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I’m doing an early, draft release of this blog post. I really want to share this now rather than wait for perfection. It’s me being creative . When I get more sleep, I’ll revise for mistakes.

There are three YouTube videos posted this year which, after watching, is helping me redefine what education should be, not just what it should not be.

• A Vision of Students Today: “If students learn what they do, what are they learning sitting here [silently in straight rows facing a speaker at the front of the room?]“
• Ken Robinson on creativity: “Creativity is important as literacy and we should treat it with the same status. … If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original… We are educating people out of their creative capacities.”
• Jeff Hawkins on brain theory: “We have an intuitive, strongly held but incorrect assumption that is preventing us from seing the answer: … that intelligence is defined by behavior”.

So after watching Jeff Hawkins, let me ask you: what are the intuitive strongly held beliefs about intelligence & what education should be that is keeping us from making a better education system?

I don’t know for sure, but I think a parallel can be drawn between Mr. Hawkins critique of the behavior model of the brain and the feeling we don’t like about K-12, under-graduate education: the industrial, mechanical, “provide input and analyze quality of output” process. Jeff Hawkins contributes his own model of brain theory by talking about observing, learning, elaborating and predicting patterns. But how can our brains learn patterns if most of what we do is repeating what was said and not learning to recognize patterns and make new links?

That’s where I feel Ken Robinson provides the, or part of, the answer: “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original… We are educating people out of their creative capacities.” The education process has to allow students to better explore their world, learn by trying and prepare them to make mistakes. What if the process of education was a collaborative one instead of a competitive one?

Education: just an idea

So, does that mean that the Bachelor should be just like a graduate degree? Well, maybe. What if the bachelor had better degrees of freedom? What if students were free to roam campus, find a teacher who is interested in the same topics as he/she was and that teacher agreed to grade the paper. The student would be free to put in as many or as little papers as he / she wants. He/she could also consult with other teachers for input. Wikis would help in matching students that are interested in specific lectures, so teachers would know if there is sufficient interest to give a lecture. If its a small class size they can even get an idea whats the background of each person coming in class. But then again, I guess there are too few teachers for every undergrad student for such an idea?

I could see it being very daunting once a student arrives at university when in the rest of K-12 kids were just taught to “follow along”. Then again, I’ve met some very bright people that simply don’t perform in K-12, so maybe the rest of K-12, as Ken Robinson advances, should be changed.

Lack of funds

What if research was less dependent on government and corporate funding? What if a research project could be defined collaboratively, the funds raised collaboratively - there has to be people in Ottawa looking for the same answers as is Mexico - and the results published wide open?

My experience as a student

I was very greatfull to have courses on C, Java and software quality assurance. But beyond that, I felt I learned more outside of engineering rather than in the faculty: making the links between politics and technology with the “Getting Open Source Into Government” group, the history class for engineers, organizing a presentation on being a green citizen in Ottawa. In a manner of speaking, it was making the *links* between the *patterns* of technology and the *patterns* of society where learning happened the most.

So where is the money going?

The same site that published “A Vision of Students Today” also published “A Vision of Professors Today”. Two questions:

• If students are putting in so much money and yet the teachers are not being paid enough, where is the money going? I’m not pointing the finger at teachers at all. I’m saying money is being wasted on something else and we should know what. Fortunately, universities in Ontario are subject to Access to Information Act .
• If *both* teachers and students are spending so much time in a process they feel is time wasted, then there must be way to make the process more efficient for both parties. Taking that particular perspective, I think there is much merit to the above idea, that is, giving the under-graduate much greater flexibility where she spends her time.

What happens to engineering?

The challenge I see is engineering and other professional degrees in Canada: the councils (more aptly called “Orders” in French) of engineers need for their very existence to industrialize the education process with a very defined curriculum. Oh well, too bad for the traditional engineers, industrialism is out, interdisciplinary is in. Time for the P.Engs to catch up. Its about recognizing patterns now, not just repeating one. Or at the very least, oblige civil engineers to make bridges out of pasta.

Last, but not least

… oh, and if I can just add my Green Party blurb to the whole thing, class sizes would be smaller with tax shifting, because labor would be cheaper by shifting taxes off of income and payroll taxes. Education, after all, is a sustainable & renewable resource. Hence, more teachers per student, smaller classes.