I have been having a great time thinking about education and learning.  My interest in this topic started with a blog post I wrote on the Union Square Ventures blog about the transformative power of the Internet.  The process that unfolded from there is illustrative of what is possible today.  The initial post and subsequent ones (including ones by Fred) attracted a lot of comments which pointed to interesting resources on the web.

Through the comments I also discovered several books that otherwise might have taken me a while to find or that I might not have deemed interesting! Those include two books that absolutely everyone with kids should read:

• A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink - describes why strengthening and integrating our right brain capabilities in everything we do will be critical going forward

• Turning Learning Right Side Up by Russell Ackoff and Daniel Greenberg - provides a stinging critique of present-day education and proposes a radical departure

The basic takeaway from both books is that much of what we are doing today is pretty much the exact opposite of what we should be doing!  Now I should be quick to point out that both books are philosophical rather than scientifc, but the arguments they make are very compelling and certainly made me questions all my thinking about education and learning.

Here are some of the things that I am now fascinated by and will spend more time chasing down:

• Kids start out with a great motivation for learning.  The perfect example is watching kids learning to walk.  They persevere over some rather formidable obstacles.  Lots of trial and error (our daughter started crawling backwards at first).  Why, when and how do we manage to dull this motivation to the point where some folks are talking about having to pay kids to study?

• Learning seems to occur when kids have to figure things out for themselves (or better yet, explain them to others) and when there is a natural reason for doing so.  Yet most schools today are organized around artificial problems and homework assignments and with everyone working on the same problems there is virtually no room for kids to learn from each other.

• Knowledge is continuous, but our organization of it is highly categorical.  By that I mean that boundaries between chemistry, physics, biology, etc are all essentially historic accidents, but they persist and are deeply engrained to the point that I sometimes catch starting the answer to one of my kids question with something like “That’s something you will learn in chemistry."  How can we get past these artificial barriers?

• The analytical mode of thinking is incredibly powerful, but creativity and design can be even more so for solving many problems.  We have developed a large apparatus of analytical modes but are treating design and creativity as "art” and entirely separate (an even bigger barrier than the one in the previous bullet).  As such they seem to be more an afterthought rather than central to learning and education.

Lots of stuff here and I feel a bit like a kid in a candy store with all these new things to think about.  There is also a strong motivation to figure this out as we have three kids in the school system right now.

As an aside, I was quite amazed to see the NYT’s profile of Marissa Mayer claim that she was honing in on SAT scores as a selection criterion and quoting her as saying about a student with a C in macroeconomics “That’s troubling to me.  Good students are good at all things."  Both of these are deeply rooted in the same believes that seem to drive much of the current reforms in education.  First, that (standardized) testing provides useful measures and second, that students should do well across the board.  The more I read on the points outlined above, the more I am convinced that these two believes are deeply flawed.