Translator: David DeRuwe Digital technologies don’t solve the problems of education. Education’s problems aren’t these, and they came much before these technologies were introduced. For example, structural problems like the almost complete absence of full-time schools in Brazil, which are the rule in developed countries and one reason why they are successful.
Good education feeds back into an advanced society and a good economy. Other problems are of a conceptual nature. Here we confuse, for example, quantity with quality.
An example is that we have almost never-ending curricula, but it substitutes for creativity curiosity, experimentation, and other important prerogatives with pure and simple memorization. Other problems are methodological, like those we have when we confine students into a classroom where we talk to them and they only listen to our voice, the opposite of what’s needed in the contemporary world where everyone takes initiative and participates. These are old problems, and they aren’t solved by digital technologies.
To understand a little better, we need to dive deeper into education. What is education? What are education’s objectives?
I can say this in various ways, but I’ll choose one special one. I’ll say that education involves many kinds of learning: learning of knowledge, learning to do, learning to be, and learning to know. What are these things?
Learning knowledge is the path we take when we traditionally begin in education - to learn about a new field or some new information, for example, a language. When a child learns to read and write, their world becomes completely different. But it doesn’t stop there.
Not only are they able to read, understand, and register, they are able to produce new ideas. Imagine someone who writes a song or who writes a poem - it’s doing this, it’s creating. It’s much more that just knowing.
This is the path of learning knowledge. Another world different from this is the world of learning to do. It’s the world of practice, that world where we unlink the imagination from the mind, pure and simple, and put things in motion in the real world.
This kind of learning is absolutely necessary. But there are two other super-important types that I want to talk about today: The first is learning to be, which is about developing one’s own potential, and developing things like one’s values, having initiative, having resilience, and being able to overcome difficulties and limitations. It’s super-important to have self-knowledge, super-important.
And the last, but not least important, is learning to coexist together. This involves things like comprehending a diversified world, valuing differences, valuing others, and living together in society. In the same way, I can say that it’s an exceptional tool to overcome social differences, gender differences, racism, intolerance, and all the other factors that make coexistence in society difficult.
All these are important aspects. Education isn’t about modernity through technologies, but through the heart. And the heart of education is exactly to train people for a world where they need to understand, need to be able to follow the trails of knowledge, need to be able to do, and need to be able to coexist.
A very interesting way to approach these educational objectives comes from a little story attributed to John Lennon: It is said that, when he was very young, he asked his mother something that children curiously ask, and his mother said: “Look, all the questions you ask about what happens in life have an answer: ‘We need to be happy. ’” Much later, John Lennon went to school, and they asked him there: “What do you want to be when you grow up? ” He immediately answered what his mother had told him - he was convinced that happiness was the objective of life.
But when he told them this, they snapped at him, telling him that he didn’t know anything about school, and he finally concluded that the school didn’t know anything about life. We don’t need for a school to be limiting and authoritative, as Roger Waters says in “The Wall” - I think you all know this song. We need a school to trace pathways for people to be happy individually, for individuals to be happy in society, and for society as a whole to experience happiness.
Educational objectives are much more complex than those we can attain with technology. Technology is seductive. It can give us the false impression that it can attack the important problems, but these aren’t the important problems.
Education is about developing people, their potential, and their ability to live in society. Education is about happier people. Education is about people and ideas in an environment where everyone can express themselves and can find the best place to live and contribute.
Thank you.
