Today I was much stimulated by viewing Prof. Stephen Hepple´s RSA lecture Learning 2016. It was a breathy entreaty for us all to embrace the future that new technology is demanding. But the worry is not just ´will we ride the wave at the right time with the right style´. More serious is all the stuff he left out – these were to do with the ´why´s and the ín relation to what(s)´of education.
Without summarizing the lecture I will pose a question that seemed to lie behind one of Hepple´s throwaway lines. He had argued for children (and parents and communities) to be co-operating partners in creating education via new technology – and lots of other ápple-pie´goodies – for all of which I was inwardly cheering, sincerely so. Everything is to be individual learning paths. Singing together, by which he meant school assemblies, was clearly one if not two millenia out of date – to be replaced by a pupil-made video trsnsmissions of what the Head wanted to say to the school, plus the netball results. It was to save wasting time – the kind of waste represented by school assemblies. Presumably it didn´t matter if the most chose to not watch the piece of video c.f a ´live performance.
The throwaway line was something about ´we must marshall our resources´. I sensed he was resisting a weak impulse to consider things like the vision of what kind of future might represent a high quality life and what kind of moral and philosophical implications there might be. It all lacked the one thing that really matters – the answer to, ´How do we have a structure, a skeleton, to enable us to make decisions in all of this free-flowing fleshy stuff?
In the SunWALK model I have of course argued that it is only by structuring education, and managing change in society and education, on a model of what it is to be fully and most positively human that we can create a future worth living in. SEE HERE
You can view the lecture-programme on Teachers TV HERE
Interesting article from the TES Times Education Supplement is HERE
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Soul Needs - One Garden 