My postman delivered my latest Amazon fix with a knowing look yesterday.
Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation will change the Way the World Learns by Clayton Christensen.
It's received good reviews and by some interesting people - Howard Gardner, Vicki Phillips (Gates Foundation) and I actually came to it via The Big Picture schools brochure, who he seems to heartily endorse.
I'm always interested, if not a little wary, on what business thinkers have to say on education, sometimes finding that their recommendations come from what shape they feel (current & future) business requires children to be in for greater competitive commercial success, mini malleable adults. So I'm interested to see what the gravitational core of the book will be, flicking through I notice a chapter on 'Schools meet society's needs' and on the jacket it reads "We can compete in the global classroom - and get ahead in the global market" this may just be publishers huff though.
When I first started home-educating a few years ago, and started thinking about the purpose of education I decided that it's aims were simple; to nurture happy, balanced self-oriented children who were able to find their place in the world - not society, culture, prevailing politics or 'work' as we see them now. I would say that this is probably quite important in the context of today's times, to be careful that we're not inadvertently carving out a role for this generation of children to fix the problems of the generation before.
This crosses over with Rudolph Steiner's philosophies, described well in this exert from Mothering Magazine;
Steiner felt that children need a balanced development of their capacities in order to be prepared as adults to contribute to cultural renewal, instead of to the ongoing dehumanization of society. His aim was not to inculcate in children any particular viewpoint or ideology, but to make them so healthy, strong, and inwardly free that they would become a kind of tonic for society as a whole. The purpose of education, he thought, should not be merely to instill knowledge, which can be coldly abstract and destructive when separated from human values and a feeling for the humanity of other people. Rather, Steiner’s goal was to educate the whole human being so that thinking, feeling, and doing are integrated, and capable of functioning in a healthy way. Such people are more likely to discover and implement solutions that further human development, rather than fall prey to narrow and dogmatic doctrines such as National Socialism. In fact, when they came to power, the Nazis closed all Waldorf schools in Germany and, later, in the countries they occupied.
The universality and forward-looking thrust of Waldorf education was summarized by Steiner: “We shouldn’t ask: what does a person need to know or be able to do in order to fit into the existing social order? Instead we should ask: what lives in each human being and what can be developed in him or her? Only then will it be possible to direct the new qualities of each emerging generation into society. The society will become what young people, as whole human beings, make out of the existing social conditions. The new generation should not just be made to be what the present society wants it to become.”
More flicking shows though that there is though lots of good stuff in Disrupting Class on 'personalization' (that term doesn't sit so well with me) and the importance child-centric education, as these ideas are not especially new it will be interesting to see how applying the theory of disruptive innovation will help to fully integrate learner-centric thinking into education. Looking forward to a good read.
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