Unmaking Sense

Episode 2.18: What would an education system built around these principles look like?

Using dynamic human development through personal mentoring to navigate a customised personalised educational trajectory.

Episode 2.17: Education as a Political Process.

We learn who we are and what we can do, what to desire and what we can contribute, in the context of others in a society in a collective. So learning is a political process because we learn from others and we contribute to others in a way that is reciprocal and exhibits mutual dependency. The more vibrant and diverse the debate, the better the range of solutions we will consider and the deeper the difficulties of the problems we can hope to solve.

Episode 2.16: Active intelligence enables us in the present to use the past to create the future

An interim integratory episode drawing together education, active and social intelligence, the present as the pivot between past and future, freedom and determinism, and participatory democracy into a scheme for personal and social empowerment.

Episode 2.15: Education for active social intelligence enables participative democracy.

Too much education inculcates a passive, contemplative kind of learning and understanding. We are not to see ourselves as if sitting beside a road observing the traffic, but as actively engaged in negotiating it; otherwise reckless driving and traffic jams do not appear to be our concern.

Episode 2.14: Intelligence as the means to unmake the past to construct a better future.

Education as the cultivation and enabling of personal and social intelligence.

Episode 2.13: The formal curriculum governs assessment, but what matters is collateral learning.

Collateral learning - learning who you are, what intelligence is and how to use it, and discovering the unique self that alone can determine the course of a life and take responsibility for its education - takes place within the framework of the formal curriculum, but gets squeezed out if assessment is given too prominent a place.

Episode 2.12: The defined curriculum provides a framework used to make education up as we go along.

To allow the future to unfold spontaneously we need space, and the formal curriculum creates that space. But teachers need to become learners to explore the newness of that space however well they know it, teaching every topic as if they had never taught it before.

Episode 2.11: Why education can no more design future citizens than predict the wheel.

Future citizens will live in a world that doesn’t yet exist, so we shouldn’t try to design an education system to produce them. Instead, we should allow personal ends and educational means to define one another in an emergent kinetic process that defies all attempts to anticipate it. Connections to indeterminism and pragmatism’s rejection of metaphysical absolutes.

Episode 2.10: If education traps us inside a partially false world-view, how can we find a way out?

Our socio-economic system requires an education system that makes producer-consumers (“prosumers”), but what if that is a self-perpetuating vicious circle that benefits only a wealthy, powerful élite; and how can we change it?

Episode 2.09: Education shares the wisdom of the past; how can we avoid inheriting its mistakes?

If we avoid starting again, what can we do to avoid adopting the same mistaken assumptions as have brought about our contemporary challenges?