By and large, schools today are judged by their capacity to successfully deliver content. That means that day in and day out students are busy accumulating information, committing that information to memory and periodically reproducing it on demand. The more accurately a significant percentage of the student body can reliably reproduce content, the more successful is the teacher and the school. This extraordinarily narrow focus on content delivery in educational practice reflects an alarming disregard for a child’s natural curiosity, imagination and initiative, not to mention their need to be resourceful and collaborative. In content driven education, students do learn certain skills, like note-taking and test-taking, but the greatest lessons gleaned have less to do with academics and more to do with challenges such as how to adapt to month after month of monotonous busywork.
When content delivery takes priority at school, educators typically rely heavily on teacher-centered instructional approaches. In a handful of schools around the world, robots are now deployed and tested with the idea that one day they will assume some of the responsibilities normally associated with classroom teaching. These interactive machines are already instructing children in vocabulary and other simple skills. Robots win praise for their unlimited degree of patience and the amount of information they can store. In an article in New York Times titled “Students, Meet Your New Teacher, Mr. Robot”, they say, “… the most advanced models are fully autonomous, guided by artificial intelligence software like motion tracking and speech recognition, which can make them just enabling enough to rival humans at some of the teaching tasks.”
The outsourcing of teaching to robots is only feasible when teaching itself is regarded as a means of effective content delivery and little else. More and more, parents, are seeing themselves and their children as consumers and schools as suppliers of a service called ‘a good education’. Robotics might one day help ensure quality control in what amounts to in the minds of some a basically mechanical service. In any case, it’s quite obvious that if the significance of education is to help nurture the intelligence necessary to meet the challenges of life, then teaching cannot be reduced to such a mechanical process.
In his book, Education and the Significance of Life, Jiddu Krishnamurti makes the reason for this clear; “Conflict and confusion results from our own wrong relationship with people, things, and ideas, and until we understand that relationship with and alter it, mere learning, the gathering of facts and the acquiring of various skills, can only lead us to engulfing chaos and destruction.” (J Krishnamurti 1953).
Instruction that helps the student accumulate knowledge is one of the responsibilities inherent in teaching. Krishnamurti, however, saw education in a larger social context and therefore considered the role of the educator, and his or her responsibilities, in that light. He warned that without self-understanding, humans are far too aggressively, self-interested, both individually and collectively, to empower with highly sophisticated intellectual capacities. Aside from academic study, education must therefore also nurture an awareness of conditioning. That awareness is stimulated, not by academic presentations, but in the mirror of relationship. For this process to be alive, students must be alive; in other words, children must be actively thinking and interacting in the classroom. Traditional educational approaches simply do not allow for this.
Elevating the role of a student from passive consumer to inquisitive participant requires teachers to redefine their role as well. Unlike conventional educational practices where the teacher is an authority who delivers content and dictates procedures (obviously, a Robot can do this job better), the human teacher should work along with a child’s thinking, to stimulate interest and provide meaningful contexts in which those interests can yield academically relevant understanding.
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Copyright / Fair Use
Phoenix | Revolutionary Minds, Paul Herder
Krishnamurti Foundation India | Education and the Significance of Life – J. Krishnamurti, 1953
New York Times | Students, Meet Your New Teacher, Mr. Robot: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/science/11robots.html?mcubz=1