O czym tak łatwo zapomnieć niestety? Niedziela, List 11 2012

Obrazek znalazłem na tablicy społeczności I fucking love science na FB

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What Must an Educated Person Know? Poniedziałek, Paźdź 1 2012

Postanowiłem dziś zamieścić dłiższy fragment w języku angielskim, ponieważ wydał mi się naprawdę interesujący.

Fragment poniżej pochodzi ze strony.

Oryginalnie pytanie to znalazłem na portalu QUORA zadane przez użytkownika Josh Kaufman. Jest mnóstwo naprawdę ciekawych odpowiedzi użytkowników QUORA z całego świata na to pytanie. Naprawdę zachęcam do odwiedzenia portalu i przeczytania ich punktu widzenia na ten temat.

O samym portalu QUORA pisałem tutaj.

Warto się zastanowić czy rzeczywiście tego powinny uczyć szkoły/uniwersytety, a jeżeli tak, to czy faktycznie robią to?

“If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?” – John Wooden, basketball coach
John Taylor Gatto, a renowned education historian and critic of modern industrial schooling, wrote an essay titled The Curriculum of Necessity or What Must an Educated Person Know? Here’s how the essay begins:

A few years back one of the schools at Harvard, perhaps the School of Government, issued some advice to its students on planning a career in the new international economy it believed was arriving. It warned sharply that academic classes and professional credentials would count for less and less when measured against real world training. Ten qualities were offered as essential to successfully adapting to the rapidly changing world of work. See how many of those you think are regularly taught in the schools of your city or state…

Here’s Harvard University’s list of skills that make an “educated person”:

The ability to define problems without a guide.

The ability to ask hard questions which challenge prevailing assumptions.

The ability to quickly assimilate needed data from masses of irrelevant information.

The ability to work in teams without guidance.

The ability to work absolutely alone.

The ability to persuade others that your course is the right one.

The ability to conceptualize and reorganize information into new patterns.

The ability to discuss ideas with an eye toward application.

The ability to think inductively, deductively and dialectically.

The ability to attack problems heuristically.

After listing these skills, Gatto continued:

You might be able to come up with a better list than Harvard did without surrendering any of these fundamental ideas, and yet from where I sit, and I sat around schools for nearly 30 years, I don’t think we teach any of these things as a matter of school policy… None of the schools I ever worked for were able to provide any important parts of this vital curriculum for children. All the schools I worked for taught nonsense up front. And under the table, they taught young people how to be dumb, how to be slavish, how to be frightened, and how to be dependent.
I found Harvard’s list fascinating. A while back, I drafted a list of this type my own post Do You Have These Core Human Skills?

Here’s my own list of “Core Human Skills”:

Information-Assimilation – how to find, consume, and comprehend information and identify what’s most important in the face of a problem or challenge.
Writing – how to communicate thoughts and ideas in written form clearly and concisely.
Speaking – how to communicate thoughts and ideas to others clearly, concisely, and with confidence.
Mathematics – how to accurately use concepts from arithmetic, algebra, geometry, calculus, and statistics to analyze and solve common problems.
Decision-Making – how to identify critical issues, prioritize, focus energy/effort, recognize fallacies, avoid common errors, and handle ambiguity.
Rapport – how to interact with other people in a way that encourages them to like, trust, and respect you.
Conflict-Resolution – how to anticipate potential sources of conflict and resolve disagreements when they occur.
Scenario-Generation – how to create, clarify, evaluate, and communicate a possible future scenario that assists in decision-making, either for yourself or another person.
Planning – how to identify the necessary next steps to achieve an objective, account for dependencies, and prepare for the unknown and inevitable change via the use of contingencies.
Self-Awareness – how to accurately perceive and influence your own internal states and emotions, including effective management of limited energy, willpower, and focus.
Interrelation – how to recognize, understand, and make use of key features of systems and relationships, including cause-and-effect, second and third-order effects, constraints, and feedback loops.
Skill Acquisition – how to go about learning a desired skill in a way that results in competence by finding and utilizing available resources, deconstructing complex processes, and actively experimenting with potential approaches.
A bit of research led me search for other lists of “what an educated person must know.” Oliver Demille’s A Thomas Jefferson Education included Harvard’s list, in addition to two others.

Here’s Princeton University’s list of skills that make an “educated person”:

The ability to think, speak, and write clearly.

The ability to reason critically and systematically.

The ability to conceptualize and solve problems.

The ability to think independently.

The ability to take initiative and work independently.

The ability to work in cooperation with others and learn collaboratively.

The ability to judge what it means to understand something thoroughly.

The ability to distinguish the important from the trivial, the enduring from the ephemeral.

Familiarity with the different modes of thought (including quantitative, historical, scientific, and aesthetic.)

Depth of knowledge in a particular field.

The ability to see connections among disciplines, ideas and cultures.

The ability to pursue life long learning.

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Czego uczy się w szkole, mimo, że wiadomo, że jest to wiedza przestarzała, nieaktualna? Czwartek, Wrz 27 2012

Pamiętam słowa mojej nauczycielki z LO, które usłyszała od niej klasa na pierwszej lekcji chemii: „Zapomnijcie wszystko, czego sie nauczyliscie z chemii w szkole podstawowej, bo to nieprawda”. Oczywiscie nie było to zbyt pedagogiczne podejście i prawdę powiedziawszy Pani Chmielewska nigdy nie była moim ulubionym nauczycielem;-) Ale to nie o mnie miał byc tekst.

Ucząc, warto informować uczniów PO CO opisujemy im jakieś modele i W JAKIM CELU mają się ich nauczyć i że NIEKONIECZNIE są one RZECZYWISTE – w sumie tu wystarczyłoby opisać pojęcie modelu.

Jakie są przykładowe półprawdy-nieprawdy, które podaje się uczniom na talerzu na lekcjach chemii?

– Neutrony, protony i elektrony są cząstkami elementarnymi i niepodzielnymi.
– Elektrony krążą wokół jądra atomowego po orbitach.
– W ogóle uczy się modelu atomowego Bohra.
– Wdychamy tlen, a wydychanym dwutlenek węgla.
– Na lekcjach w gimnazjum uczy się o kwasie węglowym, podczas gdy nie udowodniono istnienia takiej cząsteczki w roztworach wodnych – kwas węglowy to po prostu mieszanina wody i dwutlenku węgla.
– Częć nauczycieli nadal uczy o półmetalach.

Można by tak dalej wyliczać…

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