I was totally excited to read this post on ‘Hacking Education’, which I found referenced on Johnnie Moore’s blog while I was catching up with my out-of-control Google Reader subscriptions.
People who know me have heard me rant about education for a while. In summary, I hated school and it wasn’t the right place for me to learn. I did OK at it, but it wasn’t because of school, it was in spite of it. I mean does this look like an inspiring place to learn?
The world of social care is going through some pretty fundamental shifts – one of the coolest things is the idea of personal budgets which allow people to have a bit more control over what care they get. In my view it doesn’t go far enough, but that’s for another day.
What does this have to do with schools? Well, nothing at the moment. But imagine if, instead of being shoved in a school, you had a personal education budget that would give you more control over how you learned. Instead of sitting in maths lessons (my personal nadir) I would have used a bit of cash to go travelling.
That might sound like a bit of a doss but think about the far more useful skills I could have gained at a younger age: Languages and communication skills, resourcefulness, confidence, general knowledge, budgeting – the list goes on.
Backpacking round Europe wouldn’t be for everyone, but the sheer wealth of ways there are to learn should be opened up to young people. Of course, some people love school; it provides structure, routine, discipline, social interaction and much more, so maybe the title of this post is a little bit sensationalist 
Perhaps it would be better to say that everyone should be entitled to the freedom to learn in the way that best suits them.
Sure, the implementation would need a bit of thinking about, but in principle that would be how I would hack education.
Tags: change, children, education, innovation, learning
April 7, 2009 at 6:18 pm |
As a home schooling mom, I agree completely!!
However, I have to say that there are a lot of educational options out there for people. Home schooling and all of it’s variations, charter schools, private schools, etc.
I like your idea of a personal education budget, but I think there is one step better. If the schools are gone, then no one has to pay school taxes and everyone – including those with no children – could do whatever they wanted with that money. In essence the same thing, but just removing the government from the equation. If the government were to provide a personal education budget for each child, they would want some sort of account of what the money was spent on and they may even take the next step of deciding what is appropriate and what isn’t. Eventually, that would lead us right back where we are now. :-/
Public schools are on the decline, the public education system is extremely out-dated and does not serve the majority of its students. I hope that it is reformed or dissolved before too many more children are subjected to its tortures.
Great post!!
April 28, 2009 at 11:10 pm |
Hi Jessica – thanks for taking the time to comment on this post. I wasn’t sure how people would respond as although I know there are many homeschoolers in the world, I didn’t think there were many people who were up for the idea of completely revolutionising the educational system.
How wrong I was! And I like how your comment has helped to take my thinking a step further, since I totally agree that governments often try to control things by measuring them in a very damaging way.
I also came across this post http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/ (via this post http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/an-unschooling-manifesto/2009/04/27) which seems to indicate that an ‘unschooling’ movement is growing. I’d love to hear what some school students think of this idea, including those at pre-school age…
November 15, 2010 at 2:22 pm |
[...] blogged before about schools and how we teach young people, and recently I came across this fantastic blog post by [...]