Industrial-age schooling

Shikshantar has a provocative site I look forward to exploring. Example:

After fifty years of so-called development efforts, and despite great scientific advancements, India (and the rest of the world) finds itself mired in a paralyzing socio-cultural, environmental and spiritual crisis - overwhelming in its scale, intensity and rate of growth.

While education has been framed as the cure to this crisis, in reality, the factory model of schooling is part of the problem. Around the world, education systems have become commercialized 'businesses' which serve to stratify society, glorify militarism, devalue local knowledge systems and languages, manufacture unsustainable wants, breed discontent and frustration, stifle creativity, motivation and expression, and dehumanize communities. The 19th-century model of factory-schooling today stands in the way of building organic learning societies for the 21st century.

I love the fact that this is coming out of Udaipur. The global brain at work.

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My subconscious mind (AKA "the boys in the back room") has been working on new visions of what it means to learn, a follow-on to my posting several months back that it's productive to look at learning as optimizing the connections of one's neural network (wetware).

The big ah-ha, which I attribute to the heretofore unhearalded hallucinogenic properties of summer truffles, is the important role of ambiguity in learning. Give me chunks of the story, somewhat fuzzy in meaning, and I can weave them into the internal narrative of my conscious thoughts. By contrast, give me unmalleable, absolute information, and unless my wetware is perfectly attuned to it, I may have a tough time accepting it into my worldview.

Posted by Jay Cross at October 10, 2003 02:12 PM | TrackBack