This was written by Ivan Illich in1970, in Deschooling Society, but seems like something that could have been written today: “educational webs” remind us of “personal learning networks” or “personal learning environments”, and the notion of learning as a continuous, global process throughout formal and informal contexts, embeded in the very life of people, in which experiences translate into learning, sharing and caring is rather contemporary.

As far as I’m concerned, I think it’s a good idea to have a school in which children and teenagers spend a part of their day, meet and socialize, share the essential experience of the physical world. But a school made more of workshops and conversations than of traditional classes,  more for the individuals, their interests and competencies, than for the abstraction and arbitrarity that a class/cohort is, more a place of knowledge and culture to serve the students than a training environment to serve corporations and economical interests. With easy access to information and the technological tools we have today, it’s time to start thinking about a new school that replaces the one we have, resilient because of habit and tradition. Let’s be clear: the school we have today works to some extent, but it is far from the school we need for today and tomorrow’s society.

Vannevar Bush wrote this in his famous 1945 essay, As we may think, where he talks about the Memex (or memory extender), the source in which much of the way we organize or conceptualize knowledge today is said to be inspired (hypertext, Internet, networked knowledge)

In a world soaked with information, which can be accessed and retrieved in various ways almost instantly, the work of the teacher cannot remain the same, lecturing what has been said countless times, but to show what is essential and significant, model ways of connecting/relating information and thinking it critically, so as to attain knowledge and become able to use it in the real world.

Do schools kill creativity?