It strikes me that we think of learning and what it means to be educated in very binary ways, in terms of right and wrong answers, success and failure, and making it or not. We are not patient with learning; we expect to have it right now.
A teacher has shared knowledge; the student should metabolize and be able to use the information…right now. This binary way of thinking limits learners; it makes them believe they are either in or out. They understand it, or they don’t. Ultimately, it can lead to the message of perfectionism, “I always have to be correct,” or shame, “Something is wrong with me, I’ll never get it.” It is limiting and doesn’t help learners see that all learning is connected.
We have a lack of patience in learning. Look at our desire to have kids reading at younger and younger ages, mastering content at younger and younger ages. Is this lack of patience in learning what has led us to be content with reducing education down to bite-sized content? We decide that a child has been properly educated when they can repeat the learned content to us. Our education system has conditioned us to view learning as a commodity rather than helping learners see that it is all connected and we are connected. Perhaps this is why students are content to read the Cliff Notes version of a classic for the correct answers rather than engage that patient pursuit of reading and engaging the text in such a way that they might be moved and changed in some way as they read it. Perhaps this is why we are content to reduce the beauty of the mathematical world down to formulas to be memorized rather than a new way to see the interconnectedness of the universe’s inner workings. This may be why so many schools and districts are terrified by the prospect of AI and Chat GPT; it reveals the truth of what we’ve done with learning. It indicates that we’ve reduced learning (and, with it, the universe) into binary understandings. Easier to pretend it doesn’t exist and ban it from the classroom.
The truth is that to learn is to be fascinated and surprised on a continual basis. Nothing is static. The universe is in a constant process of change. A static education goes against the nature of the universe we find ourselves in. How is it that we’ve become comfortable with content being the driver of education? (And yes, it has not passed by me that in English, we use the same spelling for content and content, perhaps it’s a clue.) If learning is entering into the flow of fascination, surprise, curiosity, exploration, experimentation…all things that require patience, how might we create the conditions for learning in schools? What might our focus need to be on? What skills might students need to learn well?
Maybe AI and Chat GPT aren’t the enemies of learning. Perhaps the enemy of learning is content.
Dreams of Education 