybe not being of real help – at the Center of Action. And the Center was the only place where I did not mistakenly take the wrong cues. How to watch, how to move, what is efficient, what is a problem, what counts: it is all there. I believe that each child and every learner will immediately detect whenever he or she is distracted and pulled away from the Center of Action. The children and students lacking attention are just indicators that we do not radiate the feeling of being at the Center, or worse, that we are not there and therefore cannot teach.

Ulrich Gysel

In a nearby school classroom is a sign that states, “for whom the bell tolls” and the teacher says to the students that “it tolls for me, not you”. This reminded me of John Taylor Gatto’s teacher of the year acceptance speech in 1992, as he described the seven lessons that are taught universally in western education.

The third lesson I teach kids is indifference. I teach children not to care about anything too much, even though they want to make it appear that they do. How I do this is very subtle. I do it by demanding that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. It’s heartwarming when they do that, it impresses everyone, even me. When I’m at my best I plan lessons very carefully in order to produce this show of enthusiasm. But when the bell rings I insist that they stop whatever it is that we’ve been working on and proceed quickly to the next work station. They must turn on and off like a light switch. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of. Students never have a complete experience except on the installment plan.

Indeed, the lesson of the bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that can no longer offer important work to do. Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their argument is inexorable. Bells destroy the past and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as an abstract map makes every living mountain and river the same even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.

Want to improve learning? Get rid of those damn bells.

There seems to be a growing chorus questioning our Western school system. The conversation has been strong amongst bloggers, voices like Brian Alger or Robert Paterson on the value of homework or Chris Corrigan on unschooling. A number of our friends in Sackville have posted on Rob’s homework-related posts. Now the cry against homework has been picked up by the mainstream media such as Time Magazine and The National Post.

It’s not just homework, but the fact that a one size fits all approach to learning just does not work in a ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate world. As Ivan Illich said in Deschooling Society in 1973, “We permit the state to ascertain the universal educational deficiencies of its citizens and establish one specialized agency to treat them.” That agency is cracking.

The lack of confidence in our education system is similar to the search for better training and e-learning methods, as evidenced by the interest in our Informl Learning Unworkshops. People realise that the old ways of instructional systems design take too long for most training programs. Furthermore, slapping on a training course cannot address the majority of human performance issues faced by organisations today. Also, many are discovering that learning on the Web is more about who you know than what you know, because if you know many knowledgeable people, you can usually find a solution to your problem. The “connectors” are becoming critical to any organisation.

As students go back to school, it is up to the rest of us to ask what are they really doing there and if there is a better way. We owe it to our children.

[Note: there are more learning links to explore on this one post than our boys may get in a day of classroom instruction]