Lightspeed Systems

My Plea To All

If someone tells you they have a “simple solution” to ”fix” education (or the national debt, or any other major public policy challenge)–they are probably wrong.

Brian Bridges has an excellent post regarding online learning in his blog. Read it here: Response to ”Online schools a virtual waste for students.”  

This discussion highlights one of my pet peeves–there are far too many educators, political leaders, editorial writers, etc. who are emotionally invested in promoting and defending a “right way” to “solve” the “education crisis.”

Students, teachers, schools, communities, countries are diverse. So there are many “right ways” depending on who, what, where, when. In other words, lots of different approaches are effective – depending on the situation, learning goal, etc.

But this does not mean “it’s all relative!” Given a certain fact set, some techniques are, in fact, generally better than others. We need to continue advocating for ideas that are likely to improve teaching and learning as circumstances dictate. 

As we all should know, education–like every other endeavor–has plenty of room for improvement. It has always been so and always will be. There is no such thing as perfection in education–so continuous improvement should be our goal.

So here is my plea.

Be respectful of diverse viewpoints and stop seizing on random “facts” to prove a preconceived notion. Though there is plenty of brain research that indicates that we are naturally inclined to see what we want to see,  true paradigm shifts are hard intellectual and emotional work.

Rant over for today.

Tags: Brian Bridges, education reform, online learning, teaching

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 14th, 2011 at 8:50 am and is filed under 21st century learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.