Education, what is it really?

Education has been defined in a range of contexts from the "knowledge, skill, and understanding that you get from attending a school, college, or university (M Webster) to "An enlightening experience (Oxford Dictionary)"

Learning that takes place in schools or school-like environments (formal education) or in the world at large; the transmission of the values and accumulated knowledge of a society. In developing cultures there is often little formal education; children learn from their environment and activities, and adults around them act as teachers. In more complex societies, where there is more knowledge to be passed on, a more selective and efficient means of transmission—the school and teacher—becomes necessary.

Some philosophers (e.g., John Locke) have seen individuals as blank slates onto which knowledge can be written. Others (e.g., Jean-Jacques Rousseau) have seen the innate human state as desirable in itself and therefore to be tampered with as little as possible, a view often taken in alternative education.

Einstein had an interesting take on teaching:

I never teach my pupils. I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.

In reflecting on education and the needs for a complex and rapidly changing world, a world in jeopardy due to climate change and full of human conflict, we need to start thinking outside of the box. Is the current system functional? How can the system be adapted? Redesigned? What skills (soft and hard) are needed to build peaceful and sustainable communities? What are ways in which applicable knowledge can be acquired?

The Stepping Stones

I believe education is a multi level process in which the drive to explore, inquire and learn by experience is fundamental in order to attain realizations and appropriate knowledge. The basic stepping-stones in this process follow a progression even though the order is not always strict.

First Stepping Stone: Information

Information is all around us, information that describes our surroundings, how materials behave, how ecosystems and individual species function and behave, even how humans behave and what drives them. Today's educational system is mainly focused at this level of learning. Inquire, Explore

Second Stepping Stone: Experience

While gathering and memorizing information is important in building knowledge, learning requires practical experience in order to start understanding, relating theory or information with reality gives pertinence to learning. Experience

Third Stepping Stone: Emotion

As we have experiences, these can be simply anecdotal or they can become transformational. The difference depends on the level of involvement with our core emotions. By allowing our emotional selves to relate to the information learned we start connecting with information and establish a different relationship to it, a more personal one, one of better understanding. This level refers to experience that moves emotions, generates more profound questions and discoveries. Discover

Fourth Stepping Stone: Realization

As individuals learn and experience/feel, a disposition within them opens the possibility to take experiences to a higher and more subtle level, a level that connects to what we might call the spiritual, the intangible profound experience. These types of experiences lead us to realizations. I define these realizations as moments in which information and emotions become holistically applicable inner knowledge; when the individual begins to understand himself as a fragment of an inter-connected system that includes other living forms inhabiting our planet (other humans, animals, plants, etc). Realize, Understand

Fifth Stepping Stone: Appropriation

After a realization that has in its foundations information and experience to support it, the individual can start appropriating learning into basic attitudes, values and ethical/moral/social constructs. Appropriation ensures long-term behaviors that are aligned with a cosmological construct or world-view. Incorporate

Values for a new education

Considering the rapid changes in information and communication technologies, the landscape of education is changing rapidly. This requires a shift towards adaptive educational systems in order to maintain pertinence in the real world. Adaptive systems need to define core values that can guide change without limiting it. Values that can provide a road map towards solving global issues and aligning human population towards building peaceful and sustainable communities searching for environmental peace.

Several essential values I believe necessary for strengthening education that are currently gaining strength include:

Empathic: Developing empathy, inward (towards oneself) and outward (towards others and nature) is going to be a critical aspect of changing the value pyramid.

Open: As information and technology show us the power of an open approach to invention, open educational systems need to catch on and become open, creative systems. This enables them to be adaptive, in a dynamic and constantly changing environment.

Collaborative: As a system opens up it feeds itself through collaboration creating powerful synergies.

Inclusive: Learning communities and educational systems benefit from having a broad range of points of view, experiences and approaches. Inclusive education assures broad participation and diversity.

Biocentric: Technology and human inventiveness are moving us towards returning to a more sustainable way of life. Nonetheless, changing the way we relate to other living beings (including other humans) is fundamental in enabling us to walk towards environmental peace and sustainable communities. Shifting from EGO to ECO

Afterthought

Incorporating these stepping-stones into a new educational philosophy supported by core values that embrace the vision of a global community of living beings (humans, animals, plants, etc.) in search of harmonic coexistence can become part of the change required in order to prepare future earthlings that work towards a more peaceful and sustainable coexistence on the planet.

The person who has lived the most is not the one with the most years but the one with the richest experiences.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

-LAC.

#2030NOW #Education #EnvironmentalPeace #Empathy #OpEPA

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