Educational Excellence

Moms teach daughters how to bake cookies. Then bread? A cake or pie as well? Dads teach sons how to hammer a nail, saw a piece of wood, and maybe make something. Perhaps a doghouse or a simple table. A box, perhaps? Sharing knowledge that expands life experience. Little by little we impart what we know to the next generation. [Gender equality means moms teach sons and dads teach daughters, too!]

Teachers do the same, only more formally. In a classroom where they can engage attention and thinking from several people at the same time. This exchange of ideas and brushing brainpower against other brains creates room for logic to pull students forward into exploring ideas, creating other ideas, and sorting it all out. The process of learning. The brain accumulating more information to use in different ways. Many of those ways are unexpected. Discovery? Perhaps. Then, what to do with that discovery. Explore?

Hopefully, yes. Explore the world surrounding the student one at a time. Expose the person’s brain to ideas that fit and those that do not. Test the ideas with other ideas to determine if they still hold up, or change into something different.

What is started in class with other students is often taken by one student into his or her own solitude. There the student continues to think, compare, test, and explore. In those moments, education is happening.

In our current pandemic classes have been held remotely for many months. Connected by electrons and computer images, is education taking place? Is knowledge imparted to other brains and then taken into solitude to mull over? Is that mulling productive? Does it challenge other people, or do others challenge the student’s ideas resulting from the mulling? Is education – learning – taking place? If so, is it as effective as classroom methods in person?

No one knows. Theories are proposed but not yet fully studied and tested. Educators and researchers are hard at work wondering what works and what does not while at the same time supporting the generational transfer of knowledge.

Let us not forget that transfer of knowledge is not the sum gain of education. No; education’s purpose is to unleash the personal power of each student to think, reason, explore and discover facts both old and new. Education is about equipping students with the process of learning more and more to lead to self-sufficiency, and innovation.

Innovation in their lives and the lives of others.

Meaning discovered is the means to new realities and understanding. Expanding on that meaning with others leads to new products, services, social developments, and improvement of life for many. The common good is served. New jobs and economic power are birthed. Where the cycle of creativity ends is anyone’s guess. But it does not stop there; no, it continues its cycle of expanding knowledge and wonder for others to explore and discover yet newer meanings.

Does remote learning happen? Most likely, yes. Is that learning more powerful and effective than old-fashioned classroom learning? We do not know. We must continue to research and measure the value of all learning modes.

The next generation is a main player in this process. They are not only the students, but they are the teachers of the following generation. The life in between is fertile ground for study and exploration. And discovery. And invention.

Invention of new learning modes.

How exciting!

January 29, 2021