The Importance of Education and the Power of The Internet
I have several lenses at Squidoo about education, learning, knowledge, and understanding.
I have one The Importance Of Education that has an almost seasonal quality about it.
It appears that at the end of a school year some teachers assign a project to their students that requires a definition of "the importance of education." The first reaction of many students is to Google the assignment. That leads them to my page.
Now I don't have an approved book in their school library, the public library will not have any of my materials in their reference section, and they won't easily discover the advantages of self-directed learning in available periodicals. They certainly won't find an outline for the Netcohort Manifesto or current information about student directed learning at the Netcohort Institute.
What does happen, is their search engines will direct them to a trusted website that offers fresh insights into the importance of education -- and they discover my lens. At the least they will discover there are both social and personal reasons for education. They may use that bi-pole relationship to develop their essays. The open information in the lens is not necessarily what educational authorities would approve for their coerced students.
By the power of the internet, both sides of the story about educational importance are told.
To the horror of bureaucrats -- students can make up their own minds.
"The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real."
John Taylor Gatto
Mark up a big plus for the Internet.
.
I have one The Importance Of Education that has an almost seasonal quality about it.
It appears that at the end of a school year some teachers assign a project to their students that requires a definition of "the importance of education." The first reaction of many students is to Google the assignment. That leads them to my page.
Now I don't have an approved book in their school library, the public library will not have any of my materials in their reference section, and they won't easily discover the advantages of self-directed learning in available periodicals. They certainly won't find an outline for the Netcohort Manifesto or current information about student directed learning at the Netcohort Institute.
What does happen, is their search engines will direct them to a trusted website that offers fresh insights into the importance of education -- and they discover my lens. At the least they will discover there are both social and personal reasons for education. They may use that bi-pole relationship to develop their essays. The open information in the lens is not necessarily what educational authorities would approve for their coerced students.
By the power of the internet, both sides of the story about educational importance are told.
To the horror of bureaucrats -- students can make up their own minds.
"The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real."
John Taylor Gatto
Mark up a big plus for the Internet.
.
Labels: educational importance, importance of college education, internet education, purpose of education, reasons for education
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1 Comments:
Chiro Mkt,
Thank you for the comment.
I think you have eloquently stated much of what education should be.
Unfortunately, that is not what government approved education provides. Mental development is eschewed in favor of instilling obedience to authority, and an expectation of being bored. This makes coercive schooling very effective -- at creating easily managed citizens and workers.
Common schools are very successful at creating high consuming drones. That intent may have served a (vile) purpose in an elitist controlled, nationalistic industrial age, but is counter productive in the age we are now entering.
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