<div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 7:43 AM, Walter Bender <<a href="mailto:walter.bender@gmail.com">walter.bender@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> ===Sugar Digest=== I encourage you to join two threads on the Education List this week: <a href="http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-April/005382.html" target="_blank">http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-April/005382.html</a>, which has boiled down to an instruction vs construction debate; and <a href="http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-April/005342.html" target="_blank">http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-April/005342.html</a>, which has boiled down to a debate of catering to local culture vs the Enlightenment. I encourage you to join these discussions.</blockquote><div> </div></div>Agree that these are important discussions Need to be careful about the use of the versus depiction of these discussions IMO, this tempting shorthand can create the wrong impression eg. I would see direct instruction as a must for autistic children but don't see that it follows as a general model for all education (special needs are special) or that we should even think it is possible to have a correct general model. I don't think there is one and good teachers swap between multiple models all the time. no one on this list has argued overtly against "the enlightenment" or that local culture ought not to be taken into account, eg. Ties said "think practical", the response was of the nature that our context demands we do <a certain course of action> however, I do think the roll back of enlightenment principles is not well understood (<a href="http://learningevolves.wikispaces.com/nonUniversals">http://learningevolves.wikispaces.com/nonUniversals</a>) and that a better understanding might persuade more people of the need to keep searching and struggling for different ways to go against some of the tide of local culture - there is a recent interesting comment thread on mark guzdial's blog which is worth reading from this point of view <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNK3F4TMBURELZZK">http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNK3F4TMBURELZZK</a>