Reinventer l’Ecole ou Déscolariser l’Education?

[NOTE : J’ai présenté la version original de cet article, en anglais, à la Conférence Internationale sur l’Apprentissage par Problèmes de 2018 (PBL-2018), le 19 février 2018, qui a eu lieu à l’Université de Santa Clara, en Santa Clara, Californie. La Conférence était organisée par l’Association PAN-PBL – Organisation Panaméricaine pour une Éducation Axé aux Problèmes.]

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Devises

“Je n’ai jamais laissé ma scolarité interférer avec mon éducation.” (Mark Twain)

“Ma grand-mère voulait que je fasse des études, alors elle m’a empêché d’aller à l’école.” (Margaret Mead)

“L’école est désormais identifiée à l’éducation comme l’église l’était autrefois à la religion.” (Ivan Ilitch)

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Tableau des Matières

1. Introduction

2. Racines d’une alternative claire à la scolarisation

A. Des racines plus proches

B. Racines intermédiaires

C. Racines plus anciennes

D. Racines socratiques

E. Technologies numériques de l’information et de la communication

F. L’accent mis sur l’apprentissage (redéfini)

3. L’éducation comme développement humain

4. Une utopie – ou quelque chose de faisable ?

5. Conclusion

6. Remarques

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1. Introduction

La thèse principale de cet article est qu’il est possible et souhaitable de promouvoir et d’améliorer l’éducation en créant une société où l’apprentissage – actif, interactif, collaboratif, significatif, basé sur les problèmes, axé sur les projets – est stimulé et facilité, mais dans laquelle les écoles ne jouent aucun rôle éducatif significatif.

Une société dans laquelle cela se produirait serait appelée à juste titre une société apprenante : elle serait elle-même le principal environnement d’apprentissage.

Cette thèse a un corollaire principal : les tentatives de changer, réformer, transformer, innover, repenser, réinventer l’école afin d’améliorer la qualité de l’éducation sont une perte de temps, d’efforts et d’argent. Ces ressources (temps, efforts, argent) devraient être réaffectées à la tâche de renouveler efficacement l’éducation dans le contexte d’une société apprenante.

Au cours des dernières décennies, il y a eu d’innombrables alertes que :

l’école est devenue un lieu où la curiosité naturelle des enfants est bloquée et leur désir passionné initial d’apprendre est progressivement tué ;

en forçant les enfants à apprendre ce qui ne les intéresse pas d’apprendre, et à s’abstenir d’apprendre ce qu’ils veulent apprendre, l’école les soumet à une forme de “viol mental” ou, pire encore, à une “amputation de leur esprit” , pour lesquels il n’y a pas de prothèses ;

en traitant tous les enfants comme s’ils étaient semblables et non uniques, l’école les transforme en un groupe standardisé d’adultes dont l’état d’esprit les rend incapables de résoudre de manière créative et compétente, dans un délai raisonnable, les problèmes les plus graves auxquels le monde est confronté ;

l’école est devenue une prison à laquelle on condamne, chaque année, un nombre incroyable d’enfants aux talents multiples et précieux à des peines de douze ans, dont ils sortent, à la fin de leur peine, totalement muets, l’esprit émoussé et leur créativité détruite ;

la solution de nos problèmes éducatifs ne résidera pas dans l’allocation de plus d’argent aux systèmes scolaires, la rémunération des enseignants, la formation des enseignants plus longtemps et plus efficacement, la recherche ou l’invention de programmes, de méthodologies et de moyens d’évaluation alternatifs, la création de meilleures bibliothèques, salles de presse et laboratoires, l’injection technologies modernes dans la salle de classe, prolongeant le temps que les enfants restent à l’école (plus d’années de scolarité, plus de jours d’école dans l’année, plus d’heures dans la journée d’école, etc.), ou l’une des myriades d’autres “solutions” proposées chaque année);

l’école est morte : elle a dépassé son utilité et aucune somme de « réglages » ou de « correctifs », petits ou grands, humanistes, techniques ou technologiques ne pourra la faire revivre.

Et pourtant, les agents éducatifs publics et privés, au niveau local, régional, national et international, consacrent, chaque année, un temps considérable, d’énormes efforts et des sommes fantastiques à l’objectif d’améliorer l’éducation en changeant / réformant / innovant / transformant / repenser / réinventer les écoles.

Pour l’observateur attentif de la scène, il n’est pas surprenant que les résultats aient été lamentables voire nuls.

Cet article proposera une voie différente et innovative pour la solution du problème de l’éducation de qualité – une voie, cependant, qui n’est manifestement en aucune façon nouvelle.

2. Racines d’une alternative claire à la scolarisation

A. Des racines plus proches

Au tout début des années 70, alors que les principales technologies numériques que nous utilisons aujourd’hui n’existaient pas ou n’étaient pas entièrement disponibles, Ivan Illich (1926-2002), philosophe croate-autrichien et prêtre catholique romain, travaillant dans un centre aux allures de monastère à Cuernavaca, au Mexique, a proposé quelque chose de similaire à ce que son bon ami, l’éducateur populaire brésilien Paulo Freire (1921-1997), avait demandé quelques années plus tôt : que nous nous éduquions les uns les autres par l’interaction, le dialogue, les échanges personnels, la collaboration, médiatisé par le monde » – c’est-à-dire dans les lieux où nous vivons réellement nos vies, sans recourir aux écoles, aux éducateurs professionnels, aux programmes encyclopédiques, aux méthodologies d’enseignement sophistiquées, aux instruments de test élaborés, etc. [1].

Illich’s Deschooling Society [2], publié en 1970, est une puissante sommation à renouveler l’éducation dans une société apprenante où l’école ne joue aucun rôle. La Pédagogie des Opprimés de Freire, publiée en anglais également en 1970, contient des passages puissants avec le message suivant (ici dans une traduction en quelque sorte libre qui rejoint des passages trouvés à plus d’un endroit dans le livre):

« Personne n’éduque personne, mais personne non plus n’est capable de s’éduquer seul. Nous nous éduquons mutuellement à travers un dialogue continu, médiatisé par le monde, dans lequel nous utilisons des ressources qui, dans l’éducation traditionnelle, appartiennent au seul enseignant. L’éducation est un processus mutuel, médiatisé par le monde, dans lequel des êtres inachevés, conscients de leur inachèvement, tentent de devenir plus pleinement humains. » [3]

B. Racines intermédiaires

Toute personne ou institution intéressée par l’éducation doit avoir, sinon une définition précise de ce qu’est l’éducation, du moins une compréhension claire et précise du concept.

L’éducation, dans un passé récent, signifiait essentiellement la transmission ou la fourniture d’informations et de connaissances. L’éducation, dans ce contexte, a été organisée (sous la forme d’écoles impliquant des enseignants, des programmes, une méthodologie, une évaluation) pour mettre en œuvre cette compréhension.

Cette compréhension de l’éducation peut avoir eu un sens dans un contexte où l’information et les connaissances étaient rares et leur accès difficile. Ce contexte n’existe plus. Il faut donc chercher une autre compréhension de l’éducation. On pourrait essayer d’inventer, à partir de rien, un concept totalement nouveau. Ou nous pourrions retrouver des idées qui, par bribes, sont déjà avec nous, parfois depuis longtemps, mais n’ont jamais trouvé de véritable résonance. C’est ce qui sera fait ici dans cet article.

Prenons, par exemple, cette une citation fameuse de l’Émile de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (publié initialement en 1762), qui est peut-être le plus important essai sur l’éducation écrit au XVIIIe siècle, il y a plus de 250 ans, avant que la civilisation industrielle ne se généralise et que l’école publique moderne semblait imiter la chaîne de montage industrielle :

« Tout ce qui nous manque à la naissance et dont nous avons besoin en grandissant nous est donné par l’éducation » [4].

Cette affirmation est rafraîchissante aujourd’hui car elle met l’accent sur une chose importante, souvent négligée à notre époque : tout (« toutes les choses ») dont nous avons besoin pour vivre notre vie et qui ne nous est pas inné (« qui nous manque à la naissance ») doit être acquis par l’éducation.

Traduit dans un langage plus contemporain, cela signifie que l’éducation a à voir, non pas avec la transmission et la fourniture d’éléments d’information et de connaissances encapsulés, mais avec le processus même du développement humain, qui comprend de manière centrale le renforcement des capacités ou des compétences – c’est-à-dire l’apprentissage ( pas nécessairement d’enseignement ). Rousseau a proposé et défendu une éducation négative, une éducation du laisser-faire, une éducation dans laquelle l’apprenant est le scénariste, le metteur en scène et le protagoniste principal et actif.

Le développement n’est pas la même chose que la croissance. Le développement est le produit de l’apprentissage. Quelqu’un peut grandir et ne pas se développer en tant qu’être humain. Mowgli, le garçon des histoires de jungle de Rudyard Kipling, a grandi, mais ne s’est pas développé en tant qu’être humain. Si on peut parler de développement dans son cas, c’est plus en termes de développement du loup qu’en termes de développement humain.

Rousseau rappelle également au lecteur que l’éducation ne se limite pas au développement intellectuel. L’éducation implique également d’autres dimensions de la vie humaine : psychomotrice, sociale (interpersonnelle), affective (émotionnelle), esthétique (sensible), éthique et peut-être même spirituelle. C’est ce que l’on entend aujourd’hui par l’expression « développement humain ». Ajouter « plein » ou « intégral » à cette expression est presque pléonastique.

Rousseau ne le dit pas dans ce passage, mais même les choses qui nous sont innées (quelles qu’elles soient) peuvent s’exercer, s’étendre, s’améliorer, se perfectionner par l’éducation – dans toutes les dimensions précisées.

Cela signifie que l’éducation sera considérablement appauvrie si elle est conçue uniquement (ou principalement) comme un développement intellectuel, même si la maîtrise des compétences et des savoir-faire s’ajoute à l’absorption d’informations et de connaissances.

L’éducation est encore plus appauvrie si elle se réduit à préparer soit au marché du travail dans l’économie numérique, soit à une citoyenneté effective dans une société démocratique, même si l’éducation comme développement humain peut inclure ces deux choses. Mais cela inclut beaucoup plus, comme, par exemple, le développement de caractéristiques qui culminent dans la réalisation de soi – ce que les Grecs appelaient eudaimonia. Atteindre l’eudaimonia implique de définir, de choisir et d’actualiser son projet de vie.

C. Racines plus anciennes

Discutant du concept d’éducation chez les anciens Grecs et Romains, James L. Jarrett déclare, dans son magnifique The Humanities and Humanistic Education :

« En effet, ni les Grecs ni les Romains n’étaient le moins du monde susceptibles de partager la confusion moderne qui identifie l’éducation à la scolarisation. Nous sommes façonnés et formés par la totalité de notre environnement : il s’ensuit que nous ne pouvons pas nous permettre d’être indifférents à tout aspect de cet environnement, architectural, juridique, cérémonial, érotique, quel qu’il soit. » [5]

Si l’éducation concerne le développement humain dans toutes ses dimensions, et si elle se déroule tout au long de la vie de l’individu, elle ne peut être logée dans le cadre d’une seule institution (et souvent unidimensionnelle), à savoir l’école, sans perdre sa richesse essentielle, sa nature omniprésente et son orientation personnalisée.

Ainsi, lorsque l’UNESCO tente (comme elle a récemment commencé à le faire), sinon d’effacer la distinction entre éducation formelle et non formelle, du moins d’en réduire l’importance actuelle, elle nous ramène à une vision déjà adoptée par les anciens Grecs et les Romains.

Mais le point de vue défendu par les Grecs et les Romains de l’Antiquité allait au-delà d’une attention égale aux initiatives éducatives formelles et non formelles. Ils ne favorisaient pas la scolarisation de la société. Ils ont préféré faire de la société dans son ensemble le milieu dans lequel nous apprenons et donc nous éduquons. Selon cette vision, se préoccuper de l’éducation n’équivaut pas à créer et maintenir un bon système scolaire (public ou privé, peu importe), encore moins à allonger le temps de scolarisation (libre ou contrainte). Au lieu de proposer que l’école devienne une institution totalitaire dans la société, les Grecs et les Romains de l’Antiquité ont proposé que toutes les institutions et activités de la société aient un objectif éducatif – c’est-à-dire que la société devienne une institution ou un environnement véritablement éducatif (c’est-à-dire centrée sur l’apprentissage). C’est le vrai sens de Paideia.

La richesse de cette idée est ahurissante. Les anciens Grecs et Romains n’envisageaient pas le rôle éducatif de seulement quelques institutions de la société, telles que la famille, l’église, les organisations communautaires locales, les moyens de communication, les entreprises industrielles et commerciales, les organisations culturelles et de loisirs – pas même de l’école. Ils signifiaient que chaque institution et chaque activité de la société, depuis la façon dont les villes sont planifiées et construites, en passant par la façon dont elles sont organisées et gouvernées (y compris, nécessairement, leurs lois) et par la façon dont elles sont entretenues par des activités économiques libres, et en arrivant à la façon dont le temps de jeu et de loisirs est promu et organisé, que tout cela soit axé sur l’apprentissage, c’est-à-dire éducatif.

Plutôt que de proposer une scolarisation totalitaire de la société, ils ont proposé la déscolarisation totale de la société (à la Ivan Illich), car l’apprentissage devrait devenir l’objectif et la préoccupation globale de la société. Si les Grecs et les Romains de l’Antiquité avaient connu les technologies numériques actuelles de l’information et de la communication, ils auraient probablement mis l’accent sur leur propos avec beaucoup plus de force et de réalisme.

D. Racines socratiques

Socrate a été le premier grand éducateur de la race humaine (du moins en Occident) – et, sans doute, son plus grand. Il est important de considérer comment il considérait et pratiquait l’éducation:

Il n’avait pas d’école : il travaillait sur la place principale de la ville ;

Il n’avait pas de salle de classe : il travaillait en plein air ;

Il ne travaillait pas avec des groupes : il travaillait avec une personne à la fois ;

Il n’avait pas d’étudiants : il avait des partenaires dans le dialogue et dans l’apprentissage ;

Il n’avait pas de programme : il discutait de tout ce qui intéressait ses interlocuteurs ;

Il ne répondait pas vraiment aux questions de ses interlocuteurs : il répondait à une question toujours par une autre question, pour les stimuler à trouver eux-mêmes la réponse ;

Il considérait sa tâche comme similaire à celle de la sage-femme : faire ressortir avec succès, par une simple conversation, ce qui est déjà dans l’esprit de son interlocuteur, car c’est là, dans l’esprit, que se conçoivent les idées ;

Il n’a utilisé aucune ressource d’apprentissage à part l’interaction et le dialogue ;

Il se méfiait de l’oratoire rhétorique, de la prise de parole, de la conférence et de l’enseignement, car ces méthodes vont toutes dans une seule direction, ne sont pas à double sens et ne favorisent donc pas l’interaction et le dialogue;

Pour la même raison, il se méfie des livres, car eux aussi ne favorisent pas l’interaction et le dialogue. [6]

Voilà, en quelques mots, la façon dont Socrate voyait et pratiquait l’éducation, il y a près de 2 500 ans. Ce que Socrate a pensé et fait dans le domaine de l’éducation est beaucoup plus proche du paradigme de « l’éducation ubiquitaire à travers la société apprenante » que tout ce que quiconque a pensé ou fait depuis. Quoi que ce paradigme puisse contenir d’autre, c’est une défense claire de l’éducation personnalisée – et dans la pensée et la pratique de Socrate, nous trouvons un apprentissage véritablement personnalisé.

E. Technologies numériques de l’information et de la communication

Beaucoup d’éducateurs, aujourd’hui, quand ils ne sont pas contraints de défendre le paradigme éducatif actuel, trouvent sympathique la façon de penser de Socrate et admirent sa pratique éducative. Cela explique le succès partiel et relatif des propositions « constructivistes » ou « constructionnistes ».

La seule critique légitime que l’on puisse faire à Socrate est que sa façon de concevoir et de pratiquer l’éducation est impraticable dans une grande société attachée à l’éducation universelle, car elle est basée sur l’interaction et le dialogue en tête-à-tête. En d’autres termes : il ne semble pas être évolutif (« scalable », à grande échelle), appliqué à beaucoup des gens au même temps. Dans une petite ville comme Athènes, qui n’était pas attachée à l’éducation de ses femmes et de ses esclaves, cela a peut-être fonctionné, mais comment mettre en place ce type d’éducation personnalisée dans une mégalopole du XXIe siècle ?

Ce qui s’est passé au cours des 2 500 années qui se sont écoulées depuis Socrate, en particulier au cours des 250 années depuis la révolution industrielle, pour faire de l’éducation d’aujourd’hui une entreprise de masse standardisée centrée sur l’école a été, d’une part, une augmentation progressive mais considérable du nombre de sociétés qui se sentaient obligées à éduquer tout le monde et, d’autre part, manquaient de ressources, humaines et technologiques, pour continuer à éduquer comme le faisait Socrate.

Aujourd’hui, cependant, nous disposons de technologies fantastiques qui nous permettent de réaliser un « apprentissage horizontal » bien mieux que jamais. Ces technologies nous permettent d’accéder facilement à la bibliothèque universelle d’Internet et, aussi, les uns aux autres – ainsi qu’aux personnes possédant des connaissances et des compétences sophistiquées, qui sont prêtes, sur une base individuelle ou dans des environnements plus généraux, à partager ce qu’elles savent, et ce qu’elles savent faire, afin de nous aider à apprendre ce qui nous intéresse d’apprendre, ce que nous voulons ou devons apprendre.

Il est désormais possible, à travers les médias sociaux et les réseaux, de porter à grande échelle la méthodologie d’apprentissage de la maïeutique proposée par Socrates, offrant à chacun une éducation personnalisée qui satisfait ses intérêts, ses envies et ses besoins.

La technologie, en particulier en créant des médias sociaux et en rendant les réseaux sociaux mondiaux possibles et viables, rend également possible et viable l’éducation personnalisée à grande échelle. Parce que les réseaux sociaux mondiaux ne sont pas seulement des lieux où nous recueillons des informations, partageons des informations et nous divertissons (bien qu’ils le soient certainement), mais aussi des lieux où nous apprenons ce que nous voulons et devons apprendre, tels que définis par nos intérêts, ils sont devenus un environnement d’apprentissage macro. En fait, l’espace virtuel est devenu l’embryon du paradigme de « l’éducation ubiquitaire à travers la société apprenante ».

F. L’accent mis sur l’apprentissage (redéfini)

L’éducation traditionnelle était centrée sur l’enseignement. Aujourd’hui, l’accent est mis sur l’apprentissage, mais l’apprentissage a été redéfini.

Dans le passé, nous nous préoccupions des méthodologies d’enseignement – la didactique. Il est maintenant plus que temps de se préoccuper des méthodologies d’apprentissage, ou des mathétiques (sic), comme le proposaient, entre autres, Comenius, au XVIIe siècle, et Seymour Pappert, au XXe . [7]

Apprendre, comme Peter Senge [8], entre autres, l’a montré, ce n’est pas accumuler des informations, mais devenir capable de faire ce que nous ne pouvions pas faire auparavant. Aussi simple que cela. Apprendre, c’est renforcer les capacités et développer les compétences. Apprendre, c’est progressivement faire de nous-mêmes des êtres humains entièrement sculptés, devenir ce que nous voulons, choisissons et décidons d’être.

Mais l’apprentissage, pour être efficace, doit s’inscrire dans le cadre de son projet de vie : il doit aider les apprenants à :

découvrir leurs passions et leurs talents ;

définir et construire un projet de vie autour d’eux ;

développer les compétences, les habiletés, les valeurs, les attitudes et les habitudes, ainsi qu’acquérir les connaissances et les informations qui, ensemble, permettront de transformer efficacement leur projet de vie en réalité.

3. L’éducation comme développement humain

Lorsque nous, humains, naissons, nous ne savons pas grand-chose et ne savons presque rien faire. C’est pourquoi nous devons dépendre des autres pendant un certain temps. Mais heureusement nous naissons avec trois caractéristiques essentielles au développement humain :

notre programmation génétique est minimale et ouverte : dans certaines limites, nous pouvons devenir presque tout ce que nous voulons ;

notre capacité innée d’apprentissage (au sens vu ci-dessus), qui inclut la capacité d’acquisition du langage, est incroyablement grande, flexible et assez efficace ;

sinon, nous avons un ensemble assez unique de caractéristiques individuelles, construites sur un substrat humain commun de base, pour nous différencier les uns des autres.

Compte tenu de ces caractéristiques, l’éducation de masse, l’éducation de type « taille unique », devrait être proscrite. L’éducation personnalisée est impérative. Et, aujourd’hui, nous pouvons tous y parvenir, à l’aide de technologies déjà disponibles.

Mais l’éducation personnalisée doit nécessairement être axée sur ce que chaque individu veut et doit apprendre. Cela signifie que l’éducation personnalisée doit être centrée sur ce que chaque individu choisit et définit comme son projet de vie.

L’éducation de masse scolaire a ignoré la question du projet de vie parce qu’elle visait à fabriquer des produits humains standardisés (?), indifférenciés les uns des autres.

C’est pourquoi elle en est venue à défendre et à pratiquer une éducation « taille unique ».L’éducation en tant que développement humain, cependant, vise à aider les gens (enfants comme adultes) à trouver leur « élément », comme l’a souligné Sir Ken Robinson [9].

4. Une utopie – ou quelque chose de faisable ?

Certains liront ce papier et diront « Bon et beau… mais dommage que ce soit irréaliste… » D’autres diront même « Beau, fantastique… mais malheureusement c’est totalement utopique »! Je vous assure que ce que je propose n’est ni irréaliste ni utopique : c’est tout à fait faisable, et c’est faisable maintenant – si seulement nous choisissons de le faire [10].

Mais cela ne se fera ni facilement, ni rapidement.

Ça ne sera pas facile. Il y aura de la résistance. La résistance des personnes qui gagnent de l’argent avec les écoles, ou qui réussissent à organiser ou syndiquer les enseignants, ou qui gagnent de l’argent et réussissent à publier et vendre des manuels, des vidéos, des équipements et du matériel de laboratoire, des technologies sophistiquées, ou qui trouvent leur vocation à organiser des conférences et donner des conférences aux éducateurs… Mais c’est faisable, si nous y croyons vraiment et choisissons de le faire.

Et ce ne sera pas rapide. Il a fallu environ 250 ans pour que les gens considèrent une société sans école comme quelque chose d’inconcevable [11]. Plusieurs générations vont se succéder avant que nous puissions voir les premiers fruits de ces idées, et encore plus pour que les gens jugent inimaginable que nous ayons un jour eu besoin d’écoles pour éduquer… L’éducation à domicile pourrait aider… si elle ne se considérait pas comme un enseignement à domicile ! La déscolarisation est un bon début, mais elle doit s’accompagner d’efforts positifs pour faire de la société un véritable environnement d’apprentissage.

Il y a un secret – un secret assez simple. L’apprentissage se fait mieux lorsque nous faisons d’autres choses : jouer, travailler, vivre notre vie dans le monde, résoudre des problèmes petits ou grands : réparer une fuite dans notre salle de bain ou trouver un moyen de débarrasser le monde de la pauvreté, de la maladie, de l’ignorance, de l’injustice, de la violence, de la guerre… Jean-François Rischard, dans son important ouvrage High Noon : 20 Global Problems, 20 Years To Solve Them [12], dresse une liste de vingt problèmes majeurs de vie ou de mort qu’on ne sait comment résoudre, parce que nous n’avons jamais appris à les aborder dans nos soi-disant établissements d’enseignement. Il a dit que nous avions 20 ans pour les résoudre. C’est à ce moment-là qu’il l’a écrit : en 2007. S’il avait raison, nous n’avons que cinq ans pour apprendre à développer le nouvel état d’esprit qui nous permettra de les résoudre. Et le monde est la scène où nous devons vivre et l’endroit où nous devons apprendre – et l’endroit où nous mourrons quand 2027 viendra et nous ne l’avons pas encore appris. L’éducation n’est pas une préparation à la vie : l’éducation est le processus par lequel nous apprenons à vivre en tant qu’êtres humains autonomes et compétents. Et, j’espère, survivre. Et plus heureusement encore, s’épanouir en tant qu’êtres humains.

Il y a beaucoup de gens intéressés par la technologie ici. Permettez-moi de leur dire encore une chose. La technologie la plus pertinente pour l’apprentissage est celle qui nous aide à faire les choses que nous voulons et devons faire dans la vie. Cela n’a aucun sens de parler de technologies d’apprentissage en tant que telles, c’est-à-dire de technologies qui ne font que nous aider à apprendre.

Ainsi, le moment est venu de déscolariser et de personnaliser l’éducation et de faire de la nôtre une véritable société apprenante. Le PAN-PBL devrait continuer à se concentrer sur l’apprentissage active par problèmes, l’apprentissage axé sur les projets et d’autres méthodologies d’apprentissage actif – mais il devrait donner la préférence à l’utilisation de ces méthodologies dans des environnements d’apprentissage qui vont au-delà de l’école.

L’école est morte, vive l’apprentissage et vive l’éducation.

5. Conclusion

Dans cet esprit, je vous laisse avec une belle citation d’Erich Fromm, tirée de son Introduction to Celebration of Awareness, le livre d’Ivan Illich déjà mentionné dans les notes :

[Ivan Illich] est [à travers les années] resté fidèle à lui-même dans le cœur même de son approche et c’est ce cœur que nous partageons. ( . . . ) Cette approche peut être caractérisée par la devise : de omnibus dubitandum ; tout doit être mis en doute, en particulier les concepts idéologiques qui sont virtuellement partagés par tout le monde et ont par conséquent assumé le rôle d’indubitables axiomes du sens commun. « Douter » dans ce sens (. . . ) implique ( . . . ) la disponibilité et la capacité à remettre en question de manière critique toutes les hypothèses et institutions qui sont devenues des idoles sous le nom de bon sens, de logique et de ce qui est censé être naturel. (. . . ) Le doute radical est un acte de dévoilement et de découverte ; c’est l’aube de la prise de conscience que l’Empereur est nu et que ses splendides vêtements ne sont que le produit de son propre fantasme. Le doute radical signifie questionner ; ( . . . ) le doute radical est un processus ; un processus de libération de la pensée idolâtre ; un élargissement de la conscience, de la vision imaginative et créative de nos possibilités et options. ( . . . ) [L’approche d’Illich] remet en question chaque idée et chaque institution du point de vue de savoir si elle aide ou entrave la capacité de l’homme à plus de vitalité et de joie. ( . . . ) L’importance des pensées [d’Illich] réside dans le fait qu’elles ont un effet libérateur sur l’esprit en montrant des possibilités entièrement nouvelles; ils rendent le lecteur plus vivant parce qu’ils ouvrent la porte qui permet de sortir de la prison des idées préconçues, stériles et routinières. Par le choc créatif qu’ils communiquent ( . . . ), ils contribuent à stimuler l’énergie et l’espoir d’un nouveau départ [13].

6. Remarques

1. Il est curieux qu’aucun de ces hommes n’ait eu ses racines culturelles d’origine dans les principaux pays d’Europe occidentale ou aux États-Unis : Illich était européen de l’Est (croate) et Freire était latino-américain (brésilien).

2. Ivan Illich (1970), Deschooling Society, New York : Harper & Row, passim. Un livre antérieur d’Illich mérite également d’être consulté : Celebration of Awareness : A Call for Institutional Revolution, New York : Doubleday (1969-1970), (qui contient une introduction d’Erich Fromm), chapitres 7 (« La futilité de l’école ») et 8 (« École : La vache sacrée »). C’est de ce livre, p. 125 (chapitre 8), que la troisième devise de ce document a été prise.

3. Paulo Freire (1968), Pedagogia do Oprimido, Rio de Janeiro : Paz e Terra (publication originale, en portugais); (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Herder & Herder (première édition en anglais, traduite du portugais par Myra Bergman Ramos, avec une préface de Richard Shaull); (2000), New York: Bloomsbury (édition du trentième anniversaire de la première édition américaine, avec une introduction de Donaldo Macedo); (2018, mars), New York: Bloomsbury Academic (édition du cinquantième anniversaire de l’édition brésilienne originale, avec une introduction mise à jour par Donaldo Macedo et des entretiens avec plusieurs éducateurs importants et d’autres personnalités). La citation incorpore une fusion de divers passages librement traduits de l’édition portugaise par moi.

4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762), Émile ou de l’Éducation, initialement publié en français, disponible en d’innombrables éditions ; disponible en anglais, également dans diverses traductions, le titre utilisant un ou plusieurs des mots suivants : The Emile : Treatise on Education. La traduction du français ici fournie est celle de William Boyd (1962), The Emile (Bi-centennial Edition), New York : Teachers College Press, Book I, apud Jarrett (1973), p. xiii.

5. James L. Jarrett (1973), Les sciences humaines et l’éducation humaniste, Reading : Addison-Wesley, p. 11 (italiques ajoutés).

6. L’histoire et les vues pédagogiques de Socrate se retrouvent dispersées dans plusieurs Dialogues de Platon (disponibles dans d’innombrables traductions et éditions), mais surtout dans Théétète (date approximative 369 avant J.-C.) et Phèdre (date approximative 370 avant J.-C.). Le premier évoque sa vision de la méthode, la maïeutique (ou sage-femme), le second, sa vision de l’écriture, dont il était assez critique (par rapport à l’oralité : parler ou parler ou dialoguer ou débattre, qu’il préférait).

7. John Amos Comenius (1680), Spicilegium Didacticum, initialement publié en latin, d’accès très difficile ; pour une discussion accessible du concept, voir Seymour Pappert (1993), The Children’s Machine : Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer, New York : Basic Books, en particulier les chapitres 5 à 7.

8. Peter M. Senge (1990, éd. rév. 2006), The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization, New York: Penguin / Random House, passim. Voir aussi Peter M. Senge et alii (1994), The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization, New York: Doubleday, et Peter M. Senge et alii (2000), Schools that Learn: A Fifth Discipline Fieldbook pour les éducateurs, les parents et tous ceux qui se soucient de l’éducation, New York : Doubleday.

9. Sir Ken Robinson avec Lou Aronica (2009), The Element : How Finding your Passion Changes Everything, New York : Penguin, et Sir Ken Robinson (2014), Finding Your Element : How to Discover your Talents and Passions and Transform your Vie, New York : Penguin.

10. Peter Buckman (1973) l’a affirmé de manière sensée il y a près de 45 ans, dans son Introduction au livre qu’il a édité, Education Without Schools, Londres : Souvenir Press. Ce livre, épuisé depuis de nombreuses années, contient un article important d’Ivan Illich et est très difficile à trouver.

11. Les observations d’Ivan Illich sur la société portoricaine, faites en 1969, sont vraiment remarquables : elle, et la manière inextricable dont l’école est liée à l’image de soi de l’homme contemporain. ( . . . ) Porto Rico a été scolarisé. Je ne dis pas éduqué, mais plutôt scolarisé. Les Portoricains ne peuvent plus concevoir la vie sans référence à l’école. Le désir d’éducation a cédé la place à la contrainte de scolarisation. Porto Rico a adopté une nouvelle religion. Sa doctrine est que l’éducation est un produit de l’école, un produit qui peut être défini par des nombres. Il y a les chiffres qui indiquent combien d’années un élève a passé sous la tutelle des enseignants, et d’autres qui représentent la proportion de ses bonnes réponses à un examen. Dès l’obtention d’un diplôme, le produit éducatif acquiert une valeur marchande. La fréquentation scolaire en elle-même garantit ainsi l’inclusion dans l’appartenance à la communauté des saints. De gouverneur à jibaro Porto Rico accepte désormais l’idéologie de ses professeurs comme il acceptait autrefois la théologie de ses prêtres. L’école est maintenant identifiée à l’éducation comme l’église l’était autrefois à la religion. Tiré de “School: The Sacred Cow”, chapitre 8 dans Celebration of Awareness, op.cit., p.125 (emphase ajoutée). La dernière phrase est, bien sûr, la troisième devise de cet article. La deuxième partie de la citation provient d’un discours de fin d’études qu’Illich a été invité à prononcer à l’Université de Porto Rico, à Río Piedras, en 1969. A propos de cette même ligne de pensée, le lecteur devrait consulter le livre de John Abbott (avec Heather MacTaggart) Over Schooled but Under Educated: How the Crisis in Education is Jeopardizing our Adolescents (2010), Londres et New York: Continuum.

12. Jean-François Rischard, High Noon : 20 problèmes mondiaux, 20 ans pour les résoudre (2007), New York : Basic Books. Rischard, économiste, a été le premier vice-président européen de la Banque Mondiale de 1998 à 2005.

13. Erich Fromm (1970), “Introduction” à Ivan Illich’s Celebration of Awareness, op.cit., pp. 7-10.

À Santa Clara, le 19 février 2018

Eduardo Chaves Ph.D., Université de Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, États-Unis (1972)

Anarquismo, Desestatização e a Desescolarização da Educação

1. Introdução

Não existe consenso na definição da maior parte das teorias que propõem a melhor forma de viver em sociedade — aquilo que podemos chamar de filosofias políticas, como, por exemplo, comunismo, socialismo, socialismo democrata, democracia social (ou social-democracia), liberalismo social, liberalismo clássico, anarquismo, etc. Mas, dentre esses rótulos todos, certamente o maior dissenso prevalece a respeito do anarquismo.

No entendimento tradicional, antes que a coisa ficasse extremamente complicada, anarquismo queria dizer algo como “sociedade sem autoridade formalmente constituída“. Como a autoridade formalmente constituída para organizar as coisas na sociedade é o que denominamos de estado, anarquismo queria dizer “sociedade sem estado“. E como o estado é estruturado, organizado e operacionalizado através de um “governo” (que é a face humana, por assim dizer, do estado), anarquismo queria dizer “sociedade sem governo“.

Anarquismo, portanto, era o nome que se dava a uma sociedade sem autoridade formalmente constituída, sem estado, sem governo (se é que é possível haver uma sociedade desse tipo – que é um outro problema que tem mais que ver com a natureza humana). De qualquer forma, como uma sociedade desse tipo seria, ou pelo menos assim se supõe, uma sociedade em que a liberdade e a autonomia de uma só pode ser restringida por igual restrição à liberdade e autonomia de todos, e não há um poder superior, que fica acima de todos, e que detém monopólio no uso da força, e que, portanto, tem autoridade para restringir a liberdade de todos, o anarquismo era entendido também como sinônimo de libertarianismo: o máximo de liberdade possível (assumindo que liberdade total de todos seja algo impossível ou, pelo menos, impraticável).

Assim, vejamos.

George Woodcock, autor de um livro com o título Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (1962), parece sugerir, já no (sub)título, que os termos anarquismo e libertarianismo são basicamente equivalentes, mesmo que não exatamente sinônimos.

A primeira frase do livro de Woodcock é uma citação de Sébastien Faure (1858-1942), ativista libertário francês da segunda metade do século 19 e primeira metade do século 20, que afirmou: “Quem quer que seja que nega a autoridade, e luta contra ela, é um anarquista”. Aqui parece haver uma sugestão de que a negação da (validade da) autoridade é uma coisa, e a luta contra ela, outra – embora ambas possam vir juntas, e não raro venham.

Na Introdução ao livro The Essential Works of Anarchism (1971), seu editor, Marshall S. Shatz, cita a seguinte definição, bem mais completa, de Anarquismo, proposta por Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921), um dos grandes nomes dessa tendência política:

“Anarquismo é o nome dado a um princípio ou teoria de vida e conduta segundo a qual a sociedade é concebida sem governo, a harmonia dessa sociedade sendo obtida, não por submissão a leis, ou por obediência a uma autoridade [suprema], mas por livres acordos estabelecidos entre os vários grupos, sejam eles territoriais, profissionais, constituídos com o objetivo de produzir, ou consumir, ou satisfazer a infinita variedade de necessidades e aspirações de um ser civilizado”. [A definição de Kropotkin foi dada em seu artigo “Anarquismo” escrito para a memorável 11a edição da Encyclopaedia Britannica, publicada em 1910 (vol. I, p.914).]

William Godwin (1756-1836), também um nome importante nos primórdios da tradição anarquista (ele é o único desses grandes nomes a ter nascido no século 18), também caracteriza o Anarquismo como “uma bem concebida forma de sociedade sem governo“, em seu livro Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, de 1798 (também citado por Shatz).

2. Anarquismo Sem Qualificativos

Tenho a maior simpatia por aqueles que se contentam em parar por aqui, sem sentir a necessidade de acrescentar algum qualificativo ao termo anarquismo, que não seja libertário, ou, talvez, liberal, ou, talvez ainda, individualista. Creio que criar expressões como anarquismo comunitário, anarquismo mutualista, anarquismo sindicalista, anarquismo socialista, anarquismo comunista, etc., só complica a questão e cria confusão. Os dois últimos rótulos, por exemplo, anarquismo socialista e anarquismo comunista, apresentam um problema de coerência sério na definição de Anarquismo. Se o conceito prevê uma sociedade sem autoridade formal, sem estado, e sem governo, como associá-lo a duas tendências que propugnam, respectivamente, por um estado máximo e um estado total (ou totalitário)? Reconheço que uma sociedade anarquista pode até optar por operar com base em princípios capitalistas – mas me parece impossível que, optando por operar com base em princípios socialistas e comunistas, ela possa continuar a ser chamada de sociedade anarquista sem considerável abuso do sentido do termo.

Sou favorável, portanto, à decisão de Voltairine de Cleyre (1866-1912), uma anarquista americana do fim do século 19, começo do século 20, que dá atenção à educação, e pela qual me vi tomado de grande simpatia, embora só tenha vindo a travar conhecimento de suas ideias, e mesmo de sua curta existência, bem recentemente. Em um dado momento de sua vida, quando tentavam constrangê-la a admitir-se comunista (porque anarquista!), ela tomou a decisão de se designar simplesmente “anarquista”, e nada mais, sem qualquer qualificativo, afirmando, para aqueles que insistiam em ver nela uma comunista, que não era, nunca havia sido, e nunca seria comunista (porque anarquista!).

3. Anarquismo e Desestatização

Se estou basicamente certo até aqui, o Anarquismo será favorável a qualquer proposta que possa ser caracterizada como desestatização (ainda que gradual, parcial e lenta). Como, para quem já vive em uma sociedade estatizada, que somos todos nós, uma desestatização total e súbita parece impossível, o Anarquismo, para ser coerente, deve ser favorável a medidas que levem à desestatização da sociedade, ainda que essa desestatização se dê de forma lenta, gradual e restrita, desde que segura, e que represente um progresso na direção de uma desestatização irrestrita.

É por isso que não vejo muito problema em falar em anarquismo liberal e libertário, porque o liberalismo luta por um estado mínimo, e o libertarianismo por um estado tão mínimo que, como o sorriso do Gato Cheshire em Alice no País das Maravilhas, vai sumindo, sumindo, sumindo, até que desaparece de vez. Defender a transformação do estado em um estado mínimo, e, portanto, conviver, ainda que temporariamente, com um estado que se minimiza, é estar na direção certa no tocante ao anarquismo — algo que de modo algum acontece com os que defendem um estado máximo e um estado totalizante, que, a meu ver, andam, na contramão, em uma direção totalmente contrária do anarquismo.

Como a educação pública, em países como o Brasil e os Estados Unidos, é uma educação estatista (ou estatal), esforços no sentido de privatizá-la, ainda que de forma lenta e gradual, mas segura, desde que o objetivo final seja chegar a uma desestatização irrestrita de forma não traumática, fazem parte de uma tendência anarquista. Tenho em mente iniciativas como as charter schools e os vouchers, introduzidas nos Estados Unidos, sob a inspiração de ideias e sugestões de Milton Friedman (1912-2006), conhecido economista liberal.

4. Anarquismo e a Desescolarização da Educação

Em países em que a educação estatal (chamada de educação pública) predomina, o anarquismo deve ser favorável a medidas de privatização gradativa da escola estatal (como nas formas vistas no item anterior), ou (na verdade, e/ou) da total desescolarização da educação em geral, estatal ou privada, desde que essa desescolarização não admita, uma vez concluída, nenhum resquício de controle estatal sobre a educação então totalmente desescolarizada.

Não vou discutir aqui a privatização da escola estatal porque estou convicto de que a educação escolar, inclusive a privada, já deu o que podia dar e está com seus dias contados. Vou discutir rapidamente uma estratégia para a lenta e gradual desescolarização da educação.

A. O Anarquismo, a Liberdade e a Autonomia

O anarquismo surgiu como uma tentativa de aumentar os espaços de liberdade e autonomia dos indivíduos — principalmente em relação ao estado. Reconheceram os primeiros anarquistas que quanto maior é o espaço de ação do estado, tanto menor o espaço que sobra para a liberdade e a autonomia dos indivíduos. Essa, portanto, a primeira e maior luta.

As lutas subsequentes, como por exemplo, a luta das mulheres casadas contra a autoridade atribuída pelo estado ao marido, como cabeça e chefe da sociedade conjugal, dono de sua mulher e dos filhos do casal, que não podiam ter propriedade em seu nome, nem comprar e vender, e, no caso da mulher, que não tinha nem sequer poder pátrio sobre os filhos do casal, que era mantido com o ex-marido, no caso de uma separação, luta essa que caracterizou o início do movimento feminista, também é uma luta contra o estado, porque é pelas leis do estado que essa autoridade e esses poderes são atribuídos ao homem.

Outro exemplo é a luta dos trabalhadores contra os donos de empresas, que tomavam decisões unilaterais acerca do contrato de trabalho e as normas e regras que disciplinavam o trabalho, luta essa que era contra os donos de empresa e o estado, porque eram as leis do estado que davam esse direito aos donos de empresa. Assim a luta do movimento dos trabalhadores também era uma luta contra as leis do estado e a autoridade do estado de disciplinar as relações entre as pessoas — não só marido e mulher, mas também patrão e trabalhador.

E assim vai: a luta do anarquismo é uma luta pela liberdade e autonomia das pessoas para estabelecer laços afetivos, de convivência e de trabalho em termos acordados exclusivamente entre elas. Como diz Kropotkin, na passagem já citada:

“Anarquismo é o nome dado a um princípio ou teoria de vida e conduta segundo a qual a sociedade é concebida sem governo, a harmonia dessa sociedade sendo obtida, não por submissão a leis, ou por obediência a uma autoridade, mas por livres acordos estabelecidos entre os vários grupos, sejam territoriais, sejam profissionais, constituídos com o objetivo de produzir e consumir, bem como de satisfazer a infinita variedade de necessidades e aspirações de um ser civilizado.”

A citação de Kropotkin fala em “acordos estabelecidos entre grupos“, mas os anarquistas logo perceberam que os grupos, se formalizados, como acabou se tornando o caso dos sindicatos, podiam facilmente se tornar uma nova fonte de opressão, com autoridade e poder delegados pelo estado, de modo que a luta anarquista que, no mundo do trabalho, foi, em um primeiro momento, viabilizada pelos sindicatos, veio a se tornar também uma luta contra essas entidades de representação profissional, que se tornaram opressivas. A criação, em países como o nosso, de um “imposto sindical” que o estado cobra das pessoas para transferir para os sindicatos, mostra que sindicatos que aceitam esse mecanismo de financiamento obrigatório são forçosamente dependentes do estado e, por conseguinte, pelegos.

Custou muito para que as pessoas percebessem que a escola pública era uma outra forma de o estado puxar para si mais uma significativa fatia da liberdade e da autonomia das pessoas, agora, em relação à educação de seus próprios filhos. A escolarização, que começou a ser vista como direito das crianças, logo passou a ser uma também obrigação para os pais. Mas, pari passu, essa obrigação não podia ser executada da forma escolhida pelos pais. As pessoas podiam ser punidas se não colocassem seus filhos na escola. Isso se deu, em especial, em relação à escola estatal, mantida com os impostos cobrados de todos, não só dos que estavam dispostos a colocar seus filhos na escola do estado. Quem optasse por colocar os filhos em uma escola privada, não estatal, tinha de pagar duas vezes: uma na forma dos impostos que sustentavam a escola estatal, a outra na forma de retribuição da escola privada que prestava o serviço — entre as quais as escolas religiosas. O estado aprovou leis que o proibiam de dar subsídios às escolas privadas, para forçar essas escolas a arcar com todos os custos de seu funcionamento e, assim, cobrar mensalidades que dissuadiam as pessoas de pagar pelos serviços delas (já que pagavam, com seus impostos, para sustentar a escola estatal). Dessa forma, mais e mais pessoas abriram mão de sua preferência, de sua liberdade de escolha, de sua autonomia, para aumentar o grau de controle do estado sobre suas próprias vidas.

B. Como Lenta e Gradualmente Desescolarizar a Educação?

É evidente que, em um país como o nosso, em que a tanto a educação básica como a educação de nível superior são totalmente escolarizadas e amplamente estatais (em especial no caso da educação básica, havendo maior espaço para participação da iniciativa particular na educação de nível superior), nenhuma desescolarização da educação pode ser feita de uma hora para outra, ou mesmo dentro do período de uma geração.

No entanto, é forçoso reconhecer que o movimento de desescolarização da educação tem, pelo menos cinquenta anos, pois um dos autores mais conhecidos a propô-la escreveu seu livro em 1970: Ivan Illich é seu nome e Deschooling Society (Sociedade sem Escolas) o seu famoso livro. Paulo Freire, amigo de Illich, escreveu na mesma época, que “ninguém educa ninguém”, e tampouco “alguém se educa sozinho”, insistindo que “nós nos educamos uns aos outros em comunhão” (isto é, pela interação, pelo diálogo, pela colaboração, pela cooperação) — e aqui vem um acréscimo importante: “mediatizados pelo mundo”. A mediação não é da escola nem do professor: é da nossa atividade no mundo, do nosso que fazer no mundo do trabalho, do lazer, da vida em sociedade.

A meta e a direção estão, portanto, claramente definidas. Mas não a estratégia e a tática, que podem ser diversas. A meta é a desescolarização da educação que a sociedade proporciona aos seus membros (deschooling, para os que já estão na escola, unschooling para os que ainda não estão cumprindo pena na escola). As estratégias podem ser home schooling (escolarização em casa), manter algo parecido com o processo de escolarização, mas sob controle exclusivo da família, como o fazem os Amish, community schooling (escola comunitária), manter algo como a atual escola, mas sob controle exclusivo da comunidade mais próxima, ambientes de aprendizagem “sem cara de escola”, mas, sim, centrado em aprendizagens consideradas úteis agradáveis, como academia de danças, clubes de debates, clubes de aprendizagem de língua estrangeira (não confundir com escolas de língua, que são escolas, ainda que não façam parte do sistema escolar reconhecido), clube de gastronomia, em que se aprende a cozinhar todo tipo de comida, etc.

As escolinhas de futebol já adotaram o modelo escolar de começo a fim. Escrevi um artigo, em 2006, para a Fundação Lego, argumentando que a qualidade do futebol brasileiro começou a cair quando as crianças deixaram de aprender a jogar futebol nos campinhos de rua, de maneira totalmente informal, e passaram a frequentar escolinhas de futebol, em que aprendem, com um professor-técnico, as particularidades de dar uma pedalada ou uma bicicletada…

Nos Estados Unidos, as chamadas charter schools e os chamados vouchers são processos de tirar a escola, ou boa parte de suas atividades, de debaixo do controle do estado — não de tirar a educação do âmbito da escola.

Por enquanto, é isso aí. A luta continua. Voltarei à carga.

Salto, em 8 de Dezembro de 2020.

Erich Fromm on Ivan Illich

There is a book by Ivan Illich that has an introduction by Erich Fromm: Celebration of Awareness: A Call for Institutional Revolution (Doubleday & Co. Garden City, 1969-1970. (The translation to French has the title: Libérer l’Avenir: Appel à une Révolution des Institutions [Éditions du Seuil, 1971]).

Here I will simply select a few statements by Fromm, indicating where he and Illich agree (despite the fact that their views in other respects are quite different). According to Fromm, they agree on a core of ideas. Fromm calls this core “humanist radicalism”, although he thinks the expression, and perhaps any expression, is inadequate, even if not misleading, to describe the content of this core.

Fromm recognizes that Illich’s thought has evolved through the years, but, he says, “[Ivan Illich] has [through the years] remained true to himself in the very core of his approach and it is this core that we share” (fls.7).

What does Fromm mean by “humanist radicalism”? What does the expression imply?

For Fromm, the expression “humanist radicalism” does not mean or imply “a certain set of ideas, but rather ( . . . ) an attitude, ( . . . ) an ‘approach’, as it were. ( . . . ) This approach can be characterized by the motto: de omnibus dubitandum; everything must be doubted, particularly the ideological concepts which are virtually shared by everybody and have consequently assumed the role of indubitable common-sensical axioms. To ‘doubt’ in this sense does ( . . . ) imply ( . . . ) the readiness and capacity for critical questioning of all assumptions and institutions which have become idols under the name of common sense, logic and what is supposed to be ‘natural'” (fls.7-8).

Humanist radicalism then implies “radical doubt”. “Radical doubt is an act of uncovering and discovering; it is the dawning of the awareness that the Emperor is naked, and that his splendid garments are nothing but the product of one’s own phantasy. Radical doubt means to question; ( . . .) radical doubt is a process; a process of liberation from idolatrous thinking; a widening of awareness, of imaginative, creative vision of our possibilities and options. ( . . . )” (fls.9).

“Humanist radicalism is [also] radical questioning guided by insight into the dynamics of human nature. ( . . . ) [Illich’s approach] questions every idea and every institution from the standpoint whether it helps or hinders man’s capacity for greater aliveness and joy. ( . . . ) This is not the place to give lengthy examples for the kind of common-sensical premises that are questioned by humanist radicalism. ( . . . ) Dr. Illich’s papers deal precisely with such examples as [for instance] the usefulness of compulsive schooling.” (fls.9).

“Humanist radicalism questions all ( . . . ) premises and is not afraid of arriving at ideas and solutions that may sound absurd. ( . . . ) The importance of [Dr. Illich’s] thought lies in the fact that they have a liberating effect on the mind by showing entirely new possibilities; they make the reader more alive because they open the door that leads out of the prison of routinized, sterile, preconceived notions. By the creative shock they communicate ( . . . ) they help to stimulate energy and hope for a new beginning.” (fls.10).

In Salto, November 25, 2019

The Future of Education May Not Include Schools

Paul Boyce published today (August 18, 2019) an article in the site of the Foundation for Economic Education with the following title: “Schools Are Outdated. It’s Time For Reform” (https://fee.org/articles/schools-are-outdated-its-time-for-reform/).

For those who are native speakers of English, there may be no ambiguity in this title. For those of us who are native speakers of Spanish and Portuguese, there is. As a matter of fact, there may be more than one ambiguity.

First:

The verb “to be” can be translated into Spanish or Portuguese as “estar” or “ser“. It makes a great difference which way we translate it.

A National Secretary of Education (Minister of Education) in Brazil, once said, when threatened with dismissal by his boss, the President: “That is ok: I merely ‘estou / estoy‘ Secretary, but I really ‘sou / soy‘ a teacher and a professor”.

“Estar” refers to a transient, accidental condition; “ser” refers to a permanent, essential state.

When we say “Schools Are Outdated”, what do we mean: that they, at present, need to be updated to a new version of “schooling”, OR that they are, in their essence, something that does not fit into the present world? It makes a difference how we understand (and translate) the phrase. A huge difference.

Second:

The term “Outdated” is also somehow ambiguous. It may mean that the present version of something is not the latest, there is a new one in the market (like in “your version of x is outdated: download the most recent one in y’s site”), or it may mean that the something of which we are speaking is hopelessly anachronic, has no place in the contemporary word.

Boyce’s Apparent View:

Paul Boyce apparently understands “are” (in the title) in the sense of the Spanish or Portuguese “estar” and understands “outdated” in the sense that we need to “update” schools to the latest version of the “hardware / software” combination presently called school: update them to “new schools”, or to “innovative schools”. Paul Boyce speaks of “reforming” schools.

My View:

If Paul Boyce indeed thinks so, I disagree with him on both counts.

I think schools are, in their essence, and not only in their present incarnation, something totally anachronic and uncalled-for in this new era in which we are living. What we need is not a reform (or reformation) of the school, but its radical transformation (or transform) into something totally different from what we now have, something that amounts, in reality, to the substitution of what we now have by something totally new.

There is no doubt that, in creating something drastically new, we need to take into account what once was and learn from it — especially in a negative way, lest we repeat its errors.

John Dewey once said (in the Summary of Chapter 6 of Education and Democracy):

“Education may be conceived either retrospectively or prospectively. That is to say, it may be treated as process of accommodating the future to the past, or as an utilization of the past for a resource in a developing future.”

I agree with Dewey up to a certain point. He, of course, thought that this “Future-developing education” was “Progressive Education”. I think he was wrong on two counts. First, Progressive Education was not nearly radical enough for the task of creating a new future. Second, we have learned that it is not education alone that builds the future, but it is a host of allied forces: social, cultural, political, economic, technological. Looking back to Dewey’s time, its future has been created and we are it. And although education is terribly relevant at present (Dewey’s future), schools are not (not even the most progressive schools). Social networks and social media are.

How can we rebuild education in a society without schools? Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire were already asking that 50 years ago — although they themselves may not have fully realized how radical they were.

In São Paulo, on August 18, 2019

Timeless Learning (Aprendizagem Sem Hora Marcada)

RECOMENDO a leitura do livro cuja capa aparece na foto a seguir e cuja resenha, em Inglês, é acrescentada como Anexo.

Seu título é Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools. O título é meio difícil de traduzir para o Português, mas eu o traduziria livremente como Aprendizagem sem Hora Marcada: Como a Imaginação, a Observação, e uma Abordagem Teórica que Começa do Zero Mudam as Escolas. Seus autores são Ira Socol, Pam Moran, e Chad Ratliff e o livro acaba de ser lançado em 2018 pela Jossey-Bass, uma marca inovadora da tradicional casa editorial, John Wiley & Sons, fundada em 1807, duzentos e onze anos atrás (https://www.wiley.com/). Esse fato já é, em si, simbólico: ele mostra que tradição e inovação não são necessariamente abordagens incompatíveis. (Um pouco mais sobre isso, abaixo.)

Clicando no link abaixo você vai para uma excelente resenha do livro escrita por Will Richardson, que me foi enviada por meu grande amigo, o educador australiano Bruce Dixon (do qual fui colega durante dez anos, de 2003 a 2013, no International Advisory Board da iniciativa global da Microsoft na área da Educação conhecida como Partners in Learning (PIL). Ambos, Will e Bruce, coordenam o importante site Modern Learners (https://modernlearners.com/).

Há muito tempo que eu estou totalmente convicto de que a escola tradicional / convencional (a praga que temos espalhada por aí, em todo canto) já viveu pelo menos meio século, ou, talvez, mais de um século, de total anacronismo.

Ela é se tornou anacrônica já há algum tempo porque foi criada para a Civilização Industrial— a civilização das coisas padronizadas e estandardizadas, do cada coisa “a seu tempo”, “em série” e na “ordem certa”, a civilização dos grandes estoques, e não da produção “Just in Time” e “Just Enough”… – e essa civilização já acabou e está morta, faltando só enterra-la definitivamente.

Nessa Civilização Industrial todo mundo, quando chegava a uma determinada idade (sete, seis, cinco anos, por aí), era internado em uma mesma instituição, a escola, para aprender as mesmas coisas (uma grade curricular inflexível, composta de informações e conhecimentos organizados em matérias e disciplinas, centradas em linguagem, matemática e ciências – e que não era chamada de “grade” por acaso…), da mesma forma (assistindo a aulas monótonas e cansativas ministradas por professores / ensinantes entediados por estarem aulando as mesmas coisas pela enésima vez), na mesma sequência (séries), as séries sendo “casadas” com as idades das crianças / adolescentes / jovens, e a “aprendizagem” destes (entendida como a absorção das informações e conhecimentos que lhe eram passados) sendo avaliada mediante testes, provas e exames.

A vida das pessoas, na Civilização Industrial, também era segmentada: uns poucos anos para brincar (de um a seis, cinco ou quatro), vários outros anos supostamente para aprender (mais quatro, cinco, seis, dez, quatorze, dezoito) para aprender, cerca de trinta a quarenta para trabalhar, e, ao fim, o que sobrar para finalmente desfrutar a vida, e/ou preparar-se para a morte, ao longa da aposentadoria.

A razão pela qual a internação na escola precisou ser gradualmente estendida – a escolaridade obrigatória era de quatro anos, inicialmente, hoje é de cerca de dezoito – deveu-se ao fato de que se acreditava que, na vida, havia uma fase dedicada exclusivamente a aprender, durante a qual se deveria aprender tudo aquilo que pudesse vir a ser necessário nas fases posteriores (num processo semelhante ao de estocagem), em especial na fase dedicada ao trabalho produtivo. Assim, além de se estender o número de anos de internação na escola, também aumentou-se o número de dias passados na escola durante o ano (o calendário escolar também foi espichado), e o número de horas passadas na escola durante o dia se ampliou – o ideal passando a ser a “escola de tempo integral” – em que crianças / adolescentes / jovens passam internados durante cerca de dezoito anos na melhor fase da vida! Assim a educação das crianças / dos adolescentes / dos jovens foi escapando das mãos da família nuclear e estendida, e da comunidade imediata em que essa família vivia, para passar para as mãos do estado, a ponto de o nosso nefasto Supremo Tribunal Federal há dias ter negado aos pais o direito de conduzir a educação dos filhos sem interna-los na prisão escolar.

Essa civilização começou a ser suplantada e substituída pela Civilização da Aprendizagem (que recebe vários outros nomes, como Civilização da Criatividade, ou, com base em seu insumo básico, Sociedade da Informação e Sociedade do Conhecimento) desde o final da Segunda Guerra, ou, pelo menos, a partir de meados dos anos 1950, quando mais pessoas passaram a trabalhar na área de serviços, relacionamentos, informações e conhecimentos(o chamado setor terciário da economia) do que nas áreas da extração de matérias primase da agropecuária (o setor primário da economia) e da indústria de transformação (o setor secundário da economia) COMBINADAS.

Tomei conhecimento desse fato em 1980, quando li pela primeira vez o livro The Third Wave/ A Terceira Onda, de Alvin Toffler, publicado naquele ano, dez anos depois do seu também muito bem sucedido Future Shock/ Choque do Futuro, de 1970). Assim que li o livro resolvi dar um curso eletivo sobre ele no Curso de Pedagogia da Faculdade de Educação da UNICAMP, da qual havia me tornado diretor naquele ano, e fiz exatamente isso (apesar de o Diretor ser dispensado de aular).

Desde então, passei a estudar regularmente esse ingresso do nosso mundo ocidental civilizado na Terceira Onda. Aqui no Brasil nós, apesar de avanços, estamos sempre atrasados. Nossa economia ainda é tremendamente dependente de atividades de Primeira Onda (extração de minerais e petróleo, agricultura, pecuária, etc.), nossa atividade na área da Segunda Onda (indústria de transformação) é relativamente pequena e oscilante, e ainda não ingressamos de forma generalizada na Terceira Onda, exceto em grandes cidades da linha de frente da economia, como, no Estado de São Paulo, a capital, São Paulo, Campinas, São José dos Campos, Ribeirão Preto, etc. e, fora do Estado de São Paulo, principalmente Curitiba.

Inicialmente, defendi a tese de que era preciso radicalmente transformar a escola, para adequa-la à Civilização da Aprendizagem e da Criatividade. Escrevi um livro, em 1998, a pedido do Ministério da Educação (MEC), com o título Educação e Tecnologia: O Futuro da Escola na Sociedade da Informação. Por desentendimento com o MEC acerca de direitos autorais, o MEC acabou não distribuindo o livro – e eu o distribuí muito mal, colocando em meu site uma versão PDF, a partir do ano 2000. Ao longo de 2001-2002, escrevi outro livro, em decorrência de minhas consultorias à Microsoft Brasil e ao Instituto Ayrton Senna, que acabei não publicando, depois de já estar aprovado pela editora (SENAC), porque meu pensamento estava evoluindo muito rápido naquela época, em especial em função de minhas conversas e discussões com dois educadores de escol, Rubem Alves e Antonio Carlos Gomes da Costa. O título que dei ao livro foi Educação e Desenvolvimento Humano: Uma Nova Educação para uma Nova Era. Ele foi usado para uma formação que dei aos primeiros constratados pelo Ricardo Semler e pela Helena Singetr para serem os tutores e mestres iniciais da Escola Lumiar. (Para os interessados, estou presentemente a tomar providências para publicar esses dois livros em formato de e-book através da Editora Kapenke, de meu sobrinho, Vítor Chaves de Souza).

A partir de alguns anos atrás tenho defendido a tese illichiana da Descolarização da Sociedade, que eu chamo (com algumas nuances de sentido) de Desescolarização da Educação, como se pode constatar em meu blog / site Deschooling Education (https://deschooling.education/).

Temos tido, minha mulher e eu, interessantes discussões sobre a questão da viabilidade da escola hoje. Ela, Paloma E M C Chaves, ainda acredita que a escola tenha algum futuro, desde que radicalmente transformada. Eu, da minha parte, prefiro lutar diretamente por uma Learning and Creative Society – uma Sociedade da Aprendizagem e da Criatividade, em que livremente se aprende anytime, anywhere and anyhow, ao longo da vida inteira, em função das necessidades e dos interesses de cada um, sem que a aprendência e a criativivência sejam institucionalizadas.

Note-se que John Dewey (e discípulos brasileiros seus, como Anísio Teixeira), embora ainda não estivessem prontos para considerar a desescolarização ou desinstitucionalização da educação, defenderam uma educação centrada nos aprendentes (não nos ensinantes) e entremeada com a vida, os interesses, e a experiência desses aprendentes, tanto dentro como, especialmente, fora da escola. Esse tipo de educação foi chamado de Educação Ativa ou Educação Progressista. Mais recentemente (começando uns trinta anos atrás), li com o maior interesse as obras de John Holt, considerado o pai não só do movimento chamado de Home Schooling, um nome que considero inadequado, mas também do movimento denominado, mais apropriadamente, Unschooling. Mas esses dois movimentos ainda são bastante minoritários.

Hoje em dia temos, em movimentos majoritários, temos duas tendências.

De um lado, defensores da escola tradicional / convencional, apoiados em algumas iniciativas reformadoras, mas quase nunca radicalmente transformadoras, e em geral centradas no uso controlado (ensinante) e domesticado da tecnologia (uso esse não-disruptivo do currículo e da metodologia escolar), têm procurado reforçar a tese de que a escola deve centrar sua atenção nas matérias e disciplinas básicas, que, para eles, são Linguagem, Matemática e Ciências – talvez com uma breve pitada de Solução de Problemas, para os mais inclinados para as Ciências Naturais, as Engenharias, e as Tecnologias em geral.

Do outro lado, temos defensores de uma educação escolar liberal, focada na leitura dos Clássicos e das Grandes Obras Filosóficas e Literárias da Civilização Ocidental, que hoje também não prescide do uso da tecnologia, mas que é voltada para os mais inclinados para a área de Humanidades e Ciências Humanas (como certamente é o meu caso).

Lembram-se do tempo em que o Segundo Ciclo do Ensino Secundário, o chamado Colegial, era dividido entre Científico e Clássico? Eu comecei a cursar o Científico e o abandonei depois de um semestre apenas: fui cursar o Clássico, em que me realizei. A divisão de alguma forma continua…

Mas eu evoluí…

Se você está entre aqueles que, como eu, acha que a Educação não deve preparar apenas para uma carreira e uma profissão, mas para a vida, e que sempre ficaram, nos últimos tempos, em que as ideias de John Dewey ficaram em baixa, espremidos nessa briga entre Cientistas Naturais e Engenheiros, de um lado, e Bacharéis e Intelectuais, do outro, o livro resenhado é um alento.

Depois de passar os olhos, em leitura dinâmica, pelo livro resenhado, estou quase a concluir que não é preciso decidir, primeiro, se a escola, enquanto tal, é recuperável ou se ela está definitiva e irrecorrivelmente condenada à morte, sem direito a sursis. O futuro decidirá isso.

O que é preciso fazer com urgência é refocar a educação na Vida e no Desenvolvimento Humano. Para isso, a tecnologia (hardware + software) é importante, mas não é essencial. Essencial é entender a educação como desenvolvimento do nosso mindware para que possamos viver vidas realizadas e felizes. Por isso publico este artigo também nos meus blogs Mindware Education (https://mindware.education/), EduTec Space (https://edutec.space/), e no meu Portal de Blogs, Chaves Space (https://chaves.space/).

Em Cortland, OH, 1º de Outubro de 2018.

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ANEXO:

Choosing Progressive Education for Modern Learning

By Will Richardson

July 31, 2018

https://modernlearners.com/choosing-progressive-education-for-modern-learning/

While it’s hard to count the number of profound thoughts and insights that frequent Timeless Learning, the absolutely powerful new book from Ira Socol, Pam Moran, and Chad Ratliff that’s coming out next week, this one particular passage had my inner and outer edu-activist pumping his fist:

Adults may argue about this – they do argue about it – but despite the historical victories of industrial education, the fundamental utility of school has now firmly shifted to the progressive educational ideal, what John Dewey wanted” (97).

Finally, some well-respected voices who categorically state that for this modern era, for the sake of today’s kids living in today’s world, we must choose Dewey over Thorndike, not the other way around.

To be sure, I know many progressive educators in classrooms and schools right now. Heck, there are actually a smattering of fully functioning and fully committed progressive schools where absolutely amazing things are happening with kids and teachers who are all passionate learners. That said, too many in and out of education have long been hesitant to embrace that “progressive” moniker, partially because of the baggage it carries (it’s “soft,” you know) and partially because not enough people really understand what the word means in the context of learning.

Ira and Pam and Chad, all from the Albemarle (Va) School District, don’t just know what it means. With Pam’s guidance as superintendent, over the last 13 years (she retired this spring) Albemarle has moved from a fairly traditional public school district to one that is a living, breathing exemplar of a) what schools can become if we truly put kids at the center of our work, and b) what professional practice looks like when it’s deeply rooted in a commitment to beliefs and values and, importantly, a clear understanding of the opportunities and challenges of the modern world. In other words, “progressive.”

For that reason alone, this book is important. The story that the authors tell is not one about buzzwords, cool new technologies, some new acronym-forced strategy, or vague word salads about whatever new innovations or new pedagogies or new skillsets are the flavor of the month. Instead, as the title suggests, it’s a story about the timeless knowledge that we all share about how kids learn, how adults learn, and how we learn together in schools. I hesitate to say that you won’t read anything especially surprising in this book; you’ll likely be nodding your head on every page. But if you read it to the end, you may be surprised at how high your bar gets set when thinking about where to take your own work in schools and classrooms, even for those of you for whom “change” has been a focus already.

The inspiration here is this: It can be done. The message is this: It must be done. We have to stop hewing to the systems and structures that have for so long defined “school” and start seriously articulating and living a different vision. And it’s the living part that makes this book so special. As the authors say, it’s not a “how to;” every school is different. It is, instead, a model for what can happen when you commit fully over time to build from a deep understanding of how powerful learning happens for kids.

So let me share a couple of let’s-not-mince-any-words snips that speak to the progressive ideal, to the urgency for change, and to the realities of the system today.

“In our observations, we’ve discovered that educators with a bias toward the child—those who embrace children’s engagement, happiness, agency, and strengths—share a core belief that the essential role of school communities is to empower children through a multitude of learning pathways. Such progressive educators support children to develop life competencies through a wide bandwidth of democratic and experiential learning opportunities in both formal and informal settings—projects, maker learning, collaborative exploration of interests, technologies of all kinds used to produce learning, and exhibition of learning to authentic audiences. These educators speak with conviction about the value of knowing children as individuals rather than focusing on the data inherent in traditions of scientific management. They do not represent the norms of educational systems developed over decades through “cells and bells” structures, direct instruction, and bell curve expectations. In short, they work hard to free the child from the shackles of the compliance-based system they’re trapped in” (40).

And another:

“There are societal changes that now enable educators to leverage making as a tool – or as a philosophy inside compulsory education that we can leverage as a pathway toward a progressive education model. When people say, “Well, we all shouldn’t be makers,” we ask, “How do you define making?” Should everybody need to know how to use a 3D printer? We don’t think so. Should everybody need to know how to come up with their own ideas, and then know how to learn what they need to know about those ideas, and how then to make those ideas real, and introduce them into society in some authentic way, whatever is meaningful to the individual? Then yes, yes. Every learner should learn to do that – and they shouldn’t only have their one cool government teacher to do that. We have 13 years of iterative experiences through which we are working to do that. We are pushing back at nurturing the compliance that America’s present-day schools are built upon” (139).

And, finally, just one more to get you thinking:

“Incremental shifts in practice are not the focus of our work. We are committed to significant transformation of the teaching and learning culture in our schools. We know from our work that for individual teachers and whole faculties to change pedagogies, they themselves must commit to learning how to learn in today’s world. This means reflection, inquiry, and study in collaboration with colleagues and mentors. Provocation of thought and processing drives professional growth beyond superficial change of little magnitude to deep change that results in substantively different learning experiences for young people. We have seen this occur when professional learning opportunities shift from the normative top-down, program-driven professional development to experiential learning that gets educators out of the box we call school. When our educators come to embrace and own their own learning in a context of seeing themselves as designers, creators, and makers, it changes the game in how they approach working with learners” (159).

Change in schools is not about teaching. It’s not even about education. It’s about learning. And, ironically, that’s what makes it so challenging. The unpleasant truth is that schools were not built for learning. To change them to actually be about learning is hard, difficult work. It’s work that honestly, most people don’t want to tackle at scale. It’s easier to drive numbers. It’s easier to offer more AP tests or carve out a “Genius Hour.” It’s easier to try to keep parents and policy makers and union reps happy by just tweaking the recipe a bit than it is to peel back all the layers and start asking the deeply important questions about what’s actually best for all kids, every day, today.

But just remember: “The fundamental utility of school has now firmly shifted to the progressive ideal.” You may not believe that…yet. You may not think that shift is about your school. But it is. Your kids are writing a new story of learning outside of school that at some point will require your full embrace inside of school. That is the story of Timeless Learning, and you ignore it at your own peril.

And to your kids’ detriment.

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Reinvent the School or Deschool Education? [Slides]

The slides used in the presentation of the paper transcribed in the last article of this post can be accessed through Slideshare/Linkedin in the address below:

https://www.slideshare.net/edwardkeys/reinvent-the-school-or-deschool-education

Reinvent the School or Deschool Education?

[This is the paper I presented, on February 19, 2018, at the Problem-Based Learning Conference of 2018 (PBL-2018) that took place in Santa Clara, CA. The Conference was organised by the PAN-PBL Association. A link to the the slides used in the presentation of this paper are available in the next article of this blog.]

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” (Mark Twain)

“My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school.” (Margaret Mead)

“The school is now identified with education as the church once was with religion.” (Ivan Illich)

1. Introduction

The main thesis of this paper is that it is possible and advisable to promote and improve education by creating a society where learning – active, interactive, collaborative, problem-based, project-focused, meaningful learning – is stimulated and facilitated, but in which schools play no significant educational role.

A society in which this happened would be appropriately called a learning society: it would itself be the main learning environment.

This thesis has a main corollary: attempts to change, reform, transform, innovate, rethink, reinvent the school in order to improve the quality of education are a waste of time, effort and money. These resources (time, effort, money) should be reallocated to the task of effectively renewing education in the context of a learning society.

In the last decades there have been innumerable alerts that:

the school has become a place where children’s natural curiosity is blocked and their initial passionate desire to learn is gradually killed;
by forcing children to learn what they are not interested in learning, and to refrain from learning what they do want to learn, the school subjects them to a form of “mental rape” or, still worse, to an “amputation of their spirit”, for which there is no prosthetics;
by treating all children as if they are alike, not unique, the school transforms them into a standardized group of adults whose mindset makes them unable to creatively and competently address, within a reasonable time frame, the most serious problems the world faces;
the school has become a prison to which we sentence, every year, an incredible number of children with multiple and valuable talents to twelve-year terms, out of which they emerge, when their term is completed, totally dumb, with their minds dulled and their creativity destroyed;
the solution of our educational problems will not be found in allocating more money to school systems, paying teachers better, training teachers longer and more effectively, finding or inventing alternative curricula, methodologies and evaluation means, creating better libraries, media rooms and laboratories, injecting modern technologies into the classroom, extending the amount of time children stay in school (more years of schooling, more school days in the year, more hours in the school day, etc.), or any of the other myriad of “solutions” proposed every year);
the school is dead: it has outrun its utility and no amount of “tweaks” or “fixes”, small or large, humanistic, technical, or technological will be able to bring it back to life.

And yet, public and private educational agents, at the local, regional, national and international level, dedicate, every year, considerable time, enormous efforts and fantastic amounts of money to the goal of improving education by changing / reforming / innovating / transforming / rethinking / reinventing schools.

To the attentive observer of the scene, it is no surprise that results have been dismal or even null.

This paper will propose a different route for the solution of the problem of quality education – a route, however, which clearly is not in any way new.

2. Roots of a Clear Alternative to Schooling

A. Closer Roots

In the very early seventies, when the main digital technologies we use today either did not exist or were not fully available, Ivan Illich (1926-2002), a Croatian-Austrian philosopher and Roman Catholic priest, working out of a monastery-like center in Cuernavaca, Mexico, proposed something similar to what his good friend, Brazilian popular educator Paulo Freire (1921-1997), had demanded only a couple of years earlier: that we educate one another through interaction, dialogue, personal exchanges, collaboration, “mediated by the world” – i.e., in the places where we really live our lives, without resorting to schools, professional educators, encyclopedic curricula, sophisticated teaching methodologies, elaborate testing instruments, etc. [1].

Illich’s Deschooling Society [2], published in 1970, is a powerful summon to renew education in a learning society where the school plays no role.

Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in English also in 1970, contains powerful passages with the following message (here in a somehow free translation that joins passages found in more than one place in the book):

Nobody educates anybody, but nobody is capable of educating himself alone, either. We educate each other through a continuous dialogue, mediated by the world, in which we use resources that, in traditional education, are owned by the teacher alone. Education is a mutual, world-mediated process in which unfinished beings, conscious of their incompletion, attempt to become more fully human. [3]

B. Intermediary Roots

Any person or institution interested in education must have, if not a precise definition of what education is, at least a clear and definite understanding of the concept.

Education, in the recent past, basically meant transmission or delivery of information and knowledge. Education, in this context, was organized (in the form of schools involving teachers, curricula, methodology, evaluation) to implement this understanding.

This understanding of education may have made sense in a context where information and knowledge were scarce and access to them was difficult. That context no longer exists. Thus we must look for a different understanding of education. We could try to invent, out of nothing, a totally new concept. Or we could recapture insights that, in bits and pieces, have already been with us, sometimes for a long time, but never found real resonance. That is what will be done here in this paper.

Take, for instance, this quote from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile (originally published in 1762), that is, perhaps, the most important essay on education written in the 18^th Century, more than 250 years ago, before industrial civilization became widespread and the modern public school appeared to emulate the industrial assembly line:

“All that we lack at birth and need when grown up is given us by education” [4].

This statement feels refreshing today because it emphasizes an important thing, often neglected in our times: everything (“all”) that we need to live our life and that is not innate to us (“that we lack at birth”) must be acquired through education.

Translated into more contemporary language, this means that education has to do, not with the transmission and delivery of encapsulated bits of information and knowledge, but with the very process of human development, that centrally includes capacity or competency building – that is, learning (not teaching). Rousseau proposed and defended a negative education, a laissez-faire education, an education in which the learner is the scriptwriter, the director, and the main, active protagonist.

Development is not the same thing as growth. Development is the product of learning. Someone can grow and not develop as human being. Mowgli, the boy in Rudyard Kipling’s jungle stories, grew up, but did not develop as a human being. If we can speak of development in his case, it is more in terms of wolf development than human development.

Rousseau reminds the reader also that education is not limited to intellectual development. Education involves also other dimensions of human life: psychomotor, social (interpersonal), affective (emotional), aesthetic (sensible), ethical and perhaps even spiritual. This is what is meant today by the expression “human development”. To add “full” or “integral” to this expression is almost pleonastic.

Rousseau does not say it in this passage, but even the things that are innate to us (whatever they may be) can be exercised, extended, improved, perfected through education – in all the dimensions specified.

This means that education will be considerably impoverished if it is conceived only (or primarily) as intellectual development, even if mastery of competencies and skills is added to absorption of information and knowledge.

Education is still more impoverished if it is reduced to preparation either for the job market in the digital economy or for effective citizenship in a democratic society, even though education as human development may include these two things. But it includes much more, such as, for instance, the development of characteristics that culminate in one’s self-realization – what the Greeks called eudaimonia. Achieving eudaimonia implies defining, choosing and actualizing one’s life project.

C. Older Roots

Discussing the concept of education among the ancient Greeks and Romans, James L. Jarrett states, in his magnificent The Humanities and Humanistic Education:

Indeed, neither Greek nor Roman was in the least likely to share the modern confusion that identifies education with schooling. We are shaped and formed by the totality of our environment: it follows that we cannot afford to be careless about any aspect of that environment, architectural, legal, ceremonial, erotic, whatever. [5]

If education has to do with human development in all of its dimensions, and if it takes place throughout the life of the individual, it cannot be accommodated within the confines of a single (and often one-dimensional) institution, namely, the school, without losing its essential richness, its ubiquitous nature, and its personalized focus.

Thus, when UNESCO tries (as it recently began to do), if not to obliterate the distinction between formal and non-formal education, at least to reduce its present importance, it is taking us back to a view already espoused by the ancient Greeks and Romans.

But the point of view defended by the ancient Greeks and Romans went beyond giving equal attention to formal and non-formal educational initiatives. They did not favor the schooling of society. They favored making society as a whole the environment in which we learn and thus educate ourselves. According to this view, to be concerned with education is not equivalent to creating and maintaining a good school system (public or private, it makes no difference), much less to extending the time people remain in school (freely or under compulsion). Instead of proposing that the school should become a totalitarian institution in society, the ancient Greeks and Romans proposed that all the institutions and activities of society have an educational focus – that is, that society should become a truly educational (i.e., learning-centered) environment. That is the true meaning of Paideia.

The richness of this idea is mind-boggling. The ancient Greeks and Romans were not contemplating the educational role of only a few institutions of society, such as the family, the church, local community organizations, the communication means, industrial and commercial enterprises, cultural and leisure-focused organizations – not even of the school. They meant that every institution and every activity of society, from the way cities are planned and built, passing through how they organized and governed (including, necessarily, their laws) and through how they are maintained through free economic activities, and arriving at how time for play and leisure is promoted and organized, that all of this be learning-focused – that is, be educational.

Rather than proposing a totalitarian schooling of society, they proposed the total deschooling of society (à la Ivan Illich), because learning should become society’s overall focus and concern. If the ancient Greeks and Romans had known the present digital information and communication technologies, they would probably have emphasized their point much more strongly and realistically.

D. Socratic Roots

Socrates was the first great educator of the human race (at least in the West) – and, arguably, its greatest. It is important to consider how he viewed and practiced education:

He did not have a school: he worked in the main square of the city;
He did not have a classroom: he worked in the open air;
He did not work with groups: he worked with one person at a time;
He did not have students: he had partners in dialogue and in learning;
He did not have a curriculum: he discussed anything in which his dialogue partners were interested;
He did not really answer the questions of his dialogue partners: he replied to a question always with another question, to stimulate them to find the answer themselves;
He saw his task as similar to that of the midwife: to draw out successfully, through plain conversation, what is already inside the mind of his dialogue partner, because it is there, in the mind, that ideas are conceived;
He did not use any learning resource except interaction and dialogue;
He was suspicious of rhetorical oratory, speech making, lecturing, and teaching, because these methods go all in a single direction, are not two way, and so do not favor interaction and dialogue;
For the same reason, he was suspicious of books, because they likewise do not favor interaction and dialogue. [6]

Here we have, in a nutshell, the way Socrates viewed and practiced education, almost 2,500 years ago. What Socrates thought and did in the area of education is much closer to the “Ubiquitous Education Through the Learning Society” paradigm than anything anybody thought or did ever since. Whatever else this paradigm may contain, it is a clear defense of personalized education – and in Socrates’ thought and practice we do find truly personalized learning.

E. Digital Information and Communication Technologies

Many educators, today, when they are not constrained to defend the present educational paradigm, find Socrates way of thinking congenial and admire his educational practice. That explains the partial and relative success of “constructivist” or “constructionist” proposals.

The only legitimate criticism that can be made of Socrates is that his way of viewing and practicing education is impractical in a large society that is committed to universal education, since it is based on one-to-one interaction and dialogue. In other words: it does not seem to be scalable. In a small city such as Athens, that was not committed to the education of its women and its slaves, it may have worked, but how to implement this kind of personalized education in a 21^st-Century megalopolis?

What happened in the intervening 2,500 years since Socrates, especially in the 250 years since the Industrial Revolution, to make the education of today a standardized mass undertaking centered on the school was, on the one hand, a gradual but considerable increase in the number of those society felt committed to educate and, on the other hand, lack of resources, human and technological, to continue to educate the way Socrates did.

Today, however, we have fantastic technologies that allow us to achieve “horizontal learning” much better than ever before. They allow us easy access to the Internet’s universal library and to one another – as well as to people with sophisticated knowledge and competencies, that are willing, on a one-to-one basis or in more general environments, to share what they know, and know how to do, in order to help us learn what we are interested in learning, what we want or need to learn.

It is now possible, through social media and networks, to bring the maieutic learning methodology proposed by Socrates to scale, offering everyone a personalized education that satisfies their interests, wants and needs.

Technology, especially by creating social media and making global social networks possible and viable, is also making personalized education possible and viable in large scale. Because global social networks are not only places where we gather information, share information, and entertain ourselves (although they are certainly that), but also places where we learn what we want and need to learn, as defined by our interests, they have become a macro Learning Environment. As a matter of fact, the virtual space has become the embryo of the “Ubiquitous Education Through the Learning Society” paradigm.

F. The Focus on (Redefined) Learning

The focus of traditional education was on teaching. The focus today is on learning – but learning has been redefined.

In the past we worried about teaching methodologies – didactics. It is now more than time that we move on to worry about learning methodologies, or mathetics, as, among others, Comenius, in the 17^th Century, and Seymour Pappert, in the twentieth, proposed [7].

To learn, as Peter Senge [8], among others, has shown, is not to accumulate information, but to become capable of doing that which we could not do before. As simple as that. To learn is to build capacity and develop competencies. To learn is to gradually make fully sculpted human beings out of our original selves, to become that which we want, choose and decide to be.

But learning, to be effective, must take place in the context of one’s life project: it must help learners:

discover their passions and talents;
define and build a life project around them;
develop the competencies, skills, values, attitudes and habits, as well as acquire the knowledge and information, that, together, will make it possible to effectively transform their life project into reality.

3. Education as Human Development

When we, humans, are born, we do not know much and do not know how to do almost anything. That is why we have to depend on others for quite some time. But fortunately we are born with three characteristics that are essential to human development:

our genetic programming is minimal and open: within limits, we can become almost anything we want;
our innate capacity for learning (in the sense seen above), which includes the capacity for language acquisition, is incredibly large, flexible, and quite effective;
otherwise we have quite an unique set of individual features, built upon a basic common human substratum, to differentiate us from one another.

Given these features, mass education, education of the type “one size fits all”, should be banned. Personalized education is imperative. And, today, we all can achieve it, with the help of already available technologies.

But personalized education must necessarily be focused on what each individual wants and needs to learn. This means that personalized education must be focused on what each individual chooses and defines as his life project.

School-based mass education ignored the issue of one’s life project because it was intent on manufacturing standardized human (?) products undifferentiated from one another. That is why it came to defend and practice a “one size fits all” education.

Education as human development, however, aims at helping people (children as well as adults) find their “element”, as Sir Ken Robinson emphasized [9].

4. Is this Utopian – or is this Something Doable Beginning Now?

Some people will read this paper and say “Nice and fine… but too bad it is unrealistic…” Others may even say “Beautiful, fantastic… but unfortunately it is totally utopian!” I assure you that what I propose is not unrealistic or utopian: it is fully doable, and it is doable now – if only we choose to do it [10].

But it will not be done easily, or quickly.

It will not be easy. There will be resistance. Resistance from people who make money from schools, or who achieve power organizing or unionizing teachers, or who make money and achieve power publishing and selling textbooks, videos, lab equipment and materials, sophisticated technologies, or who find their calling to be organizing conferences and giving lectures to educators… But it is doable, if we truly believe in it and chose to do it.

And it will not be quick. It took about 250 years for people to consider a society without schools something inconceivable [11]. Several generations will come and go before we can see the first fruits of these ideas, and still more for people to consider it unimaginable that we one day needed schools to educate… Home education could help… if it didn’t see itself as home schooling! Unschooling is a good start – but it needs to be conjoined with positive efforts to make society a truly learning environment.

There is a secret – a rather simple secret. Learning takes place best when we are doing something else: playing, working, living our lives in the world, solving problems small or large: fixing a leak in our bathroom or finding a way to rid the world of poverty, disease, ignorance, injustice, violence, war… Jean-François Rischard, in his important book High Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years To Solve Them [12], has a list of twenty major life-and-death problems which we don’t know how to solve because we never learned how to approach them in our so-called educational institutions. He said we had 20 years to solve them. That was when he wrote it: in 2007. If he was right, we have only 10 years in which to learn how to develop the new mindset that will allow us to solve them. And the world is the stage where we must live and the place where we must learn – and the place where we will die when 2027 comes and we haven’t learned it yet. Education is not preparation for life. Education is the process through which we learn to live as autonomous and competent human beings. And hopefully survive. And more hopefully still, flourish as human beings.

There are many people interested in technology here. Let me say just one more thing to them. The technology that is most relevant to learning is the technology that helps us do the things we want and need to do in life. It makes no sense to speak of learning or educational technologies, as such, that is, technologies that only help us learn.

So, the time is ripe to deschool and personalize education and make ours a true learning society. PAN-PBL’s focus should continue to be concentrated on Problem-Based Learning, Project-Focused Learning and Other Active Learning Methodologies – but it should give preference to the use of these methodologies in learning environments that go beyond the school.

The school is dead – long live learning and education.

5. Conclusion

In this spirit, I leave you with a great quote from Erich Fromm, taken from his Introduction to Celebration of Awareness, the book by Ivan Illich already mentioned in the notes:

[Ivan Illich] has [through the years] remained true to himself in the very core of his approach and it is this core that we share. ( . . . ) This approach can be characterized by the motto: de omnibus dubitandum; everything must be doubted, particularly the ideological concepts which are virtually shared by everybody and have consequently assumed the role of indubitable common-sensical axioms. To ‘doubt’ in this sense does ( . . . ) imply ( . . . ) the readiness and capacity for critical questioning of all assumptions and institutions which have become idols under the name of common sense, logic and what is supposed to be ‘natural’. ( . . . ) Radical doubt is an act of uncovering and discovering; it is the dawning of the awareness that the Emperor is naked, and that his splendid garments are nothing but the product of one’s own phantasy. Radical doubt means to question; ( . . . ) radical doubt is a process; a process of liberation from idolatrous thinking; a widening of awareness, of imaginative, creative vision of our possibilities and options. ( . . . ) [Illich’s approach] questions every idea and every institution from the standpoint whether it helps or hinders man’s capacity for greater aliveness and joy. ( . . . ) The importance of [Illich’s] thoughts lies in the fact that they have a liberating effect on the mind by showing entirely new possibilities; they make the reader more alive because they open the door that leads out of the prison of routinized, sterile, preconceived notions. By the creative shock they communicate ( . . . ) they help to stimulate energy and hope for a new beginning. [13]

6. Notes

[1] It is curious that neither of these men had their original cultural roots in mainline Western European countries or in the United States: Illich was Eastern European (Croatian) and Freire was Latin American (Brazilian).

[2] Ivan Illich (1970), Deschooling Society, New York: Harper & Row, passim. An earlier book by Illich is also worth consulting: (1969-1970), Celebration of Awareness: A Call for Institutional Revolution, New York: Doubleday (which contains an Introduction by Erich Fromm), chapters 7 (“The Futility of Schooling”) and 8 (“School: The Sacred Cow”). It is from this book, p. 125 (chapter 8), that the third motto of this paper was taken.

[3] Paulo Freire (1968), Pedagogia do Oprimido, Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra (original publication, in Portuguese); (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Herder & Herder (first edition in English, translated from Portuguese by Myra Bergman Ramos, with preface by Richard Shaull); (2000), New York: Bloomsbury (Thirtieth Anniversary Edition of the First American Edition, with introduction by Donaldo Macedo); (2018, March), New York: Bloomsbury Academic (Fiftieth Anniversary Edition of the Original Brazilian Edition, with an updated introduction by Donaldo Macedo and interviews with several important educators and other personalities). The quotation incorporates a conflation of various passages freely translated from the Portuguese edition by me.

[4] Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762), Émile ou de l’Éducation, originally published in French, available in innumerable editions; available in English, also in various translations, the title using one or more of the following words: The Emile: Treatise on Education. The translation from the French here provided is that of William Boyd (1962), The Emile (Bi-centennial Edition), New York: Teachers College Press, Book I, apud Jarrett (1973), p. xiii.

[5] James L. Jarrett (1973), The Humanities and Humanistic Education, Reading: Addison-Wesley, p. 11 (italics added).

[6] The story and the pedagogical views of Socrates can be found scattered in several of Plato’s Dialogues (available in innumerable translations and editions), but especially in Theaetetus (approximate date 369 BC) and Phaedrus (approximate date 370 BC). The first discusses his views on method, the maieutics (or midwifery), the second, his views on writing, of which he was quite critical (as compared to orality: talking or speaking or dialoguing or debating, which he preferred).

[7] John Amos Comenius (1680), Spicilegium Didacticum, originally published in Latin, of very difficult access; for an accessible discussion of the concept, see Seymour Pappert (1993), The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer, New York: Basic Books, especially chapters 5-7.

[8] Peter M. Senge (1990, rev. ed. 2006), The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization, New York: Penguin / Random House, passim. See also Peter M. Senge et alii (1994), The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization, New York: Doubleday, and Peter M. Senge et alii (2000), Schools that Learn: A Fifth Discipline Fieldbook for Educators, Parents, and Everyone Who Cares About Education (2000), New York: Doubleday.

[9] Sir Ken Robinson with Lou Aronica (2009), The Element: How Finding your Passion Changes Everything, New York: Penguin, and Sir Ken Robinson (2014), Finding Your Element: How to Discover your Talents and Passions and Transform your Life, New York: Penguin.

[10] Peter Buckman (1973) asserted this in a sensible manner almost 45 years ago, in his Introduction to the book he edited, Education Without Schools, London: Souvenir Press. This book, out of print for many years, contains and important article by Ivan Illich and is very difficult to find.

[11] Ivan Illich’s observations on Puerto Rican society, made in 1969, are truly remarkable: “Only if we understand the school system as the central myth-making ritual of industrial societies can we explain the deep need for it, the complex myth surrounding it, and the inextricable way in which schooling is tied to the self-image of contemporary man. ( . . . ) Puerto Rico has been schooled. I don’t say educated, but, rather, schooled. Puerto Ricans can no longer conceive of life without reference to the school. The desire for education has given way to the compulsion of schooling. Puerto Rico has adopted a new religion. Its doctrine is that education is a product of the school, a product which can be defined by numbers. There are the numbers which indicate how many years a student has spent under the tutelage of teachers, and others which represent the proportion of his correct answers in an examination. Upon the receipt of a diploma the educational product acquires a market value. School attendance in itself thus guarantees inclusion in the membership in the community of saints. From governor to jibaro Puerto Rico now accepts the ideology of its teachers as it once accepted the theology of its priests. The school is now identified with education as the church once was with religion.” From “School: The Sacred Cow”, chapter 8 in Celebration of Awareness, op.cit., p.125 (emphases added). The last phrase is, of course, the third motto of this paper. The second part of the quotation comes from a graduation speech that Illich was invited to give at the University of Puerto Rico, in Río Piedras, in 1969. About this same line of thought the reader ought to consult the book by John Abbott (with Heather MacTaggart) Over Schooled but Under Educated: How the Crisis in Education is Jeopardizing our Adolescents (2010), London and New York: Continuum.

[12] Jean-François Rischard, High Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years To Solve Them (2007), New York: Basic Books. Rischard, an economist, was the first European Vice President of the World Bank from 1998 to 2005.

[13] Erich Fromm (1970), “Introduction” to Ivan Illich’s Celebration of Awareness, op.cit., pp. 7-10.

In Santa Clara, February 19, 2018

PBL2018: PBL for the Next Generation

PBL2018: PBL for the Next Generation
Santa Clara, CA, February 16-19, 2018

#2018PAN-PBL

Posted from São Paulo, on November 15th, 2017

4 – Technology and the Innovative School (*)

1. Linking with the Previous Three Articles

This is the fourth in a series of four articles.

In the first article (“Looking Anew at Education”) I argued that:

Education is a lifelong process of human development that takes place through learning;
Education cannot be limited to the confines of a single institution or organization and so must be seen as the responsibility of the entire society, which is the learning environment par excellence where education takes place;
We learn through continuous dialogue with our fellow human beings about things of the world that interest us;
This dialogue makes us conscious of our incomplete or unfinished nature and leads us to attempt to become more fully human through the implementation of a strategic life project of our own choosing;
This is the path toward human development;
The vision of education that promotes this path (“Ubiquitous Education through the Learning Society”) runs counter the present paradigm of education in that it relativizes the importance of formal education, schooling, teachers, and instruction: education, here, takes place in between the lines, as if it were, as we do something else (especially play and work, but also as we simply live our life).

In the second article (“Change, Innovation and the School”) I argued that:

Innovation involves change, but not every change brings innovation;
Change can be divided in two kinds: ordinary and reformative (within the paradigm) and extraordinary and transformative (disruptive of the paradigm);
It is the degree of innovation present in it that differentiates extraordinary or transformative change from ordinary or reformative change;
The changes that took place in the world in the past seventy years require extraordinary or transformative change of — and not simply in — the school;
The school, however, has been quite impervious and resistant to the demand that it ought to transform itself;
Given the dissemination of the present paradigm of education and the consequent penetration of the conventional school in the social fabric, it may be necessary to go through a transitional stage (that of the “Innovative School”) before we can hope to reach the new educational paradigm (“Ubiquitous Education through the Learning Society”).

In the third (previous) article (“Innovative Schools”), I argued that:

In the transitional stage education will still depend largely on the school but the school will have to become more and more different from the conventional institution that presently bears the same name, since it will serve, among other things, to spread education out of itself and into other institutions of society, tearing down, so to say, the walls that demarcate, and so isolate, the school from the rest of society;
Thus the Innovative School must be built upon a different vision (a new understanding of its nature, mission, and values, as well as of the outcomes it seeks to achieve), have different organizing principles (curriculum, methodology, learning resources, architectural design, technology infrastructure, and, of course, evaluation procedures), and be staffed by personnel with a distinct mindset and a different set of competencies and talents;
This Innovative School that prepares the path for the “Ubiquitous Education through the Learning Society” paradigm will focus on personalized learning that is conveyed, through a large extent, through technology and can only reach scale through technology.

In this fourth and last article of this series, therefore, technology will be the focus.

2. Technology and Personalized Learning

Socrates was the first great educator of the human race (at least in the West) — and arguably its greatest. It is important to consider how he viewed and practiced education:

He did not have a school: he worked in the main square of the city;
He did not have a classroom: he worked in the open air;
He did not work with a group: he worked with one person at a time;
He did not have students: he had partners in dialogue;
He did not have a curriculum: he talked about anything in which his dialogue partners were interested;
He did not really answer questions: he replied to a question with another question;
He did not have ready answers to the questions of his dialogue partners: he helped them find the answers themselves;
He saw his task as similar to that of the midwife: to draw out successfully, through plain conversation, what is already inside the mind of this dialogue partner, because it is there, in the mind, that ideas are conceived;
He did not use any learning resource except dialogue;
He was suspicious of rhetorical oratory, speech making, lecturing, and teaching: these things are all unidirective, and so do not favor dialogue and interaction;
For the same reason, he was suspicious of books, because they likewise do not favor dialogue and interaction.

Here we have, in a nutshell, the way Socrates viewed and practiced education, about 2,500 years ago. What Socrates thought and did in the area of education is much closer to the “Ubiquitous Education Through the Learning Society” paradigm outlined in the first article than anything anybody thought or did ever since. Whatever else this paradigm may contain, it is a clear defense of personalized education — and in Socrates’ thought and practice we do find truly personalized education (which is equivalent to personalized learning).

Many educators, today, when they are not constrained to defend the present educational paradigm, find Socrates way of thinking congenial and admire his educational practice. That explains the considerable success of “constructivist” or “constructionist” proposals.

The only legitimate criticism that can be made of Socrates is that his way of viewing and practicing education seems to be impractical in a large society that is committed to universal education, since it is based on one-to-one dialogue. In other words: it does not seem to be scalable. In a small city such as Athens, that was not committed to the education of its women and its slaves, it may have worked, but how to implement this kind of personalized education in a twentieth-first century megalopolis?

What happened in the intervening 2,500 years since Socrates, especially in the 250 years since the Industrial Revolution, to make the education of today a standardized mass undertaking centered on the school was, on the one hand, a gradual but considerable increase in the number of those society felt ought to seek to educate themselves and, on the other hand, a lack of resources, human and technological, to continue to educate the way Socrates did.

The solution found, especially around the middle of the eighteenth century, was to create an educational production line similar to the assembly line of the industrial factory, and process children as if they were raw materials to produce standardized industrial organization people.

Students, contents, methods and outcomes all had to be standardized. When the standardized contents to be transmitted were too complex, division of labor and specialization were brought into the picture…

This way, learning gradually became something that took place in the school, during school hours, in school days — not anywhere, anytime, in the place where people lived, worked and had fun. The focus gradually moved from the broad interest of the learners to the narrow, specialized interests of the various teachers. Inside the rooms of the school there was no real dialogue, but classes or lessons, delivered by the teacher to the student, of whom only silence and attention were required. And thus the students gradually adopted the ideas of their masters instead of conceiving their own and then giving birth to them, as Socrates wanted…

But today we have a different context, do we not?

For a while, it looked as if not…

For a while, technology (the computer, the multimedia projector, the projected screen, the smart board, etc. and even the Internet) simply reinforced the traditional paradigm of one unidirectionally talking to many, and the many merely consuming ideas conceived somewhere else and transmitted to them, only now with the help of technology…

But then the social networks appeared…

Initially, few people believed that the social networks would change education much. Curiously, e-mail, instant messaging, blogging, and media sharing systems were made available to users for free by the large software companies, such as Microsoft, which kept making huge investments in digitizing content, developing authoring tools for teachers, perfecting presentation programs, creating digital classroom environments, etc. These initiatives wrongly assumed that, if technology were used in teaching, students would be easily engaged in learning what the school and its teachers expected them to learn… This assumption was a great mistake.

Then Facebook appeared, and now, a few years later, it has way over one billion active users, more than 20% of the overall population of the globe — but around 50% at least of the better informed, better educated, and more affluent part of the global population. And it continues to be for free, as far as the users are concerned.

Now, at last, we do have a different context, do we not?

Here is a quote from Will Richardson, in his book Why School?: How Education Must Change When Learning and Information Are Everywhere, after he described how his son Tucker, 13 years of age, learned to play quite well a highly complex and sophisticated game, Minecraft, without any formal teaching whatsoever, only through virtual conversations with his friends of the same age, who were also learning to play the same game in their own homes, by themselves (as one would say in the past — today, we know best). The passage is rather long but it is worth transcribing it:

“More and more, Tucker and his connected friends are crafting a new narrative around learning. (Millions of connected adults are its co-authors.) It’s a story that challenges the fundamental premise of this thing we call ‘school’. In this new story, real learning happens anytime, anywhere, with anyone we like — not just with a teacher and some same-age peers, in a classroom, from September to June. More important, it happens around the things we learners choose to learn, not what someone else tells us to learn.

This new story requires us to ask the difficult yet crucial question: why school?

I’m not suggesting we consider scrapping school altogether. I’m suggesting that this moment requires us to think deeply about why we need school. Or to ask, more specifically, what’s the value of school now that opportunities for learning without it are exploding all around us? There is an important, compelling answer to that question. It is most definitely not the same one we’ve been giving for the last 150 years.

Here’s the deal.

The world has changed — and continues changing — rapidly and radically when it comes to the ways in which we can learn, and what knowledge, skills, dispositions, and forms of literacy our children will need to flourish in their futures. Plain and simple, the Web and the technologies we use to access it drive those changes. And those changes are, in a word, profound. Sooner or later, that upheaval will force us to tackle the ‘why school?’ question head-on.

Every one of us has a stake in the answer. It’s not only parents of school-age kids, or the teachers in their classrooms, who need to grapple with this.

Schools play an important role in our communities, and not just because they help determine property values. They are part of the fabric of who we are. Moreover, they remain the places where every one of our kids can go (in theory, at least) to get equal access to an education. Between that and the ancillary child care functions they provide, schools as places where children come together to learn will not be going away anytime soon.

But what happens inside of schools is going to change, now that the Web connects us the way it does.

It has to.“

[Will Richardson (2012-09-10). Why School?: How Education Must Change When Learning and Information Are Everywhere (Amazon Books, Kindle Edition, Kindle Locations 60-76). TED Conferences. Emphases added.]

Technology, especially by making global social networks possible and viable, is also making personalized education possible and viable in large scale. Because global social networks are not only places where we gather information, share information, and entertain ourselves (although they are certainly that), but also places where we learn what we want and need to learn, as defined by our interests and needs, they have become a macro Learning Environment. As a matter of fact, the virtual space has become the embryo of the “Ubiquitous Education Through the Learning Society” paradigm.

3. Technology and the Development of Competencies

The technology that is relevant to the development of competencies is the same technology that is ubiquitous in the world today: digital information and communication technologies (ICT). ICT is a large set of technologies that were developed on the basis of the digital computer unveiled to the world on February 16, 1946.

This set of technologies is fundamental for education because, to adapt a phrase Bill Gates once used in a lecture, “it exists to place people in contact with people and to give them access to the information they need to do the things they want to do”.

If Paulo Freire is right, and we learn in the world, and primarily through human interaction and dialogue, and if this technology exists for these two purposes:

to put people in contact with people, and so allow them to interact, dialogue and collaborate with one another;
to give them access to the information they need in order to understand and to improve the world in which they live, learn, work, and have fun;

then this technology is fundamental for learning — as a matter of fact, much more fundamental than it is for teaching.

A. Technology, the Curriculum, and Personalized Learning

If what was said about the curriculum in the previous article (“Innovative Schools”) is taken seriously, then it is basically impossible to implement the curriculum in any large school setting without technology.

In the Innovative School competencies are the main ingredient of the overall curriculum;
The matrix of competencies in which the curriculum is organized reflects the total set of learning opportunities which the school is willing to make available to its students (the school curriculum);
It is likely that this set will be fairly large and complex, given the variety of competencies, and their interconnections, that can legitimately be part of the school curriculum;
Each student, after consultation with his mentors and with his parents, chooses the sub-set of competencies that is relevant or useful to the definition and implementation of his life project (the student’s personal curriculum);
It is quite probable that there will no identical personal curricula in the school, given the fact that individual differences among the students will likely lead to very personal life projects.

If the number of students in the school is, say, in the hundreds, it is virtually impossible, without rather sophisticated technology, to keep track of such a high number of personal curricula and their interactions with the school curriculum (for instance, to keep an updated registry of which competencies each student has already developed and which ones he must still develop at any given time). This would be the curriculum component of a major Learning Management System.

B. Technology and Project-Based Learning

The basic way in which a student develops competencies in the Innovative School is by participating in learning projects that help him develop the specific sub-set of competencies that is relevant or useful to his life project. The school must have, therefore, a regular set of learning projects that it offers to its students, from which the students will select the projects in which they will get involved. Sometimes if may be necessary, because of specific student demand, for the school to offer ad hoc learning projects in additional to its regular offerings.

The project database of the school must clearly specify, for each project, the problem the students will investigate, which competencies they will develop as they investigate that problem, and how the solution of this problem and the development of these competencies will be assessed.

The student can, based on his life project, search the project database to determine which learning projects address problems he would be interested in tackling and to ascertain the competencies he will develop as he tries to solve the problems proposed by these projects. When these projects are offered by the school, he can participate in them. Once the projects are successfully concluded, the competencies that they contemplate will be credited to the student’s transcript, with indication of the appropriate level of depth in his mastery of them.

This would be the methodology component of a major Learning Management System.

C. Technology and the Assessment of Learning

As seen above, we learn through human interaction and dialogue. Technology, today, not only facilitates interaction and dialogue, but also makes them possible in contexts where they were impossible before.

As also mentioned above, as we interact and dialogue, and so learn, we need access to information, in order to understand and act upon the world in which we live, work, and have fun. Technology, today, is essential to the tasks of searching, organizing, storing, analyzing, assessing and applying information.

It is this kind of learning that must be assessed in the Innovative School.

In order to assess this kind of dialogical learning, it is fundamental that the staff of the school not only interact intensively with the students, but also that they carefully observe the interactions of the students among themselves. And, of course, that they record their own interactions with the students and the interactions they observe.

But the interactions that matter, in this context, do not take place only face to face inside the school buildings: they also take place in virtual space.

Thus, in order to assess student interaction and keep track of what sort of information students access, use, apply in discussions, and eventually save, the staff of the school must also be active participants in the school networking facilities but also in the social networking systems the students use.

Of course, a careful balancing between the privacy rights of the students and their need to be accompanied in their learning must be sought and the rules that allow the school staff to monitor student activity must be clear and understood by everyone involved.

But, in any case, it is clear the role that technology must perform in enabling and enriching interaction and information access as well as in the recording of all this information and in its timely retrieval by all interested parties in the process of evaluating student learning.

Also, by extending the network of people with whom the students can come into contact, technology allows students to participate in collaborative learning projects with students of other schools, all over the world (assuming the problem of language is solved, and it will be solved by technology as well), and maintain personalized dialogue with multiple partners about the things that they are interested or need to learn.

The development of competencies that involve the building of psychomotor abilities, such as is the case in medicine, dentistry and several other areas, presents special challenges, which, however, will be adequately met with the evolution of technology. Telemedicine is already a reality, and so the acquisition of medical skills through distance education is also around the corner. Preparation of pilots through flight simulators is already de rigueur. There is no reason to fear that other areas will not face similar developments.

4. In Conclusion

The Innovative School is necessary, as a transitional institution, and it will necessarily depend heavily on technology. But the technology it will use is not information dispensing technology that will automate and, to a large extent replace, conventional teaching functions (information delivery).

The technology that is important for learning and managing learning in the Innovative School is basically of three kinds:

The sort of technology that young people already master: technologies that allow them to communicate with each other quickly and easily and that gives them access to whatever information they need to learn what they want or need to learn;
Technology that helps them simulate rather complex processes — and games are important simulators;
Technology that helps them make complex decisions and solve complicated problems in various areas — the so-called “expert systems”.

As mentioned above, learning takes place as we do something else: play, work, live our lives in the world. Thus, the technology that is most relevant to learning is the technology that helps us do the things we want and need to do. It makes no sense to speak of technology that only helps us learn: learning or educational technology.

Good Learning Management Systems help the Innovative School do something quite important: monitor (track) and evaluate each student’s development toward the achievement of his personal life project. But they must really manage learning, as a process and as an outcome, not school or classroom attendance, teaching, or test results.

São Paulo, on the 31st of October, 2012, revised in São Paulo, on the 22nd of August, 2017

(*) I thank Microsoft’s Brazilian subsidiary for the authorization to use in this article material that I wrote at her request five years ago.

3 – Innovative Schools (*)

1. Linking with the Previous Article

In the previous article (“Change, Innovation and the School”) it was argued that:

Innovation involves change, but not every change brings innovation;
Change can be ordinary (within the paradigm) or extraordinary (disruptive of the paradigm);
Ordinary change is usually small, piecemeal, incremental, gradual, does not depart much from established thought or practice, and so leads at best to the improvement or reformation of an established paradigm; extraordinary change, on the other hand, is usually broad, deep, systemic (holistic), radical, departs considerably from established thought or practice, and so normally leads to the replacement or transformation of an established paradigm;
It is the degree of innovation present in it (i.e., of that which, in it, is distinctly new) that differentiates extraordinary change from ordinary change;
The amount, direction, rhythm and nature of the change that took place in the world in the past sixty five years or so are such as to require transformative change of every institution of society, including the school;
The school, however, has been quite impervious and resistant to this requirement;
Given the penetration of the conventional school in the social fabric, and given the strength of its attachment to the industrial paradigm, its reinvention in the direction of the paradigm outlined in the first article (Ubiquitous Education, or Society as the Learning Environment par excellence) will need to go through a transitional phase in which an Innovative School will help create the Learning Society (Society that Learns and where one Learns) and prepare us to actively, interactively and collaboratively learn in it.

The last article finished with a description of the main features of the Factory-Style School. This article will seek to describe the contours of the Innovative School, which will help pave the way for a world in which every institution of society will be educational (i.e., learning-oriented).

2. The Innovative School: Vision

To be innovative, a school must have a new vision, which includes a new understanding of its nature, mission, and values, as well as of the outcomes it seeks to achieve:

Its nature must be inclusive: given the undeniable fact that we, humans, have multiple dimensions, and that other institutions of society are not presently capable of fully performing their educational tasks, the school needs to focus its attention on all of the dimensions of its students and help each of them develop as fully as possible as an integral and integrated human being;
Its mission must be to create a learning environment where personalized education is possible and viable: given the undeniable fact that we, humans, are all different from one another in our personal characteristics, interests, talents, levels of motivation and learning styles, the school needs to pay special attention to each student in his specific uniqueness and make sure that he learns what he needs and wants to learn in the way and the rhythm in which he learns best;
Its values must be:
- recognition of the fact that each student is a unique human being, worthy of full respect in his uniqueness by all those who work in the school;
- recognition of the fact that human beings develop through learning, that is, by building their capacity to do things which they were not capable of doing before;
- recognition of the fact that human beings learn best when they are actively engaged in doing things that are interesting to them (interest-based active learning, or learning by doing), in collaboration with partners who have similar interests (collaborative projects), and with the support of persons who can, when necessary, mediate the process and facilitate their learning;
- recognition of the fact that freedom is essential to the learning process, not only in the choice, by the students, of what to learn and of how to do it, but also in the organization of activities, by the school, in such a way as to provide unstructured time for leisure and otioseness (or idleness) on the part of the students (since intelligence does not prosper without a modicum of idleness and creativity does not prosper without a modicum of indiscipline);
- recognition of the fact that participation, by the students, in the elaboration of rules and in the making of decisions that affect their lives (including the processes in which they are evaluated) is essential for their learning and development.
The Outcomes that it ought to pursue are:
- help the students define and choose a life project that combines their talents and their passions;
- help the students determine which competencies, skills, attitudes and values are required to transform their life project into reality and help them build, master or acquire them;
- maintain in the school a learning environment that is conducive to integral and integrated human development.

3. The Innovative School: Organizing Principles

To be innovative, a school must be built and function according to sound principles, such as these:

To be innovative the school must contemplate broad and general learning expectations for the students (“curriculum“), personalizable for each student and flexible enough to be adjusted as the student develops, possibly changes interests, and defines and redefines his life project;
To be innovative the school must adopt a flexible, student-centered learning methodology that is active, collaborative, problem-oriented, project-based and research-focused;
To be innovative the school must make available to the students rich and abundant educational resources, including different types of digital technology, books, musical instruments, art material and material for art work, tools of various sorts, destined to all kinds of work, including manual labor, such as carpentry, woodwork, electronic / electric / automotive equipment repair, cooking, baking, restaurant and hotel work, etc.), and must allow these resources, and other resources that the students bring with them to the school (such as computers, tablets, smart phones, etc.) to be freely used by the students in their learning process;
To be innovative the school must consider evaluation an essential part of the learning process, which cannot be dissociated from it, since evaluation is not a set of specific procedures applied at the end of the learning process to assess whether, or to what extent, the student learned what was expected of him;
To be innovative the school must have a novel and modern modular architecture, and its spaces must be both generic and specialized but, in either case, flexible, modularizable, and reconfigurable, and its technology infrastructure must be state of the art;
To be innovative the school must have a novel approach to time: time needs to regarded as something to be used flexibly. Business already adopts “flextime“: it is time the school does the same.

4. The Innovative School: Personnel

To be innovative the school must have diverse personnel: professionals who have multiple talents and competencies to perform the general and specialized functions that are needed to address students with diversified and often rather special educational needs;
To be innovative the school must count upon personnel committed to its vision of education and who are passionate for the work they do;
To be innovative the school must select and recruit personnel who are not afraid to change and who want and feel comfortable to work in an student-centered innovative school that favors student initiative, protagonism and participation and that expects its professionals to be more like mentors, coaches, mediators and facilitators than like teachers and instructors.

5. Competencies, Curriculum, Methodology and Evaluation Procedures

Human beings, it was mentioned above, have multiple dimensions — at least the following: psychomotor, intellectual, social or interpersonal, affective or emotional, aesthetic or sensible, ethical and perhaps even spiritual. To fully develop these dimensions they need to develop and integrate multiple sets of competencies.

Competence is the capacity to mobilize, or draw upon, skills, knowledge and information (the thing the French call “savoirs”), attitudes, and values in order to perform (“savoir faire”) a set of tasks in a high level of proficiency and with some degree of automaticy.

Contrary to what is done in the school of the Industrial Era, in the innovative school competencies are the main ingredient of the curriculum, and conventional curricular contents (the traditional disciplines or subjects) are, to use a term the Brazilian National Curricular Parameters have made a household word, transversalized. These are drawn upon if and when needed. These contents are to be “pulled” by the students whenever they need or want them. It makes no sense to “push” them into the students just because they may eventually be needed or wanted.

That is why the curriculum of the innovative school must be a matrix of competencies rather than a grid of disciplines or subjects, dosed according to the age of the recipients.

The curriculum, in its broadest sense, is the total set of learning opportunities the school is willing to make available to its students.

Not every student needs to avail himself of every offering. This would be impossible, in the case where the offerings are ample, and it would rarely be recommendable, even when the offerings are parsimonious.

The offerings that a given student does select, given his life project, and after counseling with his mentors and his parents, will constitute his personal curriculum. The personal curriculum of a student is the set of offerings that he chooses to take.

If the student needs or wants to develop competencies that are not part of the offerings the school makes available, the school ought to make every effort to make it available, either through independent study supervised by the staff or, if needed, through apprenticeship supervised by an outside consultant.

One interesting issue is: must the school require of every student the development of at least a minimum set of competencies (such as basic literacy in the mother language, “numeracy”, mastery of the scientific method, etc.?). The answer is a qualified “yes”. The “yes” is qualified because today it is almost inconceivable that a student will spend about twelve years in an innovative school and not choose to learn how to read and write, how to solve numerical problems, or how to tackle problems of an empirical or theoretical nature. If, even though improbable, a student does not learn how to read and write (for instance) by the time he is eight or nine, his mentors and the pedagogical coordination of the school should have a clear idea of what is happening and of what ought to be done, other than compelling the student to learn.

Something else that is important to consider in this context is the fact that students have different interests and rhythms. A student that learns to read and write at eight might be as proficient in reading and writing as a student who learned to read and write at four, by the time both are, say, twelve. Also, a student who wants to be a poet or a novelist does not need to learn a lot of mathematics, and another, who wants to be a mathematician or an engineer, does not need to learn a lot of syntax or literature.

The active, collaborative, problem-oriented, project-based and research-focused learning methodology that the school ought to adopt is based on the fact that there are many ways of developing essential and important competencies, and that all of these ways can be employed in the form of learning projects, which students, individually or in group, freely choose in order to develop competencies related to their interests (what they want to learn) and, specifically, to their life project (what they need to learn). This methodology respects the students’ freedom to learn and thus solves the vexing and difficult problem of motivation.

Finally, the issue of evaluation. As mentioned above, to be innovative the school must consider evaluation an essential part of the learning process, which cannot be dissociated from it. Evaluation is not a set of specific procedures applied after the learning process has ended, in order to assess whether, or to what extent, the student learned what was expected of him.

If this is so, evaluation cannot be confused with quizzes, tests and exams. Evaluation takes place through observation and interaction, duly registered in a learning portfolium.

If this is so, evaluation cannot be confused with quizzes, tests and exams. The student, together with his mentors, coaches, facilitators and mediators, and, if necessary, also with his parents, must be involved in the process from the very start. The student is not less protagonist when he is evaluating his own learning and his own development along the path of his life project.

Also, the curriculum, if well elaborated, must operationally define the competencies and specify the indicators of its development with different degrees of expertise or depth. This makes it easier to evaluate the learning process as it is happening.

6. An Additional Word on Technology

The school of the Industrial Age was an institution that sought massification of education through standardization. The innovative school that will prepare the path for the Learning Society must seek personalized education that reaches scale through technology.

The next article, the last of this series of four, will deal with technology and how it can make personalized education viable and take it to scale.

São Paulo, on the 22nd of October, 2012, revised in São Paulo, on the 22nd of August, 2017

(*) I thank Microsoft’s Brazilian subsidiary for the authorization to use in this article material that I wrote at her request five years ago.

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Devises

Tableau des Matières

1. Introduction

2. Racines d’une alternative claire à la scolarisation

A. Des racines plus proches

B. Racines intermédiaires

C. Racines plus anciennes

D. Racines socratiques

E. Technologies numériques de l’information et de la communication

F. L’accent mis sur l’apprentissage (redéfini)

3. L’éducation comme développement humain

4. Une utopie – ou quelque chose de faisable ?

5. Conclusion

6. Remarques

1. Introdução

2. Anarquismo Sem Qualificativos

3. Anarquismo e Desestatização

4. Anarquismo e a Desescolarização da Educação

A. O Anarquismo, a Liberdade e a Autonomia

B. Como Lenta e Gradualmente Desescolarizar a Educação?

First:

Second:

Boyce’s Apparent View:

My View:

1. Introduction

2. Roots of a Clear Alternative to Schooling

A. Closer Roots

B. Intermediary Roots

C. Older Roots

D. Socratic Roots

E. Digital Information and Communication Technologies

F. The Focus on (Redefined) Learning

3. Education as Human Development

4. Is this Utopian – or is this Something Doable Beginning Now?

5. Conclusion

6. Notes

1. Linking with the Previous Three Articles

2. Technology and Personalized Learning

3. Technology and the Development of Competencies

A. Technology, the Curriculum, and Personalized Learning

B. Technology and Project-Based Learning

C. Technology and the Assessment of Learning

4. In Conclusion

1. Linking with the Previous Article

2. The Innovative School: Vision

3. The Innovative School: Organizing Principles

4. The Innovative School: Personnel

5. Competencies, Curriculum, Methodology and Evaluation Procedures

6. An Additional Word on Technology