Prepping for the long run : modern education, previous problems

Photo: James F Clay/Flickr

I had a teacher in high school who used to reference this quote, “A ‘smart’ person learns from their mistakes without having to make them over and over. An ‘educated’ person, however, learns from the mistakes of others and never has to make them at all.”
It’s a powerful argument for education, no? It speaks to the idea that we are transforming minds, not just informing students. It speaks to the notion that we are changing paradigms and ultimately the paths of our people, for the betterment of society.
But as I have now watched our videos several times, “School of Thought: The Future of Learning,” I have realized that some problems don’t go away as easily as some others. Some problems are not just about cognition or assimilation and they will take more than education to fix.
After watching the videos with audiences, my favorite question to ask is, “What did we miss?” After all, nobody could put it all into 20 minutes worth of video. Nobody could think of every possible confluence of neuroscience, learning psychology, technology, and education for the future. As much as we tried to follow current trends through space and time, I’m sure we’ll watch this short-film in a decade and go, “Whooops! We really missed THAT one!”
But inevitably, as people talk about the power of personalization, problem (challenge) based learning, and incredible connectedness that the possible future seems ripe with, someone almost always asks about socio-economic factors. Someone will ask, “What about students who aren’t connected?” OR “What about students who may have a device, but they don’t have the speed to make the device work?” OR “What about students who don’t even have breakfast in the morning … does this utopian future help them?”
Our videos that describe incredible change and promise to education in the future are cast around a single income family. It’s hard to see from the scenes, mostly because we had to film in locations that were FAR from low-income, but the family is on the edge of middle and lower class. Why doesn’t it look that way? Quite pragmatically speaking, we had no idea if we would get another chance to do this. And since our planet, for the first time ever, has a majority of people in the middle class, we took what little time we had on screen to deal with education as it was influenced by technology, not as it could fix issues of poverty, development, or disability.
I believe technology can have a significant impact on those problems too, but again, we just didn’t have time to address every social issue that surrounds education. I won’t speak for Pearson on this issue, but a quick glance at the Pearson Foundation’s portfolio should illustrate how seriously our company takes socio-economic issues that touch education.
But the questions are there all the same. My wife was a first grade teacher for a time. She taught in some very wealthy districts as well as some extremely poor schools. I can remember her taking cereal, bagels, crackers, nuts, and fruit snacks almost every morning because she had a handful of kiddos who would come to school hungry. And if Maslow was right, which I think most reasonable people assert that he was, nobody cares about learning when they can’t even feed themselves. But as much as my wife’s love was for these few children who dotted her classroom, there are tens of thousands of students who don’t have that. I heard a radio ad yesterday saying that 1 in 6 Americans miss at least one meal every day, and that half are children.
I know there is a litany of other issues just like this that blanket education. From poverty to mental issues and abuse, to health problems and any number of other problems, educators often have to be counselor, waiter, or guardian angel before they can even think about being a teacher. And this is at every level too. I have had college students explain to me that they were working 4 and 5 jobs at a time just to survive. In fact, in 2002, I was watching the nightly news when I saw a student of mine on TV. She and her two kids were walking into a shelter on a cold, winter night in Denver. I had previously had no idea.
Will a technological future fix any of this? I hope so. We’re already starting to see how tech-savvy people are using the web, software, and devices to connect those who have with those who don’t. Can education help fix any of this? Likewise, I also hope this is true. I think some people teach solely because of that very belief.
But just because we don’t cover these social issues in our videos doesn’t mean we don’t know how important they are. Just the opposite, actually. So we hope that you found the videos to be interesting notions of the future — possibly inspiring or at least thought provoking. But also know that there is much work to be done in order to come close to the future we illustrate there. And not just in terms of stitching together technology, neuroscience, and learning design, but also in stitching together opportunity, safety, support, and care. We have much to do.