Inquiry and implications

Inquiry

Often times when we think of school, we think of the teacher, standing at the whiteboard expounding or sounding out or conjugating or dictating or solving or explaining or diagramming.  She has the knowledge, it lives in her, she must know her stuff. Then, through pedagogical voodoo, she transfers this thing that lives in her, the finer points of biology or French or calculus or European History or carpentry or computer programming, sends it like an email with all those ones and zeroes into the brains of the awaiting Others, those adolescents who will receive the information, interpret it, and reproduce it.

I propose that this is a misconception.  Our world gives and receives information a quintillion times a day.  (You're probably thinking "quintillion is totally a made up word."  To prove my point about giving and receiving information, click here to see whether I am making it up).  Now, I could have just included that definition here and been done with it, and you may have read it and chuckled to yourself at my pluck and cleverness.  But that would have been evidence of this misconception: that I have the knowledge, you don't have the knowledge, and that I must place the knowledge into your brain like cookies into the cookie jar.  But by clicking and searching and taking just one more step, you prove your own curiosity, that natural instinct to explore and know the world.  And in the act of inquiring further, I allow you to build meaning on your own terms and in your own way.

This seems to be getting at a new concept of knowledge, because in this scenario, who has the knowledge?  Where does it come from?  Did I give it to you?  Did you make it?  What does it say about you?  What does it say about me?

Implications

And the bigger question that follows all of these other questions is: why does it matter?  Quite frankly it matters because everything in our society and world has changed dramatically over the last 50 years except for one area: education.  If you walked into a classroom from the 1960s, you might have found something like this:

And then, if you were to walk into a classroom this year, you might have found something like this:

What do you see?  The same thing with a screen?  

Now, many people are saying these days that our "system is broken" and that we as a nation must do something differently in education to "fix it."  Unfortunately, more often than not those are code words for buzzy political ideas about test scores, teacher evaluation and money, none of which address the eerie similarity that we observe in these two pictures at 50 years remove.

I don't wish to say that students should no longer sit in desks or raise their hands to speak, but something in the nature of the interaction between student and teacher and subject matter seems to have been left untapped as we have remained static in our educational practice through the years.  I am doing my own inquiry into these things, and I think it has something to do with curiosity, originality, undoing hierarchies in the classroom and society, and helping students prefer to name and know the world on their own terms rather than speak when prompted and remain in their passive role as receiver.