This reflection on the shifting ways that our ability, as humans, to connect and collaborate is well worth a read. maybe you’d also like to see how it looks as a much expanded version of the reasons why we need to engage with the ‘pram pushers.’
An excerpt from Mark Pesce’s blog: Education is freely available. That is not in short supply. What is in short supply – and always has been –
is that moment of human contact, the connection which produces the transfer of insight, of skills, and understanding that won’t come from any webpage, however brilliant, or any podcast, however well-produced.
Students are connected as never before, but few of those connections lead to understanding. This is the failure and the challenge of our generation. It is a failure because we let the school grow up outside of the network, where we should have been binding the two together at every point. It is our challenge because unless we do begin the hard work to knit these two together, we will see formal education become increasingly irrelevant in the presence of an ever-more-potent educational field.
Because the network is everywhere, the school is everywhere. Because the school is everywhere, the hard-and-fast boundaries between school and the rest of life, as we live it in modern-day Australia, must collapse. The idea that school is something that happens ‘over here’, while the rest of life is lived ‘over there’ doesn’t make sense anymore. Given that the connections a child establishes from her earliest years persist throughout her lifetime, shouldn’t some of those connections – arguably, the second most important, after family – be to educators and educational resources? These connections would become the core of the mentoring bond, which rises to work in partnership with the parental bond, a constant nurturing force throughout the passage into adulthood.
For a good read, have a look at Mark Pesce’s blog – The Human Network
In the meantime, isn’t it about time we moved from ‘School Planning’ to ‘Planning School?’
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