Last week I wrote about what we should be teaching students to prepare them for the future. That led me down a rabbit hole of how we should be teaching them
Everyone has it backwards we don't teach people. We help then know themselves and how they grow. Then they teach themselves. Education is a tool for conditioning. We will not survive with hive mind. We will only survive using our full intelligence. How we view education is idiotic. We are born fully equipped to learn. They destroy that in us.
Where do I sign up?!
I’ve been thinking among similar lines. We are holding our students back in many (increasing) situations especially in the field of teaching AI.
I think we should grade our students on how well they teach us!
Teach undergrads like they live in a playground, not a prison. That’s what students need 20 minutes and 2000 years in the future.
I think a bit issue is that, personality-wise, 3/4 of the population are discrete thinkers and only 25% are systems thinkers (the S and the I of the MBTI respectively) I'm OK with a playground but I'm a systems thinker. I find there are a ton of people who need the constraint of a playpen so they can reduce the complexity and chaos and learn.
Heck, even those of us who are exploring the realm of the future are, I'd wager, heavily skewed towards systems thinking and away from discrete.
I must confess to being a bit of a skeptic when it comes to allowing personality/preference tests to dictate learning behaviors. They are useful guides, but certainly not fixed, and the evidence points to creative and even systems thinking to be learnable. I'd also add that the concept of a learning playground isn't completely unconstrained, but opens up avenues of learning rather than closes them down within boundaries that don't leave students overwhelmed.
But of course, there is a wide range of ways in which people prefer to learn. That said, I'd be interested in looking at research around whether these preferences are inherent or are, themselves, learned.
Oh, personality proclivities are essential understanding for understanding learning. They are useful guides and aren't fixed but you can watch the difference. I mean even the Big 5 concept of Openness. That's a measure of curiosity.
Clearly if you aren't high on trait openness, you aren't inclined to explore new areas. It doesn't mean you can't, but it's not comfortable.
Even in applied futures that ASU ASURE does you find the participants skew much heavier towards the Intuitive than the Sensing. In the least threatcasting I was at, the sensing types struggled with the task while the intuitive types were all over it.
By my non-scientific survey of asking people, I found over 60% were Intuitive at that event though Intuitive personality traits are only in 25% of the population in general and even less in STEM. I'd bet if you did an analysis on the HSD program compared to say, Physics, you'd find a ton more Intuitive types in HSD than standard STEM.