AN EDUCATION FOR THE FUTURE

It is already a cliché to remark that our time is one of tremendous breakthroughs, refer to new work in technology, nanotechnology, the genetics revolution, robotics, artificial intelligence, perhaps even the creation of new species, by accident or by design. It is also a cliché to note that education is becoming increasingly important. Anything predictable and rule-governed will be automated. Only those persons who are well and broadly and flexibly educated will be able to function productively in this new world. Around the world, education leads the list of public concerns. Today, we will speak about education of children and adolescents; issues of collegiate and professional education deserve separate treatment on another occasion. By background, a psychological researcher who has studied mind and brain with particular reference to learning and to education. I just mentioned the consensus today about the importance of education. There is not comparable agreement about WHAT education should be and HOW it should be achieved. I want to mention two dilemmas-both connected to the cognitive, the knowledge agenda of school.

What should be taught? What should be highlighted: facts, information? data? If so, which of the countless facts that exist? Subject matters and disciplines-if so, which ones? Which science, which history? Should we nurture creativity, critical thinking? If there is to be an additional focus, should it be arts, technology, a social focus, a moral focus? If you try to have all you would break the backs of students and teachers, even given a demanding elementary and secondary school curriculum. If knowledge doubles every year or two, we certainly cannot multiply the number of hours or teach twice as quickly. Some choice, some decisions about what can be omitted, is essential.

How should we teach? Even if we could agree on which emphases should be adopted, one must still determine whether to teach all subjects or all students the same way, or to individualize the curriculum for each student or groups of students. How much emphasis should there be on computers, distance education, various media? What should be the role of home, school, the media, or extra-curricular activities? How much responsibility should be placed on teachers, students, peers, parents, the wider community? Issues of pedagogy and instruction turn out to be as vexed as issues of curriculum and content.

I believe that the primary cognitive purpose of education for the young should be to help students understand the world around them--the physical world, the biological world, the social world, the world of personal experiences. This is best done by first training them in the three basic literacies (Reading, Writing, Calculation) -- nowadays we might add computing; and then introducing them to the major families of disciplines: science, which seeks the truths about the physical, social, and biological worlds, and which uses the powerful tools of mathematics; the study of art and nature, which tells us about the beauties of the natural and the manmade worlds and which give us the tools to produce objects that we ourselves cherish; and history and literature, which tell us about the human past, document the good and evil choices that humans have made and the consequences of these choices, and help us to determine what we ourselves should do when faced with dilemmas. In sum, the disciplines represent humanity's most determined efforts to learn and to understand what is true, beautiful and good, and by extension to spurn falsehood, to turn away from what is repulsive, and to avoid evil deeds. The capacity to think intelligently is very different from knowing lots of information. Such intelligent thinking, such understanding is likely to come about only if one has rounded, three-dimensional familiarity with a subject, so that one can probe it in many different ways. And here at last is where our multiple intelligences can make their contribution. If we are willing to spend time on a topic and probe it penetratingly, we do not have to approach it in just a single way (which is almost always through written texts or lectures). Instead we can learn about it in many different ways, using our multiple intelligences, and that concept or topic is much more likely to remain with us, embedded in our neural networks, and to be usable in flexible and innovative ways. In fact, I would guess that if you were asked to remember material from World history,you wouldn't remember long time-lines, but rather a few events. So, my recommendations can be stated simply. First obtain the literacies; then study in depth key topics in the major disciplines; approach those topics in many ways; and give youngsters many chances to master and many vehicles to exhibit their understandings. Let them use their knowledge of evolution to evaluate the discovery of a new set of dinosaur bones or the spreading of a computer virus, as seems to happen each new week, at least on my machine. Various tasks can be left for the university: a specialization in one or another discipline; work that is explicitly multi or interdisciplinary; and the mastery of facts that may be useful to know if you want to become an expert.

I turn, finally, to the question of how education may differ in the future. The widespread availability of powerful technologies will be a great boon. Students will be able to get much information on their own, often in vivid form. They will be able to encounter multiple representations of material, for example through hypertext linkages, surfing the world wide web, or experimenting in virtual reality. There will be waning demand for live presentations of "straight, canned lectures"--such as this one!--for such lectures can be recorded and accessed, if one wishes, on the Internet at any time in day or night. In the future, students and parents will expect to be able to interact with teachers, in person and via the Internet, including instructors and experts whom they have never met. (We teachers will get even less sleep than we do now!) There may well be more home schooling, and more mixed forms of schooling, with students doing more at home, more with parents, more with ad hoc or planned groups, with only certain kinds of activity occurring each day within a single building. Flexibility is likely to prevail at school, as it is beginning to prevail at the workplace, in both of our countries. I find these prospects exciting. The challenging of teaching young persons is going to increase in the years ahead. Not only will students be encountering spectacular demonstrations through technology; the world itself, in its technological facets, will continue to change at dizzying rates. We live during the first time in history when we human beings could destroy the world through nuclear weapons. We also live at the first time in history where--through genetic engineering or nanotechnology. We could create new toxins, or new forms of bioterror, which could destroy the planet. We also live at the first time in history where we will have machines that are at least as smart as we are in many ways; machines that can plan economies, wage diplomacy, alter politics, and, for all I know, manage our leisure life, our love life, the place and manner of our deaths, and rebirths, how and whether we will be remembered. There will be experiments in cloning organs or whole human beings, and there will be attempts to merge humans and robots, for example, through the implanting of silicon chips in our brains; some will even hope to achieve immortality in that way, by downloading the wet brains into a vast dry database. I will leave it to you to determine whether this prospect of indefinite lives more closely approximates a dream or a nightmare! I am not saying that these issues--what used to be the stuff of science-fiction--should dominate the curriculum of the school. I am saying something more radical. I am saying that they are already beginning to constitute the curriculum of life each day. Students won't have to learn in school about cloned organs and organisms or silicon implants in the hippocampus because they will see them on television or surf past them on the Internet, or hear them argued about around the dinner table at night or at the cybercafé around the corner. And so the tasks of educators will become dual and dually challenging: on one hand, to inculcate the traditional disciplines and ways of thinking as I have described them; and, on the other hand, to help students cope with and perhaps take an active role in deciding how to deal with these dazzling developments, which, as I say, are no longer restricted to the pages of science fiction.

Public vs. Private Education

Throughout the world, societies are rethinking the relationship between the world of education and the marketplace. As you probably know, there are many private initiatives in education. Some individuals would like to have all education choice determined by portable vouchers that pay for one's schooling, and these proponents may even look forward to the disappearance of public education as we know it. I believe that market control of education would be grave mistake. Public education has much to learn from business, and I for one appreciate the various kind of financial and advisory support that businesses can provide. However, the goal of business--to make a profit--is fundamentally at odds with the goal of education--to have an informed citizenry capable of independent analysis and decisions. Education is also an area of expertise and is becoming increasingly so; just as we should not entrust business people to make medical decisions, we should not allow business people to make educational decisions.

Multicultural issues

When a country consists primarily of a single culture, then the issues of cultural education are relatively simple. Citizens should come to understand the history, governance, art forms, and values of their particular culture. However, nowadays, two new issues arise. On the one hand, many countries such as us no longer have a dominant culture, but are exquisitely multicultural. On the other hand, we are all members of a global society and we all need to be prepared to deal with individuals from a diversity of backgrounds. It is important to learn about one's own background culture, but in my view that task that can only rarely be undertaken by a school system in a multicultural society. Cultural education is better left to afterschool or weekend options. While cultural education is an option, introduction to the global society is becoming a necessity. Unless students have some grasp of trends and realities around the globe, and some sense of how to deal with individuals from diverse backgrounds and often conflicting value systems, they will be ill-equipped to survive in the future.

Academic vs. Practical Training

In years past, most societies featured a fairly early tracking mechanism, where the most successful students took an academic curriculum and had the opportunity for higher education; while the rest either dropped out of school, worked in farms or factories, or entered a vocational track. Nowadays, it is considered suspect to advocate such a tracking system. After all, most vocations run the risk of being automated; and we are living in a "learning" or "knowledge society" where individuals must be familiar with symbolic or notational systems. Otherwise they will have little chance to benefit fully from the opportunities available in a technologically-sophisticated setting. However, it is also apparent that not all students want to continue in school beyond the age of 15 or 16, nor that this is necessarily the optimal place for them to spend half of their waking hours at that stage of their life. In many cases, they and the society would be much better off if they mastered a trade, did community service, became involved in an artistic troupe, or went to work in a developing country. We should not force all young people to pursue higher education before they reach the age of 20 but that we should extend the option to them throughout their lives. Just as students in all developed countries now have the opportunity for a free primary and secondary education, we should gradually extend this privilege to the tertiary level. In this country, universally-available university education should be the goal such as Open University. However, it should be up to the student when and even whether to pursue that option. With the explosion of learning opportunities (e.g., distance learning, on the job learning,) and with the proliferation of institutions that provide education (e.g., for-profit, corporate, the military), there is no reason for everyone to proceed along a single lockstep route from kindergarten through graduate school. I should add, finally, that we have probably had too sharp a division between academic and practical learning. Much academic learning can be enlivened and enhanced if it has a real life component, or even vivid multimedia facets. Recent Dutch experiments with project-based and theme-related curricula illustrate the power of education that activates the multiple intelligences of the learner. And by the same token, there is every reason to infuse on-the-job training with exposure to general concepts and principles that extend beyond the particular task that is being mastered. One advantage of a "multiple intelligences approach" to education is that it does not simply consist of a set of hurdles designed just to pick out those individuals with a blend of linguistic-logical intelligence--though I suspect that particular blend is well-represented today in this room!

Disciplinary and interdisciplinary studies

All of us have become aware that so much cutting edge work in the world is focussed on problems, not on disciplines; and that much of the best work combines a number of disciplines, whether it be the intersection of genetics and information science, cognitive science and neuroscience, economics and behavioral science, or arts and computers. Since postgraduate education needs to take an increasingly interdisciplinary stance, what implications might follow for precollegiate education? So what about efforts at interdisciplinary work before tertiary education? I think it is possible to lay the groundwork for interdisciplinary education in at least three ways: Among the young: Encourage wide reading (or even wide surfing of the web). This is the best route to cultural literacy. When young individuals pick up ideas informally on many topics approached from many angles, they accumulate a fount of knowledge which later serves them well;

During the middle school years: Feature complex problems which require considerations from a number of different disciplinary perspectives. For example, ask students to consider what would happen if the earth ran out of petroleum or if computers were "hacked" by organisms from outer space. Even when students are not fully versed in a discipline, it is instructive to realize that they will have to bring more than one perspective--and more than one intelligence--to bear on a solution.

In secondary school: Devote a fair amount of time to active efforts at synthesis across disciplines. Most students see secondary school as a series of unrelated topics, as they wander from one class or test to the next one on the schedule. This estrangement is not essential. Particularly if there is coordination among faculty, it is possible to approach some of the same topics (e.g., light, the Renaissance, patterns) from more than one disciplinary perspective. Then, if there are special weeks or classes devoted to efforts to bridging these perspectives, students can begin to gain a feeling for what genuine interdisciplinary work is like. Let me stress that, in offering these comments about public/private education, multicultural education, vocational training, and interdisciplinary education, putting forth my own views, even prejudices, I am not speaking as a disinterested expert. Indeed, one cannot even begin to think about such issues unless one puts forth one's own value system. The answers can be guided by findings from research but they can never be dictated solely by the results of scientific or social scientific research.

Two Crucial Values

In touching upon values, I want to emphasize the enduring importance of two values: the Assumption of Responsibility; and a Respect for Humanity. We encourage students to carry out work, but that work needs to be good in two ways: exemplary in quality but also responsible. More specifically, the work that we do as adults should take into account our responsibilities to five different spheres: to our own personal set of values; to other individuals around us (family, friends, colleagues/peers); to our profession/calling; to the institutions to which we belong; and to the wider world-- people whom we do not know, those who will live in the future, the health and survival of the planet. Attention to these responsibilities is important for any worker, be he or she a physician, physicist, physical therapist or fisherman. Such responsible education cannot be completed in the early years of life; but it must begin there. Adult years are far too late. And so parents and teachers must embody a sense of responsibility in their own lives and seek to nurture a comparable sense of responsibility in all young people. This is especially difficult to do in uncertain and turbulent times like these: when things are changing very quickly, market forces are very powerful, there are not equivalently potent counterforces, and our whole sense of time and space is being altered by technologies like the world wide web. Many people in my country and elsewhere are worried about the alienation that many young people experience--alienation from the world of school and, in some sad cases, alienation from the world at large. I lack the expertise to discuss this national and perhaps world-wide phenomenon. But I do know that we must help students to find meaning in daily life, to feel connected to other individuals and to their community--past, present, and future; and to feel responsible for the consequences of their actions. We must help them to achieve the state of flow--the balance between skills and challenges--which motivates individuals to return to a pursuit time and again. Plato understood this 2500 years ago when he stated, "Through education we need to help students find pleasure in what they have to learn." The second value is an appreciation of what is special about human beings. Human beings have done many terrible things but countless members of our species have done wonderful things as well: works of art, works of music, discoveries of science and technology, heroic acts of courage and sacrifice. Our youngsters must learn about these achievements, come to respect them, have time to reflect about them (and what it took to achieve them) and aspire some day to achieve anew in the same tradition…or perhaps even to found a new tradition. Learning about human heroism may be another clue to how to nurture youngsters who embody positive values. We should not be afraid to state our values; but of course it is far more important to embody them, to live them day in and day out. The scholarly disciplines are among the most remarkable of human achievements--and we must remember that they are much easier to destroy than to build up. Totalitarian societies first burn the books; then they humiliate the scholars; then they kill those who do not buckle under. As the events of the last century remind us, a Dark Age can always descend upon us. We should remember that one of the most magnificent of human inventions is the Invention of Education--no other species educates its young as do we. At this time of great change, we must remember the ancient value of education and preserve it--not just facts, data, information, but Knowledge, Understanding, Judgment, Wisdom. We must use the ancient arts and crafts of education to prepare youngsters for a world that natural evolution could not anticipate and which even we ourselves as conscious beings cannot fully envision either. In the past, we could be satisfied with an education that was based on the literacies; that surveyed the major disciplines; and that taught students about their own national culture. We must maintain these three foci, but we must add two more: preparation for interdisciplinary work and preparation for life in a global civilization. We must keep alive the important values of Responsibility and Humanity. The great French playwright Jean-Baptiste Molière once declared "We are responsible not only for what we do but also for what we do not do." We must not shirk from the responsibility to prepare children and youth for a future which we can only glimpse-- as through a glass darkly. That is the challenge faced as never before by education today. Let us combine the best of physical, natural, and social science, with the most precious of human values. Let us do so on a Global Scale. Then and only then can we have an educational system that reflects the best facets of the human condition.

sumber asal:Howard Gardner, AN EDUCATION FOR THE FUTURE:The Foundation of Science and Values