Monday, January 18, 2010

21st Century Education

In the 21st century of course will be filled with unexpected new technologies that will demand new skills that we have never fathomed. Despite the incomprehensible digital expansion that we are witnessing, it does not completely and irrevocably alter the way in which we ought to teach. Personally, I think that education is much more than just learning material, but an experience. I believe that there is irreplaceable value in being a class room with a structured school schedule. The value of physically being in class could never be replaced by sitting behind a computer screen.

With all of the global issues going on today the most important skill that you will ever learn is problem solving and relating and communicating with people. The class room could be said to somewhat represent the workplace, where there is a manager who resides over people and tries to ensure their quality of work is of the best can possibly do. Similarly, a teacher is there to ensure the highest quality of learning for the students that they can provide and hence ask the students for their full participation.

When you are sitting behind a computer you do are unable to directly communicate with someone face to face and therefore lack the means to develop the communicative people skills necessary in most all aspects of life and the workplace. Also, I honestly think that the relationship between teacher and student when would be virtually eliminated with a completely online education. All in all, there are pro's and con's to both. I would hazard a suggestion at a mixture of the two types of education, with a foundation in class room type educational settings generally.

3 comments:

  1. MC Casper,

    I could not agree more. There is a lot to be said about the experiences that we as students receive from interacting with both other students and teachers. Having a structure to our lives most definitely affects our learning in a positive way.

    Last year, I had a socratic seminar with my English class about our generation's growth in comparison to earlier generations. I continually tried to stress the importance of how we continue to shut ourselves our from the surrounding society. We walk around the halls with our headphones on! We have so many stimulants today that I think our generation fails to recognize the importance that social interactions have. I believe that if we fail to change this, we could be facing a much different future than we might expect.

    ReplyDelete
  2. MC Casper,
    I appreciate your insightful post. It is obvious that you put some thought into your response. I agree with you that education provides the structure and framework through which important life skills and habits of mind are developed. Skills and habits such as clear communication, logical thought, time management, persistence, patience, and flexibility to name a few. In addition to the content of any particular course (or maybe in spite of it) we all learn these essential skills of being human in order to lead a happy and productive life. Thanx for the thoughtful post.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi MC Casper,
    What you said is very thoughtful. And I’m so impressed that our opinions are so similar. “Personally, I think that education is much more than just learning material, but an experience”, I could not agree more and I would like to define this experience more specifically. I think that education is much more than just learning material, but an experience which learns how to communicate with people, how to convert the information into your own knowledge, and how to be a good man.

    Having a strict schedule for everyday definitely helps us learn. A lot of things that we could not learn from the computer; there are things that we could only learn from practice, from experience, such as people learn how to communicate by being in a community. I also think communication is the fundament of studying. We will spend our lifetime learning and mostly we learn from others. Communication sets up the bridge for us to the knowledge.

    ReplyDelete