Education Purpose

Rob also outlines his frustration with the education system in PEI (and everywhere else, really) and offers his vision for a better way:

"Can we try an experiment? Can we set up one school on PEI where the kids can choose what they want to do and then we pile in and help them get there. It would be likely that such as school, would have a string bias towards the arts of all types. This does not have to be big at first. See it as a living experiment."

Before I forget, Will also had an insightful post about the frustrating gap between the needs of the system and the potential he sees for authentic learning with technology:

"Now I'm not saying my school can't get there, but it won't be anytime very soon. And unfortunately, you won’t find much to support that in the new tech plan, which, for all intents and purposes, seems pretty much rooted in sustaining the NCLB model for preparing a country of factory workers; everyone knows the same stuff and has the same skills. Does anyone see the irony in educating kids for jobs which are being shipped offshore? And I mean really, what relevance do iPods and blogs have for standardized tests, anyway? Right? Way too risky.

What’s even more ironic (scary? sad?) is that we have an educational system that still asks students to basically try to learn independently (they work collaboratively but seldom learn) and use that learning to impress a very limited audience of teachers. Meanwhile, what the real world expects are students that are able to truly learn through collaboration and share that learning with large, extended audiences for meaningful purposes."