"I never teach my pupils;
I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn."  Albert Einstein

I have been listening to an interview with Oliver Sacks on his new book, Musicophilia. He mentions that much more of the brain is recruited for music than for language.  There is no one spot where a neuroscientists goes to access music from the brain.  Music pulls from many, many parts.  Music, Sacks asserts is innate, even for those who like myself, are musically challenged.

I recall hearing about a prisoner who kept himself sane by understanding the idea that "Once one gets deeply into a subject, he discovers that it relates to everything else in the universe."  In deed, this soldier's mind was able to take untold learning journeys that kept him not only sane, but enlightened under the most awful of external realities.  No one told him what to learn next, or how to connect. His mind took him on these explorations.

Both of these stories reveal the awesome innate abilities that each of us have inside us. Yet, almost all schooling assumes that learning comes from the outside and fights its way into our brains so that we can grow up knowing what we need to know...

"Beginning with Seymour Papert's simple observation that children are knowledge workers like any adult, only more so, we decided they needed a user-interface tailored to their specific type of knowledge work: learning. So, working together with teams from Pentagram and Red Hat, we created SUGAR, a “zoom” interface that graphically captures their world of fellow learners and teachers as collaborators, emphasizing the connections within the community, among people, and their activities." From the One Laptop Per Child website, 2007

 
I have my own OLPC computer now. It sits on my desk beside my MacBook.  It looks like an interesting toy ... something that you might get at Toys R Us. And yet, it is extremely sophisticated in its simplicity.  It is indeed a disruptive technology, not because of its design and power (which is powerfully advanced) but because of how it is designed to be used.   Right from the start, the designers of the laptop assumed that children know how to learn and they learn best from each other or by emulating others. They learn because they are curious, playful, and interested in life.  The OLPC does not assume that learning is a scarce commodity ... that only the wealthy can afford to be well educated. In fact, it is distinctly against the model that says children learn by being taught by a teacher.  To me, it is a wonderful experiment, and if it can scale, I am betting that it makes a wonderful contribution to our understanding of how and why learning happens.

“To learn is to change. Education is a process that changes the learner... Learning involves interaction between the learner and his environment, and its effectiveness relates to the frequency, variety and intensity of the interaction. Education, at best is ecstatic.”      George Leonard, Education and Ecstasy, 1976

I read Leonard's book in 1976 and knew it would become a classic.  He made strong points about what education could and should be. I was considered a forerunner in education having opened one of the most creative and innovative Teacher Center's in the country. I was given awards and invited to speak at large teacher associations and conferences. The Learning Exchange  that I helped to create engaged with exemplary teachers throughout the greater Kansas City Area  to create curriculum that the cummunity felt was lacking in the area schools. I thought a lot about the 21st century and wondered what young people would need to learn in the 20th century that would help them be fit in the 21st century.  I regaled against the "sit-and-get" way of learning and  the LX became well known for project-based learning and for making collaboration, design, and exploration seem natural ways of learning, even for adults. 

In 1978, my husband, Matt, and I started teaching a course together for students and adults called TOOLS (Time of Our Life Seminars). We created an outline curriculum for the 21st Century.  Our course was intense explorations into the future, engaging the personal, organizational, and world views of each participant.  And yet, and yet, as I now live in the 21st century ... as I see the changes that have occurred in just one generation  -- 30 years or so -- there is so much I wish I had offered that I did not even think about then.  I took so many things for granted.