(this is just today's post from my blog, which I thought some here might find interesting)

A concept of what we’re doing in education, and what counts as learning, that I often hear when I’m talking to people is ‘the teacher (or the textbook or whatever) tells you a whole bunch of facts, and you try to memorise as many as possible, and then you have a test to see how many you remembered’. I use the metaphor of a bunch of coins to think about that one - the teacher gives you a handful of coins, and you try to catch as many as you can. In the test you show how many you caught and managed to hold onto. (And later on you get to spend those coins, i.e. use those facts, in your life (but maybe some of them are in old currencies that are no longer useful, and others are for countries you never go to, metaphorically speaking)).

I think a lot of education can be like that, particularly in primary and high school, and more so in the ‘olden days’ when people my age where going to school than now. But I don’t think that’s a particularly useful form of education these days. Google (or the search engine of your choice) basically means that any fact you might need is at your fingertips almost instantly any time you might need it. In that situation, memorising facts is one of the most useless things you can do with your time. Rather, what you need is skills in judging the quality of the information you find. To continue the metaphor above, there’s essentially a never-ending ATM with all the coins you could ever need… but the catch is that some of them are counterfeit. In that situation, carrying coins is not a particularly useful skill, but being able to distinguish the real from the fake is crucial.

(There’s another reason the memorisation idea of schooling is not particularly good: it means that those who succeed in school are basically those with good memories. But memory is not the same as intelligence or creativity or hard work - and those latter three things are much better predictors of success in life than a good memory.)

So the image I often use instead is of a photographic filter - a coloured (or smoked, or polarised, or star-filtered, or…) piece of glass that is placed in front of the lens and changes the view. Using the filter allows you to see things about the world that were there all along, but that you couldn’t see before, in the same way that wearing Polaroid sunglasses will allow you to see fish beneath the surface of a river that you couldn’t see without the glasses on because of the glare off the surface of the water. If you really understand Newton’s Laws of Motion, for example, the way you understand and interpret the motion of a car (or any other object) will be different compared to if you’re not looking at the world through that filter. Similarly, a particular political or religious viewpoint will filter the way you see the world. Every new filter brings some things into sharp focus - like the fish - but forces other things out of our awareness - like the sparkle of the sun on the water. So each new filter is a trade-off, and one of the important skills is to be able to use several different filters, taking them on and off, in order to be able to see more features of a particular situation.

How would thinking about education in this way - as gaining new filters and skills in their use, rather than as collecting coins - change your ideas and assumptions?