Early musings on education

For our final project here at CIID, we have to keep a Final Project Journey which I am actively publishing here on Medium. This entry has been added as a part of the Journey 0.5 update.

My starting point…

Currently, I aim on tackling the issues with traditional schooling systems. These institutions have really failed at meeting needs and using the power of the creative energy in people between the ages of 1–25.

An alternative path could be to help increase people’s curiosity about the world around them in general, which I believe is a catalyst to creating grassroots movements against the traditional system.

The level at which I would like explore education is not yet clear to me and I am fully aware of the delicacy between the ages of students.

To start with, my interest begins with children over the age of 5, or at least have a reasonable speaking proficiency.

For the ages of 6–13, there is an overabundance of “play” centred design explorations, an area which I find uninteresting, as my focus is on the systemic problems of education.

From 13–17, the group has more opinions about what they want to do, but is still open to exploring new venues for learning. Their capabilities to use more complex tools makes them more interesting to work with.

Finally, from 17–25, the tools could be most complex and thus interesting. The group is also slowly inching towards maturity and are therefore more able to provide insights on their thoughts. The issue with this group however, is that they have already gone through the failed system. This means that their issues may be symptomatic of earlier failings that time could be better spent solving.

My explorations so far…

Given the broadness of the topic of education and the amount of respectable people that have explored it before, the starting point would naturally be some readings. My list will include more classical literature on education in combination with looking at contemporary “alternative schools.” Currently, I’m exploring the concepts by Sir Ken Robinson and his ideas about standardization in the system.

Current questions that are arising are:

• At what level is standardization good?
• When is the right time to learn something?
• How much should be imposed on students in regards to what they should learn?
• Why are some students more inherently curious about learning than others?
• How do we uncover each student’s “trigger” subject or educational pursuit?
• What role should the teacher play in the classroom?
• What is the balance between self-learning and group work is needed for an ideal school environment?
• Is there any truly scalable method of mass education?
• Is it possible to create a highly customized educational system that is still cross-compatible and measurable to external parties?

A lot of inspiration is also drawn from my own personal experience with schooling and its failings, as well as its successes. Cultural biases are also playing a role here, as my high school was in Abu Dhabi and was massively against extra-curricular activity. In Montreal, where I attended university, that desire for community manifested itself with extreme participation across a variety of student groups and organizations. What I learned from those contrasts, including my time helping set up a student incubator, have given me a lot of perspectives on this topic.