Education is a Cow That Anyone Can Milk

7/31/2019 Education is a Cow That Anyone Can Milk

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EDUCATION IS A COW THAT ANYONE CAN MILK – ANDRÉ KLEIN, 2011

Reviews & Praise"This book shoud be required reading for officials of the Ministry of Education." - Erika Zein-

erova

"so easy to read and, at the same time, so profound!" - María Inés Brumana

"very interesting and well-written" - Niklas Pedersen

"easy and pleasurable reading" - Michael A. Gyori

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http://learnoutlive.com/blog





About This PublicationThe following text is a collection of short pieces about education, change and technology that

originally appeared on the author's blog and have been rearranged, improved, extended and

polished here with the help of a dozen voluntary editors. (see "Special Thanks" for complete

list of contributors)

© André Klein, 2011

This is an independent publication via learnoutlive.com

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http://learnoutlive.com/


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Disclaimer According to the many letters and comments I received in response to the first draft of this

collection of writings, there were a few recurring questions and concerns which should be ad-

dressed right from the start.

The easiest way to clarify any misunderstandings is by stating clearly and unequivocally whatthis is not.

• this publication does not claim to provide final answers but to raise questions instead.

• this piece of writing is not about arguing for or against one or more opinions but stands

as an open invitation into a process of discovery and entertaining ideas and perspect-

ives

• no blanket conclusions should be inferred from or read into this text: there is not only

one right way to do things in education - there are many right ways depending on in-

dividuals and circumstances.

• if there are any seemingly unsupported assumptions about education, they stem from

my personal experience as a language teacher and learner and are therefore left without

citation.

Also, it needs to be said that due to the many different fields commonly lumped together with

education such as politics, finance, logistics, technology, etc. the term needs constant clarifica-

tion. As I understand it, education, in essence, is a form of psychological development that can

manifest itself in a variety of skills such as speaking a foreign language or playing the piano.

More importantly, the concept of education can never be reduced to these "fruits".

Rather than superficially understanding education as an acquisition of skills or knowledge I

prefer the premise that education is best understood as the process of "removing barriers to

learning".

Unfortunately, our very ideas of what education is or should be can be the biggest barriers of

all.

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This is where the title comes in. It is based on a phrase one of my teachers in high-school was

very fond of: "Statistics Is a Cow That Anyone Can Milk" (" Statistik ist eine Kuh, die jedermelken kann" ). In our case, this means that much of what is contemporarily described as

"education" is not necessarily referring to the same concept or even broad direction, but im-

plies highly disparate and often conflicting perspectives, such as humanitarian vs. economical,

results-only vs. process-oriented, etc.

Some readers might feel that there are gaps in between the different parts that make up this

text. While there is an over-arching narrative, the arrangement of the sections is deliberately non-linear because the only way to accurately describe a fragmented landscape is to adopt an

approach that suits the territory.

Having said that, let's start our discovery.

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Introduction According to International Labour Organization data released in 2011, global unemployment

is growing steadily, with Western countries accounting for 55% of the increase in unemploy-

ment between 2007 and 2010. ( source ). The estimated world unemployment rate rose to

8.7% in 2010, according to CIA data.

In Spain for example, youth unemployment now stands at 46%, in Greece 40% (source)

while in America it is currently at an average of 18.4% (source). Furthermore, there seems to

be a strong correlation between the 2011 global (youth) protest movements both in the Middle

East (" Arab Spring"), in Spain, Greece (" Indignants" ) and the U.S. ("Occupy Wallstreet" ),

and these growing numbers of youth unemployment.

There are many reasons to be found for this trend of youth unemployment. It is true that glob-

al recessions are partly to blame but another reason is that our current mode of education

might not be in tune with the world of today. Either students graduate highly in debt ("stu-

dent loan debt will exceed $1 trillion, surpassing even credit card debt" in the U.S. - source)

or there are simply no jobs to be found (" More than half of students who graduated from

universities [...] in 2010 have struggled to find a graduate-level job" in the U.K. - source).

Is it the fault of governmental regulation?

Or does the world high schools and universities prepare students for simply not exist, any-

more?

New Jobs & Old HabitsWe're writing the year 2011:

Manual labour has become redundant. Factories are more and more automated. The assembly

line is robotized, illustrating the very real effects of technological unemployment .

Machines are cheaper in the long run.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jan/25/ilo-high-unemployment-young-global-recession

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2129.html

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/aug2011/balk-a23.shtml

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/reshma-saujani/the-participatory-revolut_b_1016775.html

http://www.alternet.org/story/152809/the_$1_trillion_student_loan_rip-off:_how_an_entire_generation_was_tricked_into_taking_on_crushing_debt_that_just_enriches_banks/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-15385007


http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jan/25/ilo-high-unemployment-young-global-recession

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2129.html

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/aug2011/balk-a23.shtml

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/reshma-saujani/the-participatory-revolut_b_1016775.html

http://www.alternet.org/story/152809/the_$1_trillion_student_loan_rip-off:_how_an_entire_generation_was_tricked_into_taking_on_crushing_debt_that_just_enriches_banks/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-15385007





They can work around the clock. They don't need vacations or lunch breaks.

Therefore, human workers are replaced by machines and automated systems. And what's left

of repetitive human labour is outsourced to the developing world.

But this replacement of man by machine is not just happening at the conveyor belt:

around two million administrative and clerical workers lost their jobs afterbosses discovered they could handle their calendars and travel arrangements on-

line and rendered their assistants expendable. ( source )

Thus, it’s not just the hard physical labor which is slowly but inevitably being replaced. On a

deeper level whole sectors that are related to information and don’t need human intervention

are vanishing as they are replaced by modern media and technology (example: instead of em-

ploying secretaries to write down and mail our letters we can dictate and send emails by voice

directly to our devices).

On the other hand, new job descriptions are created faster than people can be trained: “Viral

meme tracker, slideshow specialist [or] headline optimizer” ( source ) are just a few examples

of this new sprawling landscape of evanescent (they often disappear as quickly as they

emerge) occupations.

In the 20th century people used to learn a trade and stayed in it for the rest of their lives.

When they could no longer work they got a pension.

Nowadays, working in any trade implies constant learning and expansion of (not just technic-

al) skills. Global competition and financial instabilities force companies to be highly selective

when accepting new employees. Job requirements are more and more demanding. In many

trades, especially technology and business, even applicants holding one or more degrees will

not be invited to a job interview if they can't show the right references and approved work-ex-periences.

Therefore, children born today will learn a variety of skills as opposed to a fixed trade and

change careers every few years. They

will not enter the workforce until their late 20s, but will stay at work well into their 70s, demographers predict. [...] The group dubbed Generation Alpha,

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http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/legal_skills/2011/04/will-technology-make-the-office-secretary-obsolete.html

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/07/paul_ford_facebook_and_the_epiphanator_an_end_to_endings.html


http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/legal_skills/2011/04/will-technology-make-the-office-secretary-obsolete.html

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/07/paul_ford_facebook_and_the_epiphanator_an_end_to_endings.html





born between 2010 and 2024, will study longer than previous generations,change careers at least five times and will more likely be self-employed, accord-ing to social forecasts. ( source )

If these predictions are accurate, the future demands a whole variety of new skills and know-

ledge in support of independent career moves and autonomous, ongoing learning.

Is our current approach to education flexible enough to cater to this new situation?

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http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/more-news/alpha-babies-face-multiple-careers/story-fn7x8me2-1226077644602


http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/more-news/alpha-babies-face-multiple-careers/story-fn7x8me2-1226077644602





How To Quit The Education Factory AndLeave For The Green Fields Of Learning

Divided Attention Yesterday I had a talk with a 12 year old.

He told me he’d been learning Arabic for 5 years, 5 days a week but couldn’t put together even

one sentence.

I was curious why. Was it so difficult?

Was the teacher so bad?

No, he said.

It was rather that the group consisted of 20 pupils and every year they went through the same

material again and again.

Then he came up with a curious calculation. He said that due to the group setting he felt the

teacher wasn't giving individual students enough attention, thus the usefulness of these les-

sons was actually divided by 20. Therefore, he was not really taking 150 lessons per month but

only 7.5.

Without further comment from my side he quickly added that it wasn't just him - all his class-

mates felt the same and that in order to really make progress, each student would need a

private teacher.

Trays Of Eggs & Football Teams

Every school teaches students in groups, so-called classes (a word with huge socioeconomic

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implications, i.e. "first class flight" or "second class citizen"). In K-12 education, these classes

generally consist of students of the same age, regardless of their individual characteristics.

There can even be enormous gaps between individual students’ learning ability and general

growth process: gaps, which the teacher is supposed to bridge without boring the bright

ones or leaving others behind.

Reducing class-size sounds like a solution to many people.

An expensive solution, obviously, for it would mean having to employ more teachers.

Nevertheless, changing the quantity alone won’t magically improve the quality of education.

The important part is putting students together in such a way that the talents and learning

needs of each individual provide balance to the whole.

Putting together a good class this way will take lots of time and analysis, it’s like selectingplayers of a football team, adding, exchanging and improving the mix over time.

If done right, this approach can minimize the gaps between learning styles and knowledge

levels, and make for an ore productive learning experience overall. I’ve worked in a private tu-

toring institution which allowed me (in a limited range) to do this and I was always surprised

how the whole group could change by adding/subtracting one person. It’s not just the “bad

apple” ruining the bunch. A good one can help the whole group to excel!

In addition to teachers not having influence on the way their class make up, there is another

problem with learning in groups that we have found from schools all over the world:

Assembly Line Curricula: Step By Step And One-Track Minds

Have you ever had a teacher that goes by the book?

Where each lesson is another page, another unit, another section, number after number after

number…?

I certainly have.

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Educators are supposed to have a system. They are supposed to create lesson plans where

each activity builds upon all the other ones, so that over time students will learn more andmore instead of simply running in circles.

Fair enough…parents and politicians want to see guarantees and results.

But there are two misunderstandings, here:

• learning is not always a linear process

• ironically, a good lesson-plan doesn’t always make for a good lesson

There are general stages in learning. Let’s take learning a language for example. You start with

letters, go on to words, then sentences and then whole texts. Each one is built on and consists

of the former.

The general idea is to take these stages and connect them. In geometry, the shortest distance between two points is a line.

In theory it looks so nice, doesn’t it?

And while learners do indeed eventually go through these stages of A,B,C the actual growth, as

I’ve experienced it while teaching and learning anything myself from languages to program-

ming, looks more like this:

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All these squiggly lines are detours, questions, repetitions, jumping ahead, etc. And to be quite

honest, not even this graph is really accurate, because many times a learner grasps parts of B

before having grasped A completely and then while at the C stage needs to go back to A to

make up for the gaps. I’m sparing you a visual representation of it: lots of loops.

Because not all students in a class are at the same level and may have different learning styles,

it can also be very difficult to get all students through consecutive stages without losing themin one of these loops and twists

If, on the other hand, we have one-on-one sessions or carefully selected small groups and look

at teaching in a non-linear way, how can we make sure to get people from A to B to C?

The honest answer: There is no guarantee in learning.

Some people learn quickly. Others slowly.

No rationalization or efficiency model will change human individualization.

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3 Teaching Skills For The 21st CenturyThere are many skills the educator of the future is going to need.

Notably, these include technical skills such as building and maintaining a webpage, using

VoiP technology, Social Media, etc.

But this is only the beginning!

Being technology-savvy, as important as it may seem, is not really a skill in itself.

It’s simply a prerequisite for other, more advanced skills.

Having said that, let’s take a look at 21st century skills that all implicitly use technology but go

far beyond:

1. Cross-Cultural Fluency

This is also often called “Cultural Literacy”. Due to globalization and students becoming more

and more mobile, cultures are increasingly overlapping and mixing.

Someone who has cross-cultural skills will be able to engage with people from many different

cultures without stepping on any toes or being overly-careful and therefore avoiding fruitful

discussions of difficult topics.

Wherever we are from, appreciation and knowledge of one culture alone is not enough.

Even if there isn’t an opportunity to travel to distant countries, it’s still possible to talk to

people from far away by bringing them into the classroom by voice and video.

Respecting cultures is one thing.

Another is not just appreciating other cultures in theory, but actually being able to navigate

their worldviews confidently and constructively.

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From the exposure to many different local cultures and traditions, notions of a “global cul-

ture” slowly but inevitably emerge and naturally replace “Us vs Them” with a more refined

“global identity”, which can only be defined by living it.

Kids growing up today are not going to live in nation states.

They will continue to be citizens of states but their activity (both online and offline) will go far

beyond borders.

The future will favour the cross-culturally skilled, both at the workplace and in personal rela-

tionships.

NOTE:

Individuals from the developed world are already experiencing a cultural vacuum. Local tradi-

tions, customs and religions are disappearing while mobility is increasing, whereas in the de-

veloping world, traditions, customs and religions are often as rigid as the inability to travel

and experience other cultures!

Bridging this gap will become an important challenge of the 21st century.

2. Information Literacy

Contrary to common opinion, information literacy doesn’t just refer to being able to use Office

or find stuff on Google.

Instead, it is closely linked to Media Literacy and could be described as follows:

The ability to understand, connect and evaluate different kinds of information from various

perspectives and media.

Kids of today are already accustomed to huge floods of information.

The importance of being able to use certain criteria to evaluate this data stream, rises in direct

proportion to the sheer of amount of articles, videos and audio they receive.

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These criteria (e.g. information vs. entertainment value or artistic presentation vs. structure &

content, simplification of complexity for the sake of exemplification vs. over-simplification,

etc.) shouldn’t be taught but instead derived from class room discussion and could be started

with questions like this:

“Why does this YouTube video have so many views? What is its information value compared

to its entertainment value? “

“Considering newspaper articles: How long is too long? Do you feel less threatened by

lengthy articles when they contain pictures? Why is that? What other design elements help

to structure long texts and make them readable for overtaxed brains? “

This skill also implies being able to come up with an “information diet”: carefully selecting

daily amounts and quantities and being aware of becoming either under-informed or over-sat-

urated.

Admittedly, this is a difficulty for both adults and youngsters. Hopefully, we can learn from

each other.

3. Producing Content

Theoretically, every student who passes high school should be able to write readable articlesand essays on a variety of topics without too many grammar or spelling mistakes.

Writing is an absolutely vital skill, even in the 21st century.

What has to be added, though, is a larger context!

We used to write on paper and published in journals and books.

Now we write on the Internet.

A text doesn’t stand for itself, anymore. The hyperlink and Social Media connect single words

and whole texts to other words and texts, so that one can literally "jump" through an endless

array of related information from different sources by following a trail of meaning.

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Also, texts increasingly contain non-textual content; they are either directly or indirectly con-

nected to images, video and audio and can easily change into an infographic, a script for a

video or podcast.

Therefore, after teaching the basics of text-production, teachers in the 21st century should in-

creasingly focus on digital content creation.

Again, simply teaching Powerpoint, Photoshop or programs like Audacity is not enough.

These technical skills have to be acquired while applying them, so that when passing high

school or some kind of equivalent, any student will (theoretically) be able to produce and pub-

lish a variety of different media from webpages to video animations.

Certainly, each student has different capacities and talents so that some will lean towards

writing while others will tend towards visual design. That’s only natural.

What is important, though, is to provide them with a context for their work and enable collab-

oration and synergies between different fields by connecting different disciplines such as pro-

gramming and poetry, drama and web design, etc.

Also, encouraging students to produce content for a real audience as opposed to merely satis-

fying classroom requirements can help prepare them to become active and responsible cit-

izens of the world of content creation and consummation.

NOTE:

Learning about content production and publishing methods and tools never stops.

Just as language changes, so does software. Students generally don’t have a problem keeping

up with rapid changes. It’s the teachers who really have to make an effort. Visiting a seminar

or conference on podcasting or blogging can be a good beginning but it’s no replacement forcontinuous engagement and learning.

Recent decades of specialization have produced an attitude of: “I’m not a programmer” or

“I’m not good with creating visuals”, shrugging off responsibility.

The 21st century will partly reverse this trend so that while everyone can and should specialize

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_content_creation









in a particular medium, everyone will also have a basic understanding and skills in other

areas.

Sounds daunting?

Kids are already doing it.

If we as educators want to teach them anything we had better raise the bar and catch up!

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The Myth Of The Super-Teacher & WhyMoney Alone Won’t Transform EducationIs it a bird?

Is it a plane?

No, it’s … the super-teacher who isn’t thrown off track by the most snot-nosed interruptions

from the back row.

It’s the intrepid educator who never loses his temper and will not rest until the last child has

fully understood the subject matter, even if they’re spending most of their lesson sending each

other Angry Birds rip-offs via Bluetooth.

But where is the super-teacher when you need him?

Why doesn’t he teach our children?

As Ellie Herman, a high school teacher, pointed out in an article in the LA Times, the Super-

Teacher is missing everywhere because he’s a myth.

He (or his super-human female variation she) is in no way less imaginary than Santa Claus

and his flying reindeer.

For in the same way flying reindeer would depend on either a suspension of gravity or an al-

teration of their delicate legs into full-fledged wings, the teacher has to rely on certain condi-

tions.

When The Rubber Meets The Road

When an average class holds about 30 children on a whole galaxy of different developmental

levels in terms of behavior and knowledge, who is supposed to bridge that?

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http://learnoutlive.com/the-myth-of-the-super-teacher-why-money-alone-wont-transform-education/www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-herman-class-size-20110731,0,3910343.story


http://learnoutlive.com/the-myth-of-the-super-teacher-why-money-alone-wont-transform-education/www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-herman-class-size-20110731,0,3910343.story





When one kid gets medication against ADD, the other one is suffering from a divorce drama

and a few others are making their first advances into puberty, teaching is the last thing you're

going to do.

Like many others, I’ve experienced these situations myself over many years.

On your contract it says you’re an English teacher. But in reality you’re the classroom ground-

skeeper or zookeeper, pick your poison.

Colleagues used to come to me to complain that their students had behavioral problems onsuch a scale that they were holding up everything and when talking to students’ parents they

were told it’s their own problem since they are the teachers.

No matter our opinions about such exchanges Who’s to blame for bad education? is not really

the question.

How to teach in ever-deteriorating public school conditions, that’s the question.

Is it even possible? What are the outlooks?

The Poor, The Rich And The Educated

It’s a fact that there are alternatives to public education.

And if we’re talking about private schools or private tutoring, paying parents – while not hav-

ing any more influence on the quality of the teacher – do guarantee certain conditions like

lower average number of students in a class, more availability of materials, etc.

It’s true that private schools do not automatically provide better teachers and teaching.

But neither can the best teacher work miracles in the worst of conditions.

As Ellie Herman points out, who works at a high school in Los Angeles: "I'll never be

excellent if we continue to slash education budgets and cut teachers."

We have all heard this argument many times.

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If there was only more money, public education would change for the better.

After all, we can see it with private institutions. Even if they have their own problems, they certainly aren’t doing worse, are they?

Private Teachers And Plasma-Screens

It’s not a secret that educational facilities (especially those funded by local governments) face

huge problems.

Classes with simply too many students and growing socioeconomic differences stretch teach-

ers beyond their psychological limits, leading to stress and eventual burn-out.

Money could employ more teachers.

To quote Herman again:”To teach each child in my classroom, I have to know each child in my classroom.”

This means that in order to teach all children, class-sizes would have to be low enough to en-

able a teacher to establish a one-on-one relationship with each one of them.

But where to draw the line? What’s the perfect ratio? 1:10? 1:5? Or the private 1:1?

Private tutoring is actually experiencing a revival at the moment.

The growing business developing around private online teaching sessions is enormous.

And prices don’t have to be astronomical.

In the end, it’s up to parents to decide whether to invest their time, effort (and money) in an

alternative to public education, or not.

These days, anyone who can afford to buy a plasma television and a smartphone contract can

afford a good private teacher, especially if they extend the search worldwide on an online

basis.

It’s a bit different than paying high monthly tuition-fees for private tutoring and then being

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rid of the responsibility.

It’s more like working closely with a teacher, establishing custom lesson plans either in placeof or in addition to the kids’ other obligatory schooling.

The moment when people will actually choose to hire a teacher instead of buying the next gen-

eration hi-definition TV, then we’ll see a shift.

What we need are not just higher budgets.

We need to re-evaluate the role of education on both a public and personal level.

What does it mean? Why are we doing it? Do we really care? Or would we rather just pay and

be rid of it ?

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Turning Tutors into Millionaires: The“Celebrity Teachers” from Hong Kong What if Lady Gaga helped your child to prepare for that next English test?

Imagine hiring Justin Bieber for an hour of homework help.

How much would they charge for one lesson?

In Hong Kong, it’s not the stars that are teaching. Here, the teachers themselves are the

stars. They earn up to $1.5 million a year, drive luxury cars and their white-toothed smiles

and glossy hairdos are gleaming from billboards all over the city, larger than life.

Needless to say, their lessons aren’t exactly cheap. But in Asia, grades and exams are

everything. For parents, no price is high enough. Half of Hong Kong’s students get profession-

al tutoring outside school. (source)

The “star teachers” and their businesses cater to this need. There’s intense competition. So

they market themselves in a similar way to the music or movie industry with the only differ-

ence being that while the latter are losing ground, these “star tutors” are doing better than

ever - throwing piles of money at promotion and raking in the profits.

Star tutors spare no costs on publicity. Even tutors who belong to one of the four major chains here must self-promote. But successful tutors can command hundreds of students. - csmonitor

There’s a certain principle here: As education systems are tumbling down, tutoring businesses go up. As I’ve written before, they are the vultures circling the carcass of a sys-

tem that has kicked the bucket. Positively speaking, they are a good indicator of how public

education is doing. If you are seeing too many of them, something is going very wrong.

The Hong Kong version of it is alarming in its aggressive marketing strategies. It raises such

questions as: What is the role of public education in a booming economy? Is it just

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http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2010/0302/In-Hong-Kong-star-tutors-earn-1.5-million-salaries


http://learnoutlive.com/the-uncomfortable-truth-about-tutoring/










the giver of grades, dispenser of certificates? What does it do?

In the West, we often like to see our education system as a prerequisite for economic growth, believing that our education lays the foundation and shapes the future of our economy. Hong

Kong shows a different picture. Here, public education can’t keep up with the rapid growth of

the economy. Therefore, a new education system, a parallel world of tutoring is born, one

that is modeled on the dynamics of the free market. And they seem to be doing well. Hong

Kong tutors provide the desired results to their clients: “exam skills”. And parents keep

shelling out mountains of money.

Many businesses in Europe and America are already doing the same. They aren’t necessarily

promoting teachers done up like Hollywood puppets - not yet, at least - but they are feeding

off parent’s needs to provide “good grades” and “pass exams”.

One could argue that public education has lost all means to make students reach the grades

and exams set up as national standards. A paradox? Not to private tutoring, for they dependon the system being broken! (The more students fail in public school, the more

they need help from these institutions.)

But this is just one side of it. Even if grades are sufficient, parents (especially in Asia) will

want their children to be the best . Which means: numbers, ratios: measurable success!

We invariably feel that the state of education should be measured in a similar way to the GDP.The effects of education must be demonstrated quantitatively, at all costs!

Hong Kong is at the forefront of this kind of thinking.

But America and Europe are not far behind. Tutoring has become an integral part of the edu-

cational landscape. At its core is the idea that both teachers and students are failing to meet

the official standards.

But instead of questioning the standards themselves, after all they are “god” .. excuse me ..

“government-given” there surely must be something wrong with the people.

And thus, the dog continues to chase its own tail.

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5 Questions Everybody Should Ask AboutEducation

1. Has Technology Become Part of Nature?There are two kinds of general approaches to technology and education these days:

- the classicist

Technology is understood as an intrusion into the traditional corpus of literacy, rhetoric, etc.

It has no function in the classroom except in specialized cases (such as computer and/or me-

dia studies) or as peripheral devices enabling screenings of educational videos, etc.

- the tech-head

This approach is the complete opposite and very popular among educational start-ups. The

idea here is that technology will magically improve education by removing the human factor

and making it interactive and fun.

…

Both of these approaches are not really an adequate response to the current situation.

Technology, to kids growing up today, is not something out of the ordinary which has to be

resisted or presented as a novelty.

Instead, it’s merely a part of everyday life. Not using it would be like refusing to eat and drink.

And presenting it as “revolutionary” would make just as much sense as advertising cutlery as a

life-changing way of eating.

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2. Is Collaboration The New Originality?

Closely linked to a changing understanding of media & technology is the concept of original

and rip-off, of creative thinking and mere copy & pasting, of individual intellectual property

and collaborative creativity.

Many teachers and professors are still not comfortable with the fact that there’s a lot of know-

ledge to be gained outside their classes, lectures or designated text-books.

In fact, by merely reading a Wikipedia article every day and following up and cross-checking

their data, a person could gain an extraordinary body of knowledge without ever setting foot

in a classroom.

But when a student copies and pastes a Wikipedia article and hands it in as an essay, that’s

something else.

Where are the boundaries between this copy-cat behavior and our somewhat romantic ideas

of “original thought”?

If all factual knowledge is just a click away, the demands made to students should shift.

Is an original thought something which is happening in a vacuum and out-of-context?

Or is every original thought based on other original thoughts?

What are the rules and regulations upon which a student is allowed or required to use and cite

his sources?

Should Creative Commons (or other models) be systematically taught?

What is the creative value of a “mash-up”, a remix?

Also, if someone can copy large parts of his university doctorate thesis and get an official seal

of approval from his university and only be found out many years later by non-institutional

volunteers, what does that say about the value of a doctorate and the university as a whole?

learnoutlive.com 25

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12608083


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12608083





3. Discovery Instead Of Lectures?

The widespread use of technology enforces a certain way of learning.

Many children will find out intuitively how to unlock certain functions of a program simply by

trial and error whereas older generations might be more cautious and demand reading a

manual first.

Actions like uploading a picture, refining your search keywords, dealing with privacy settings,re-setting your password and many other micro-actions have become as important as being

able to spell your name.

For many of us, using technology is not really an option. Whether we need to send a docu-

ment, book a flight, buy books or listen to music – we do it all by using the Net and techno-

logy.

While this does create a new psychological pressure it also helps to train a mindset of dis-

covery.

We don’t know what we are going to find when we Google something in the same way we used

to know what to expect when we asked for a certain book in the local library.

Therefore,constantly being presented with new data and new circumstances favours the intu-itive, not the normative learners.

This is not to say that students don't need to learn to find, sort and evaluate data. In fact, it's

more important than ever. High schools prepare students for library research and academic

rigour. And these skills are still important. The library, however, is only a small part of the

global growing body of knowledge.

One thing is for sure: In the future, technology will not become less important, the opposite

seems more likely.

But is the education of today preparing people to stand on their own two feet in this new

world?

learnoutlive.com 26

http://learnoutlive.com/who-can-survive-24-hours-without-internet/








4. Social Skills Over Mental Juggling?

When any factual knowledge can easily be retrieved through your phone or home computer,

there is no need to go to school or university simply for the sake of "downloading" informa-

tion. (There are still many other reasons to go - from discussion classes to workshops, etc. but

the bare facts can often be retrieved quicker and more directly by other means.)

Furthermore, one could say that education institutions have lost the monopoly on knowledge.

They are no longer the only source of high quality information.

Have they internalized this fact and accordingly shifted their emphasis to other areas?

Or are they still locked in debates trying to establish themselves as the true holders of know-

ledge while claiming that the Net and all of its endless resources is a mere rip-off source of un-

reliable lay-person work?

One of the areas that Internet and Technology can not (yet) supply is the exposure to a face-

to-face social environment.

Are teachers and professors capitalizing on this and engaging students in active social

participation, creating feedback and training scenarios – or are they trying to compete with

Information Technology instead?

5. Changing Classrooms For A Changing Future?

The future of work is uncertain, to say the least.

Already now, global unemployment is rising because machines have made many repetitivetasks obsolete.

If the role of education is to prepare people for the future, we need to know what the future

looks like.

But since everything is changing at such a breathtaking pace it’s hard to predict anything.

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http://learnoutlive.com/why-schools-shouldnt-be-the-only-answer-to-the-need-for-social-skills/


http://learnoutlive.com/hey-kids-were-on-a-road-to-nowhere/




http://learnoutlive.com/hey-kids-were-on-a-road-to-nowhere/





If this sense of uncertainty is the only certainty we have, what do we need to change about the

way we learn and teach?

On the other hand we can be relatively sure that technology will not go away. Information will

continue to accumulate. Communication will proliferate across all venues.

Taking all these factors together, what are the skills and requirements for the future?

There is a lingering hope that the past will return with all its predictable inevitability, leading

to economic stability, normal weather and diplomatic linearity.

But what if it doesn’t?

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Education Is A Cow That Anyone Can MilkThere’s the word: education.

And then there’s the actual work of education.

But all of too often never the twain shall meet.

It's unfortunate that while the learning conditions in many countries could be a lot better, of-

ten the only thing that improves over time are the speeches about education.

Talking The Walk And Walking The Talk

The word education is a standard part of politicians’ promises all over the planet.

Why?

It’s easy game.

By promising improvements in education a spokesman can reach…

• concerned parents who are worried about deteriorating conditions in school, not

enough teachers, too many students, etc

• teachers, academics and other educators who want to believe in improvements in their

professional environment

• market speculators and businesses in need of skilled personnel

Plus, and this is a big one, talking about education implies somewhat noble intentions.

It’s as if merely mentioning the word automatically makes a person a humanist, altruist, phil-

anthropist, etc.

It doesn’t have the bad ring of “money”, “industry” or “war”.

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But it's not just politicians who love the word. There are thousands of “education experts”

worldwide who make a living by talking or writing about education.

And as eloquent as their publications on the “state of national education”, their TV-interviews,

podium discussions, conferences and symposia may be, education, the work, doesn’t just ma-

gically improve.

Instead, talks about educations mostly just lead to one thing: more talks about education.

The Best Educators Are Like Ninjas

Despite everything said above, there are real educators all over the place.

They don’t wear a tag that says “super-teacher”.

They are the person sitting next to you on the bus, clutching a disposable coffee cup like mil-lions of other commuters.

They are, in fact, invisible.

In public they wear the common disguise of weariness and bland appearance.

But in their classrooms they move like lightning.

They are masters of communication, daily traversing the trenches of disinterest and lack of

concentration.

Dancing on the tightrope of authority and partnership they are twisting the verbal attacks of

rogue youth into learning opportunities, forging ties with class after class, solving conflicts

both big and small.

With one hand they are exemplifying the lesson’s content while warding off interruptions with

the other.

Many have fallen prey to alcoholism, burnout and mental hospitals.

And yet, there are those who continue unperturbed between classroom, teachers’ room and

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corridors.

They are half-hero, half-slave to the system.

Most of them go about their daily business with less-than-perfect conditions.

They have seen politician after politician preaching the gospel of “better education”.

And yet, nothing changed. There are still too many students, not enough teachers, etc.

One could say they are fighting a lost war.

And while education experts and politicians stand at their lecterns in their spotless suits talk-

ing about the “importance of edifying one’s mind” in lavishly-decorated conference halls,

teachers are running in between worn benches trying to get students to turn off their mobile

phones and listen, pay attention and learn for just a few moments.

Now, who really is the expert?

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The Impossible Crusade of Education Tech -nology Against The Human Spirit A few days ago, I re-watched the classic 1965 movie “The Slender Thread” in which a woman

played by Anne Bancroft tries to commit suicide and then calls a crisis centre hot-line where

everyone is furiously trying to pin-point her location in order to send an ambulance.

Apart from the intricate story which the woman slowly unfurls during her call, there’s another

thing which makes the movie so special: Antique technology and a look behind the scenes of

60's telephony.

As the crisis centre is trying to locate the caller’s location they first have to file an emergency

request through an operating centre (the place where dozens of women used to sit with head-

sets plugging and unplugging cables), which after being checked by the local police results in a

person physically wandering through relay racks and looking for the call with a flashlight, only

to find out that it’s coming from another switchboard to which they have to send another per-

son and so on and so forth.

The first thing that came to mind while watching this was that the movie was a greatshowpiece of long-obsolete jobs in the communication industry.

It’s another good example of the term technical unemployment : how slowly and silently occu-

pations that could be replaced by machines became extinct.

NPR compiled an interesting list of these occupations, among them: elevator operator, copy

boy, pinsetter and lamplighter.

Most of these jobs are about manual labor and were already wiped out decades ago.

But what about occupations involving mental labor? Are they next?

Will teachers and educators occupy the list of tomorrow’s obsolete occupations, doomed to ex-

tinction by the relentless steamroller of information technology?

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É

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124251060


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124251060





Why iPads Don’t Magically Make Shakespeares

If, on any given day, you check the Net for the latest news on education, there’s always a cer-

tain quantity of “revolutionary new technologies” and “disruptive tools” that promise to fun-

damentally change the way we learn.

Whether it involves replacing textbooks with iPads, using Twitter back-channels or using

100% automated language learning solutions like RosettaStone there’s a great underlying

hope that technology will somehow increase the quality of learning.

Ironically, when people speak of “quality education” they mostly refer to a quantification (!) of

knowledge as measured by scores and making people learn faster, not necessarily deeper, in

order to stay competitive and make learning as efficient as possible.

Now, add to this the fact that education technology is a huge, lucrative business! Many

education-startups are pressurized by investors to constantly fuel the hype with marketing

language and new products, apps and subscriptions in a carefree Silicon Valley way.

But there is no guarantee that iPads will make young kids want to read more instead of play-

ing Angry Birds or that Twitter will improve in-classroom communication constructively in-

stead of merely accelerating the slide into banter.

Neither is there any proof that using automated interactive language software helps people tolearn better.

Computers Are No Smarter Than A Gnat

Yes, sure, we have these “smart” algorithms crudely mimicking the way a teacher might re-

spond and repeat a particular topic until understood but if you look at the current state of

artificial intelligence, it’s far from being intelligent.

From my own experiences with this kind of automated language learning software I always

thought that this is how the Orang Utans must feel when put in front of touch-screens to push

the right color before they get a banana.

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EDUCATION IS A COW THAT ANYONE CAN MILK ANDRÉ KLEIN 2011

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44384057/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/

http://t.co/l04LbTV

http://learnoutlive.com/the-brightest-minds-of-my-generation-are-building-fast-food-education-startups/

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/schools-ditch-books-for-ipads-wont-solve-todays-reading-crisis/12683

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnzlbyTZsQY&feature=player_embedded



http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44384057/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/

http://t.co/l04LbTV


http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/schools-ditch-books-for-ipads-wont-solve-todays-reading-crisis/12683







Push right – smiley face, fanfare sound.

Push wrong – sad face, tuba sound.

That’s about as “smart” as these allegedly intelligent technologies get in reality.

Sometimes it can help to drill a bit of vocabulary. Then again, language learning is not a boot-

camp.

Ultimately, it only insults the intelligence of the user, whether human or primate.

Also, there is the question of how you can learn a language which is a form of human interac-

tion by using a software that lacks.. well… human interaction.

Therefore, as promising as it might seem to strip the human factor from the equation, it will

eventually backfire, especially considering the disagreements and confusions around what

learning is actually supposed to be.

When The Tinkertoy Stops Being Exciting

While the climate around education technology is still largely dominated by the Silicon Valley

gold-rush mentality and the large number of individuals influenced by this techno-babble

bubble, more and more people lately are beginning to voice concerns and weariness regardingthe trumpeting of superficial change.

A commenter on a blog post about 21st century learning skills put it like this:

Using a computer doesn’t automatically mean someone is learning. But neither does using a pencil, a whiteboard marker or a chisel. Put the learningahead of the technology and that’s where the great teaching is found.

And this is where it gets interesting.

If learning is the highest priority, what does it actually mean?

It’s easy to create another app and promise people to learn languages faster, easier and

without interacting with real people. (That’s the job of the marketing and development de-

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EDUCATION IS A COW THAT ANYONE CAN MILK ANDRÉ KLEIN 2011

http://www.connectedprincipals.com/archives/4458#comment-21007








partment, the parts of start-ups that are usually perfectly in tune with each other.)

But there are a million questions here, such as: How does the way a human being learns differfrom the way software “learns”?

What motivates learning? Smiley faces and fanfare sounds? Or the direct feedback and

encouragement of another human being?

What about animals? What can we learn about the way they acquire new skills and how does

it differ from our way of learning?

For hundreds and thousands of years human beings have been collecting knowledge, learning

and experimenting.

The ever-smaller, ever-faster computer, one of our younger accomplishments in the history of

modern technological feats, seems to have brought with it a curious predicament:

Not only did it make our lives easier but also we have begun to rely on these new technologies

on such a scale that thinking, feeling and communicating on our own has become a daunting

prospect.

How can technology possibly be the answer to a growing over-reliance on technology?

Education technology will be very limited if not actively obstructive until educators have

defined very clear goals and functions for each of these tools that are not merely self-referen-

tial, i.e. technology for technology's sake.

In other words: until we find ways to define basic premises and goals in education aside from

the blind chorus of bigger and faster, there’s no use bringing in more technology.

A good way to start is by thinking about skills.

If you compare a human and a computer side-by-side, one is left with the question: What are

specifically human skills?

Quickly storing and retrieving information?

Or thinking creatively, self-reflection and emphatic communication?

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EDUCATION IS A COW THAT ANYONE CAN MILK – ANDRÉ KLEIN 2011





EDUCATION IS A COW THAT ANYONE CAN MILK ANDRÉ KLEIN, 2011

Once the answer is clear, we can come up with a division of responsibilities instead of trying to

be like computers or forcing machines to mimic our own behavior.

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,

3 Reasons Why Technology Won’t Trans-form Public Education According to Wikipedia it was in the early 60's that a university first experimented with us-

ing computers to teach kids maths.

That's over 50 years ago. That’s half a century!

According to technologists, the problem is that schools simply aren’t exposed enough to it to

work its magic.

Only when every kindergarten child has an iPad will we know for sure!

Right?

We might be terribly wrong.

1. U.S. Education-Statistics Are Down

The biggest players in the computer industry are from the United States.

And it’s not just Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook or Twitter. Also, most of the more well-

known start-ups in the education sector are built and based in the U.S.

Since all of that speaks in favor of American entrepreneurialism, one would think that if

there’s any country in the world that would show the fruits of technology in education, thenthe U.S. should be it.

The over-all exposure to, and acceptance of, technology is relatively high. Online learning

courses are an official part of many American Universities and study programs.

Unfortunately, if you take a look at the numbers, education is not sky-rocketing in America.

learnoutlive.com 37


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-learning#History


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-learning#History




Here’s a statistic from the Broad Foundation

Here’s another one:

“Since 1971 , educational spending in the U.S. has grown from $4,300 to $9,000 per student.

But reading and math scores have flatlined.”

According to a study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and

Development ”the U.S. was placed 25th out of 30 countries in math performance and 21st in

science performance.”

Will replacing textbooks with iPads really create a magical shift or result in the same pic-ture of spending with no change?

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http://broadeducation.org/

http://urbanschoolfoundation.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/the-united-states-shocking-education-statistics/

http://www.studentsfirst.org/pages/the-stats


http://www.oecd.org/home/0,2987,en_2649_201185_1_1_1_1_1,00.html


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44384057/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/t/many-us-schools-adding-ipads-trimming-textbooks/



http://broadeducation.org/

http://urbanschoolfoundation.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/the-united-states-shocking-education-statistics/








2. Feeding Off The Need for A Major Paradigm Shift With Toys

The problems of education systems in the U.S. and many European countries are far from

simple.

As we've discussed before one of the problems is that our schools are run like factories. That

worked for the Industrial Age but doesn’t work for our times.

It has been said many times that our education systems need to be updated.

But just buying expensive gadgetry and transferring timetables to the Internet is not enough.

It’s not even close to enough.

It’s a bad joke, in fact, like dressing a steam-locomotive up like a bullet-train while leaving its

innards untouched and then expecting it go 200 miles per hour.

Sure, it seems almost impossible to change the established structures of the “old system”.

Maybe it is. But putting all the money on the tech-horse won’t change the fact that we need

more than toys.

3. Compartmentalization instead of CommunicationHave you ever wondered what made Isaac Newton such a genius?

He was not just a physicist and outstanding mathematician but also a nature philosopher,

theologian and ... yes …alchemist.

What about Einstein, the father of modern physics?

He was not a science-nerd either but wrote more than 150 non-scientific publications.

How many physicists and chemists today will graduate well-versed in literature, theology,

philosophy and the arts?

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http://learnoutlive.com/trust-toys-and-technophobia-in-online-learning/

http://www.alchemylab.com/isaac_newton.htm


http://learnoutlive.com/trust-toys-and-technophobia-in-online-learning/

http://www.alchemylab.com/isaac_newton.htm




One might argue that there is no direct correlation between university and becoming a genius,

maybe best illustrated by the current drop-out culture and people like Steve Jobs and Mark

Zuckerberg.

So the issue is not primarily what educational institutes teach, but the idea of an over-special-

ized lopsided education they project.

In trying to measure competitiveness in national education, statistics generally look at the

subjects of science and basic reading and calculus.

Rarely is there a study that ranks countries based on their knowledge of French literature, An-

thropology or even Social Studies.

Mostly, it’s hard sciences like physics, chemistry, engineering, etc.

Why?

They are “competitive”. In other words: They can easily be turned into money and political ad-

vantages, therefore governments are eager to support universities' engineering faculties while

neglecting philological faculties.

Another way to understand this is by looking at the highest paying degrees. All of them are

hard-science related. And the lowest-paying ones are mostly education-related.

Now, back again to Newton: everyone knows that he was a genius.

But maybe what made him so smart is that he wasn’t just being a left-brained nerd but en-

gaged his mind in a broad variety of different topics?

It would be an understatement to say that the nerd of today has become culturally accepted.

He/she has become a cultural phenomenon!

If you’re as terribly good with numbers as you are bad with people, you can even be proud of

this disability and join a Silicon-Valley startup.

And while that may work as a business-strategy, education should not be about developing a

one-track mind, or should it?

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http://learnoutlive.com/when-digging-for-oil-is-more-important-than-teaching-children/




http://learnoutlive.com/when-digging-for-oil-is-more-important-than-teaching-children/





Is there, in fact, a chance that we'll experience a sort of renaissance in education that will

cherish all kinds of forms of learning and discovery, or will our unsolicited studies have to re-

treat into the crevices of our busy schedules while educational institutions are becoming moreand more simply result-oriented diploma-factories?

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A Culture Of Isolated ApproachesIt has become common sense that we have not just one, but two brains - or to be more precise:

two specialized parts of the brain. This understanding has become known as "brain lateraliza-

tion" or "hemispheric brain function". It has become heavily popularized but rarely do we see

actual applications of this knowledge.

Also, the generalizations are so widespread, e.g.: "left brain = structural, right brain =

‘artistic’, etc." that it’s often hard to talk about it without falling prey to over-simplification.

Like many valuable insights in our culture, this too has been trivialized into "fridge-magnet"

slogans and hollow platitudes. Everybody claims to "be aware" of it, yet through a kind of un-

reflected popularization we often render certain understandings impotent to effect genuine

and sustainable development.

Damaged Goods

Let’s take a look at the mapping of major language centers in the brain for a second.

It all started when Pierre Paul Broca, a French physicist discovered that one of his patients who had a severe speech disorder (he couldn’t say anything else than “tan”) suffered from a

lesion in the left frontal lobe of his brain.

Later the German Karl Wernicke found out that if patients had damages in their brain in a dif-

ferent place, they didn’t have any problems to produce speech motorically but they couldn’t

comprehend what was being said!

Like colonies, the two previously unmapped areas now were called Broca/Wernicke. What do

the discoveries of Broca & Wernicke have in common? My professor in neurolinguistics once

summarized it as follows: “If it can be broken, it must have a function.”

Imagine you are a visitor from the jungle without exposure to modern civilization and one day

you stumble over a functioning computer. You want to find out how it works.

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So you start destroying parts of it. When certain parts of it don’t work anymore you assume

that the one that you destroyed must have had this or that function. But since it’s now broken

you need to get a new one to confirm this understanding.

While I don’t want to imply that the two physicians actively destroyed parts of patients’ brains

to acquire an understanding (mostly they looked at autopsies), their (and others') research is

often based on observing damage.

Now, if we go back to our jungle man and his computer, he will be able to gain isolated under-

standing of certain parts but by merely deducing from brokenness he will never gain an un-derstanding of the whole.

Holistic Approaches to Learning

Our whole education system sits on the premise of "understanding in isolation". At least in the

West, this is how we learn, traditionally. We look at a situation to isolate the problem. Then

we try to "fix" it or to deduce general rules and patterns. It has brought us great advances in

science, economics, etc. But we might just have reached the end of the ladder.

In a globalized world, we need global thinking and global understanding. Not just

in a geographical sense, but in a psychological one, as well.

What that means for the brain is that however you want to classify all the different parts of it

(left/right hemisphere, Broca/Wernicke centers, etc.) merely mapping them is not sufficient

because the map is not the territory. It might help to identify certain problems, localize and

maybe find solutions to them, but until we don't actively employ these different functions in

action, it is mere theorization.

In other words: Knowledge doesn’t always equate with understanding. Informa-tion doesn’t automatically lead to learning. Here is an example:

• We are living in the information age. We have an almost infinite access to information about

health. Yet, as the Journal of Nutrition wrote in 2010 “nearly the entire U.S. population

consumes a diet that is not on par with recommendations”

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http://nutritionalhealthandwellness.blogspot.com/2010/08/does-average-american-diet-provide.html









Scatterbrains & Non-Sequential Thinking

If you read a recipe for a cheesecake, the end-point is clearly defined and the whole text only

leads to one thing: the cake.

The same is true if you have a piece of "opinion politics" where the author from the beginning

has a fixed view on things and tries to convince you (which is the true meaning of rhetoric, by

the way) that his point is right.

There are many other examples. But the article which you are reading right now, and the rest

of my writing, for that matter, has a completely different approach.

While I do have very deliberate outlook from the beginning, I’m not interested in turning the

exposition of understanding into an autopsy, which would imply that it (understanding) is

already dead.

In teacher’s training in university we were taught to plan every five minutes of a class. We

were supposed to set learning goals for these 5-minute sections, make predictions of how the

students will react and then reverse-engineer a lesson-plan which successfully leads to these

goals. This rarely works in a classroom, however, because understanding is not a product. It's

a process.

Learning is not about instilling pre-packaged knowledge in someone else’s brain as if in-stalling a software.

Unfortunately, this is often the standard approach.

Holistic education, as noted in the introduction, can be understood as a form of open-ended

human development. It's not a matter of indoctrination or a means of reaching a fixed end-

point.

In terms of methodology, holistic learning can be such that it draws the learner into a creative

process by systemically leaving gaps that cannot be bridged by sequential or pure logical

thinking but demand an independent effort from the recipient's side.

While we are generally aware of "learning through discovery" (just another slogan?), it is by

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no means at the center of mainstream-education. Instead, we have come to expect everything

to be pre-packaged, prepared and served to us on a silver platter. Education should be like en-

tertainment, best enjoyed with the least effort.

This is not learning, though. This is simply consuming knowledge.

Switching Attention

A non-sequential approach to teaching for example will often look at the same thing from dif -ferent angles to encourage lateral thinking or serendipity.

By switching attention and looking at a topic from all sides as if we’re walking around it we

slowly discover a three-dimensional grasp of it, so to speak.

It seems to me that many of us have never learned or even thought it worthwhile to use our

minds in a more holistic way. On the one hand we have people who are over-structural, over-linear and pedantic in their approaches and on the other hand of the spectrum we have

people, often influenced by Far-Eastern methods, who simply believe that “thinking is bad “ -

not to mention those who subscribe to modes of “apathy” or “righteous indignation”.

All of these assumptions can be understood as barriers to learning.

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ConclusionThere are no universally-accepted norms or guiding ideas in education, today. Aberration has

become the norm. Some people are trying to usher in new technology-driven paradigms while

others fight for reversion back to analog.

Public education is going downhill. Private teaching is experiencing a revival.

The job-market demands fewer and fewer people with more and more skills and knowledge.

If education is supposed to be the process of acquiring the necessary competencies for thriv-

ing in tomorrow's world, a comprehensive education must address and prepare for all of the

above.

The faster and more erratic the changes in the world, the more ingenious and differentiatededucational efforts have to become. Individuals and parents cannot rely on institutions alone.

Choosing the right institution or private teacher for a specific individual and goal may prove

to become more important than conforming to arbitrary curriculum requirements.

The only guarantee for a good education will be based on the parents' or individuals' time, ef-

forts and finances invested in these matters above and beyond minimum requirements.

The education of the future won't be a passive endeavor. When information is abundant, cre-

ativity and communication rise in importance.

This is the real paradigm shift that education technology delivers only indirectly.

Machines won't replace psychological development and refinement.

And juxtaposed, we will eventually find out what sets us apart and makes us human.

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Special ThanksThis publication was made possible with the generous help of many volunteers, in no particu-

lar order:

María Inés Brumana - eltgoestothemovies.blogspot.com

Sylvia Guinan - salis.gr/wordpress

Mihad Ali - mihadali.com

Michael A. Gyori - mauilanguage.com

Laura Harlow - mauilanguage.com

Jo Furniss - jofurniss.wordpress.com

Sumeer Chadha - albereez.blogspot.com

Niklas Pedersen - www.passwithnik.tk

Erika Zeinerova - zeinerova.blogspot.com

Mike Hohnen - mikehohnen.com

Eti Shani - hebrew.learnoutlive.com

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http://eltgoestothemovies.blogspot.com/


http://salis.gr/wordpress/

http://mihadali.com/

http://mauilanguage.com/default.aspx



http://jofurniss.wordpress.com/


http://albereez.blogspot.com/

http://www.passwithnik.tk/


http://zeinerova.blogspot.com/


http://mikehohnen.com/

http://hebrew.learnoutlive.com/



http://salis.gr/wordpress/

http://mihadali.com/




http://albereez.blogspot.com/



http://mikehohnen.com/

http://hebrew.learnoutlive.com/




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