Dear Varun,
Sorry for the late response to your last letter. Part of it was the busiest of the semester but the main reason I took so long was because I was stumped by your questions. I know that you have been thinking about what is education and how we should educate Vishva for a while now. And I’ve been listening but more passively. I haven’t really had any thoughts of my own. That is, until we listened to the under the tree podcast. I was really inspired by the episode we listened to because it offered not alternative ways of education but about rethinking what education even is and suddenly I understood more deeply your passion for this project. I guess up until then, while I nodded yes that we should rethink education, I really didn’t understand or hadn’t actually thought much about what that meant or how it could look.
Here are the things I got from the podcast and that I want to think out loud with you:
- We need to reimagine how we assess education. In some schools we have gotten rid of exams in favor of portfolios but the issue remains the same – we are evaluating the individual teacher and student and determining how successful they are at meeting certain criteria. Instead, we should think about how we might assess education by evaluating how we contribute to the greater project of education. We’ll come back to this point later because it of course requires us thinking through what exactly is education.
- We need to rethink what should be curriculum. Instead of content delivery, how can I make it relevant to the issues of today? One approach might be thinking through how we can create clusters of concerns – the environment, mental health, etc.
- The purpose of education is movement building. So what are things that we think are important to know/understand in the world today? How can we contribute to the world? What does it mean to center our education around that?
So what I understood is that instead of imagining education as the fixed thing with perhaps some flexible parts or some “applied areas” which is primarily how I was thinking about it before, we should understand the education system to be in flux all the time, constantly moving and shifting, responding to the current needs.
If we are going to educate Vishva at home – actually scratch that – regardless of whether we are educating Vishva at home, we need to answer those last set of questions. And to be honest, I’m still struggling or I should say simply thinking about how to answer those questions. Like I think it’s important to understand orientalism but is it an answer to “what things are important to know/understand in the world today?” And if yes, what does it mean to teach that? At all levels, ages? In a variety of ways? It’s more than just reading Said. So I find myself confused and that alone tells me the importance of the project but it still doesn’t give me full clarity.
I mean when I think of the list of things I wish I understood better in order to make sense of the current climate of the world, I think a lot of it has to do with the global economics, trade, technology, construction of disciplinary mechanisms like prisons etc. But when I think about what it means to forge a path with that knowledge, I can’t imagine anything other than what my education was + some additional topics + physically visiting places around the world. That can’t be right can it?
How did you answer those questions? What are your thoughts? You have done so much reading at this point about the variety of philosophies of education – has anything become clearer in your head?