Explore Creative Learning

students submit to certified teachers in order to obtain certificates of their own; both are frustrated and both blame insufficient resources--money, time, or buildings--for their mutual frustration.

This network of tape recorders, of course, would be radically different from the present network of TV. It would provide opportunity for free expression: literate and illiterate alike could record, preserve, disseminate, and repeat their opinions. The present investment in TV, instead, provides bureaucrats, whether politicians or educators, with the power to sprinkle the continent with institutionally produced programs which they-or their sponsors--decide are good for or in demand by the people.

Things, models, peers, and elders

It should use modern technology to make free speech, free assembly, and a free press truly universal and, therefore, fully educational.

A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known.

Invariably, it shapes the consumer who values institutional commodities above the nonprofessional ministration of a neighbor.

meant to serve a society which does not now exist,

In this chapter I intend to show that the inverse of school is possible: that we can depend on self-motivated learning instead of employing teachers to bribe or compel the student to find the time and the will to learn; that we can provide the learner with new links to the world instead of continuing to funnel all educational programs through the teacher. I shall discuss some of the general characteristics which distinguish schooling from learning and outline four major categories of educational institutions which should appeal not only to many individuals but also to many existing interest groups

Many teachers and pupils, taxpayers and employers, economists and policemen would prefer not to depend any longer on schools.

some new device which "makes" people learn

Their knowledge of facts, their understanding of life and work came to them from friendship or love, while viewing TV, or while reading, from examples of peers or the challenge of a street encounter.

If the goals of learning were no longer dominated by schools and schoolteachers, themarket for learners would be much more various and the definition of "educational artifacts" would be less restrictive.

Formal learning requires special access to ordinary things, on the one hand, or, on the other, easy and dependable access to special things made for educational purposes. An example of the former is the special right to operate or dismantle a machine in a garage. An example of the latter is the general right to use an abacus, a computer, a book, a botanical garden, or a machine withdrawn from production and placed at the full disposal of students.

Other basic institutions might differ from one country to another: family, party, church, or press. But everywhere the school system has the same structure, and everywhere its hidden curriculum has the same effect.

The supervaluation of the abstract blocks progress in educa-tion in mutually reinforcing ways in practice and in theory. In the practice of education the emphasis on abstract-formal knowledge is a direct impediment to learning-and since some children, for reasons related to personality, culture, gender, and politics, are harmed more than others, it is also a source of seri-ous discrimination if not downright oppression.

Bricolage is a mecaphor for che ways of che old-fashioned traveling cinker, the jack-of-all-trades who knocks on the door offering to fix whatever is broken. Faced with a job, the cinker rummages in his bag of assorted tools to find one thac will fit the problem at hand and, if one tool does nor work for the job, simply tries another without ever being upset in the slightest by the lack of generality.

If children really want to learn something, and have the opportunity to learn it in use, they do so even if the teaching is poor. For example, many learn difficult video games with no professional teaching at all! Others use Nintendo's system of telephone hot lines or read magazines on strategies for games to find the kind of advice for video games that they would get from a teacher if this were a school subject. Moreover, since one reason for poor instruction is that nobody likes to teach reluctant children, the constructionist route will make teaching better as well as less necessary, thus achieving the best of both worlds.

It is to be read on a more ideological or programmatic level as expressing the belief that the route to better learning must be the improvement of instruction-if School is less than perfect, why then, you know what to do: Teach better.