Be Radical in Your Learning

 

Meet Sergio and Paloma. Sergio is a teacher in northern Mexico right up against the border. Paloma joined his class when he decided things needed to change and apparently the students of his class became amazing thinkers and learners after his changes. But what did he do?

I received a Facebook notification from my mom-in-law alerting me to an article in which the headline reads: How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses

So without hesitation I opened my browser and read the contents. Even though the writer proposes that he has discovered a trend in education that is radical and may make you a genius, it seems that education, research, psychology, and technology are finally catching up to a form of unschooling.  Sergio didn’t completely convert to the unschooling school of thinking (is that sacrilege?) but used a lot of principles of allowing kids natural curiosity and motivation to guide their learning.

I like divergent methods of education. This article describes several places in the world where self-taught, self-motivated, and self-structured education is occurring and the amazing results. Some of it is unschooling with a high degree of technology involved (internet). However, this method is not limited to technology because it is being implemented in some of the poorest communities in the world with great success.

Now I will admit, I am not completely comfortable with unschooling because I think kids are like electricity or water: they will follow the path of least resistance. Therefore, if they don’t have to study it or if it is too hard, they will forget it. So I think some structure is good but perhaps structuring learning with greater input from the learner will have greater affect on their learning. The article then continues to talk about major players around the world using and testing this method of education.

I took two things away from the article:

1. Freedom and creativity at a young age inspires and leads to genius thinking (read the story of Einstein and Google execs in the article)

2. Greater learning occurs when the learner has the most control.

I learned a method to implement #2 which I will talk about in my next post

 

What do you think of the article?

How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses