Is knowledge really at the heart of education?

I suppose this is a post for students and teachers and I wonder what you think. Teaching has become a study in entertainment recently. The best of us reduced to performing engaging lessons for students without the contextual understanding or realisation that education is a two way street. It often appears that the pupils in the classroom do not realise that without their engagement the reality is that they will not take it in, or for that matter understand what the hell we are trying to get across.

Suddenly sounding 34: school used to be about remembering as much as you could cram in your head before you spilled your guts on the pages of an exam. What happened to the need to use knowledge? Probably, and ironically we have Facebook and twitter and blogs and wiki everything that allow us to find material without having to have it immediately at our fingertips. People now actively refer to their I-phones as their ‘brains’ and the pub quiz is no more about the largest collection of trivia, but the most subtle use of a web browser under the beer soaked table.

In the classroom the works of Shakespeare are reduced to sound bites and linear development of the play is removed in favour of a thematic demolition. History modules at A level can be as short as a few decades and the less said about GCSE science the better. Gone are the mysteries of the universe in favour of the practicalities of warming a house or keeping a pet.

The unknown, the beauty of new knowledge, shining in the dark should be the attraction that sends flocks of student magpies to steal and hoard the wealth of human endeavour. But they do not and we are left with the need to engage a continually disinterested, disheartened youth with pedagogic sleight of hand.

Perhaps there needs to be a new approach to this. I have been just as guilty in failing to teach and instead training students to pass exams. Do we need to be braver? Should we be pushing facts and figures and showing students the beauty of the complexities of knowledge? Do we need to show them the utility of not just gaining a grade, but gaining an understanding as well? It is a new educational paradigm and a new communication and language that in honesty only students and the most recently trained will ever be properly versed in.

In a new year and with a new start these are the questions I hope to answer and the challenges I hope to at the very least stare down.  All of us, students and teachers alike, need to be braver. Let me know how you get on.  

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