A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change by Douglas Thomas & John Seely Brown

Author:Douglas Thomas & John Seely Brown [Thomas, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: CreateSpace
Published: 2011-03-12T05:00:00+00:00

In the spring of 2010, one of us was confronted with perhaps the most damning indictment of the educational system that we could imagine. Doug was teaching an undergraduate honors seminar, and the goal of the course was for each student to create a proposal for his or her honors thesis. The course covered all the various methodologies, techniques for research and for conducting reviews of literature, and guidelines for creating annotated bibliographies. Yet for the students, the most difficult part of the class turned out to be the first assignment, something that Doug had thought would be the easiest: selecting their thesis topics.

Students showed up in Doug’s office with no idea of what they wanted to write about. So, in response, he would ask them: “What is it that you care most deeply and passionately about? What is it that you will wake up every morning wanting to write about?” He was shocked when student after student answered in roughly the same way: “I don’t know. No one has ever asked me that question before.”

Despite twelve years of grade school and three years of college, those students had never before felt as though their passion, the thing they truly cared about, actually mattered. In fact, the thought was so alien to them that, in almost every case, they had already rejected potential topics precisely because they were too important to them. They had come to believe that things they felt passionate about should not be part of the (formal) learning process.

This kind of thinking pervades current education systems. Yet most teachers know that when students feel passion for a topic, they will seek out the tough problems, rather than the easy ones, and work harder to solve them. And best of all, they will have fun doing it.

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