Is the Education System Damaging Education

Like many organisations and systems the education system is constrained by systems of measurement.

To examine a subject we need content, a syllabus and meaningful measures of performance. A major argument is that education has become about passing tests rather than learning and that the tests define education by limiting that which can be taught.

The recent comment from Professor Lachlan MacKinnon about the content of ICT taught in schools is bound to raise a debate.  

 

The education system has a problem – on the one hand it is being asked to be more flexible, to change and innovate yet on the other hand the measures it has to satisfy have to be static and stable to be meaningful.

 

 Education should be more about learning rather than teaching – developing self study, research, collaboration, presentation – ACTIVE LEARNING.  The future of learning will probably have less and less to do with being taught.

 

By focusing more on the process of learning rather than teaching we may have a chance to introduce the flexibility we are being asked for. Learning skills can then still be applied to specific tasks in order to measure outcomes (exams/tests).

 

The typical school ICT syllabus is most likely to cover old fashioned client-server or if lucky web 1 systems but is unlikely to include anything on “cloud computing” – indeed many web 2 and cloud systems would be banned.  If we were to focus more on achieving particular tasks rather than teaching particular systems we would have opportunities to make ICT education more relevant