Unmaking Sense

Traditional thinking, concerns not to disadvantage children and a narrow understanding of how experimentation works conspire to militate against imaginative, innovative educational reform. We need to reimagine educational experimentation along lines indicated by play rather than monolithic studiousness.

All kinds of things militate against the implementation of the programme as described: tradition; founders; governors; parents; curriculums; assessment; national expectations; employers; universities; league tables; generally “the way we have historically made sense of and implemented education”.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.