Its official - Size does matter! Pluto is no longer a planet, or so we are told. Now we are told that it is too small to be a planet. We are told this despite Pluto remaining the same size it has always been! At school we learned it was a planet, but now children will learn that it’s not. Textbooks will need to be re-written, astrology charts need to be redrawn. Children will have to remember that the number of planets in our solar system is one less than it was six months ago. Another useless piece of knowledge has changed.
There are some that say that whether Pluto is now a planet or not - does not matter and to the vast majority of us it doesn’t. However it plays havoc with our schooling system which measures success by students being able to remember useless and meaningless knowledge. In our system a child is seen as an empty pot that is filled by the school to become part of a batch of beings adhering to the same ideology and approach to life.
I still remember lots of useless information pumped into me at school. Most of which is irrelevant or downright wrong today. Superseded by advances in computing, genetics, astronomy, biochemistry, physics – everything! The status of Pluto is only the latest change in a knowledge base that is completely different from fifty years ago. Yet our approach to education has not changed very much at all in that time, and though the syllabi slowly changes to accommodate new knowledge – irrelevant facts are not replaced but are an add-on to an already over crowded subject area. As a result our text books and subject areas get bigger and bigger and bigger!
Some school subjects change more drastically and with more frequency than others. In our schools our history changes with every new party in Government, but history is not alone in constantly changing. Rapid change is the defining characteristic of the present era, and it often makes the individual accumulation of knowledge a massive waste of time.
In most other countries a radically different approach to our 19th century textbook method has been adopted. There, education encourages children to see themselves as a fount of information and knowledge about their immediate world, and they are encouraged to work with classmates and teachers and learn from their own experiences so that they can develop strategies together to change their situation.
In this approach, teachers start by drawing out each child’s experience and then the whole class looks for shared patterns of experience and knowledge. Once this has been done the children are helped and encouraged to add new information and ideas and to look at their experiences in different ways.
Then they are helped to practice skills, and plan for action to change themselves and their situation.
Education for these children moves from experience to analysis, and from analysis to encouraging collective action to change, and with the changed situation to reflection and evaluation. No need for textbooks, no need for examination, no need for competition. Children learn what is important to them, and most have no need for knowing that Pluto is no longer a planet…
