[Its.an.education.project] Questions for education projects. The life cycle of a great education.

[Samuel Klein]

On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 11:41 PM, Bill Kerr <billkerr at gmail.com> wrote:

I think there also needs to be something in there about different learners
> being different or that learning styles that work for one learner may not
> work for another. Perhaps those who learn readily without formal instruction
> are just one subset of all learners. For those people school may well feel
> like a prison or a sophisticated form of child abuse. Other learners may
> need far more structure than is fashionable to admit in constructionist
> study groups. There actually appears to be evidence for this.
>

Interesting point.  I do worry about mindful observation being biased by the
unconscious need to be fashionable -- something that affects all sorts of
experiments, scientific or not.


> However, Wheldall is concerned that low-progress readers do not learn to
> read naturally. "They will only learn to read with careful, systematic
> instruction to which phonics instruction is central," he says.
> If I am casting the net too wide with these questions then they still
> might serve a useful purpose of how the net should be cast, what should be
> in and out and why.
>

Agreed -- "How wide should the net be cast in this discussion?" is another
good one.


> Much of this is a war zone but OLPC was prepared to fight some sort of war
> from the start. Which war(s) are we prepared to fight and which ones not?
>

Another good one.  A related question : when is it acceptable to dismiss
commonly-held beliefs as obviously wrong (is it ever acceptable?) and when
should they be addressed in detail?

And you and Javier both note:

Is Education different in under developed (and conflicted) countries?

Highlighting some major differences -- as perceived internally, and as
perceived by visiting educators from elsewhere -- will be useful.

Negative results are also very interesting : what are major educational
initiatives (in a given region/country) that have been tried without
success?  What are narrow areas in which they dramatically succeeded or
failed?

SJ
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