Goals for humans and goals for education

I have been a teacher and instructional designer for nearly a half century.  I have seen so many innovations and changes throughout the decades, particularly in the last few decades with the integration of technology.  We are now experiencing a tremendous challenge with the Covid-19 and the need for online and blended learning.  Teachers are searching for ways to use technology that they have been discussing for years but might not have had the push to implement.  Now they are scrambling to put their curriculum online for students and to create a much different learning environment than we have ever known.

The big question is how do we make these changes and how many of these changes are needed for the long term and not just for this pandemic period.  We need to have a very serious conversation about how we can introduce blended learning into our educational system and how should we use technology to help us with our goals.  But I think that we now also need to take the time to start the conversation to replace our early 20th century educational goals with 21st century goals.  The old goals were framed around children as potential factory workers who needed to follow orders and to recite back information. During the last few decades, we have added more and more curriculum demands on the knowledge level for each grade.  We don't remove curriculum items as much as we just keep piling on more to require students to regurgitate. 

But the problem is that we have not taken a systematic approach to designing our own educational system.  We have taken the "just pile it on" approach and now we have a huge mess that we call a curriculum.  We need to take a step back and redesign the entire curriculum.  Sometimes, it is better to tear down and start over rather than keep on trying to patch things up.  In this case, we need to start all over with new goals that reflect mankind's 21st century goals.  Of course, we will need to agree upon what those new goals will be.

The Instructional Systems Design (ISD), or often just Instructional Design (ID), approach is an approach to design systems, which might mean organizations, businesses, schools, corporations, etc.  The educational system is a system.  The human system is also a system. Duh, you think, but we need to examine these two systems much more than we do.  ISD should be used to help us set new goals for our educational system.  We need to use a very methodical approach in designing our schools.  I have worked as an instructional designer for many years and I have used ISD to design and to develop hundreds of educational and training projects and instructional materials.  ISD provides a thorough analysis of a system and then recommends solutions to any system problems.  Problems within a system would be anything that might deter the system from meeting system goals. 

ISD will help a company identify areas in which the company needs to improve and determine if any of these areas for improvement are related to a need for education or training of some kind.  ISD process can also be used to help identify the goals for our educational system and then determine the instructional solution for obtaining those goals.  I maintain that the goals of the educational system must be in alignment with the goals of human beings.  It is our children who go through our created educational system and these children are humans.  I know that sounds dumb, but we often forget that we are creating a system that is not a corporation or business that needs training programs for specific needs for their employees.  We are talking about an education/training program for the needs of every child and therefore every human being in our nation.  There is not a specific need to fill any more.  We do not need to train children to work in factories or to get a job.  There are many, many training programs for specific work related skills and so getting training for a job is always possible for everyone and training will become even more easy for adults to get to prepare for good paying jobs that have immediate need in our society.

But we are now talking about creating the environment in which we will require all humans in our society to live. That is a much different set of goals to consider.  We must consider what are the goals of our children.  Are the goals of every child the same or different?  How much?  Children are like us.  Humans who are growing up into becoming adults who will become us.  What are the goals of children?  What are our goals as adults?  What are our goals as human beings?  How can we create an educational environment in which all children learn to obtain their individual goals?  The goals for this educational system should be the same goals for each individual human. 

We need to decide on the goals of the human system.  Determine the goals of humans first and then make them the goals of the educational system. 

What do you say are the goals of humans?

What is the Probe Method?

I created the Probe Method during the 1990s as a constructivist, problem-based learning (PBL) and cooperative learning model using technology.  The idea is that students are asked to take any topic, question, and/or problem and thoroughly investigate (probe) it.  Students work in small and/or larger groups and they sometimes work individually, but they use technology to help them investigate the topic, question, or problem, and they go deeper and deeper into their investigations, not just finding a few facts.  They make summaries of their findings and they share their information and ideas coming from the investigations.  They continue to work in small and larger groups to find out how and why and they look for deeper understanding and insight. 

For instance, students want to know why there is so much racism in America.  Racism is a topic.  Why does racism exist is a question.  How can we get rid of racism is a problem.  Students begin to work together to understand and help solve the problem of racism as a Probe Method project.  Students would normally be told to read an article or two on racism and maybe see a video on the topic and then they are asked to write a report on what they have learned and maybe their opinion in their paper.  But in the Probe Method students continue to do more and more readings and they ask more questions and do more reading and ask more questions.  You could expand the inquiry into many disciplines and into very heavy scientific and philosophical questions.

I'll write more about the Probe Method later.

Covid-19 is a challenge for our national consciousness

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused a challenge to the development of our national consciousness or national mind.  The human consciousness follows stages in its development.  We have an individual consciousness that follows these same stages of growth and development.  I do not profess to fully understand all of human consciousness and the development of our entire universe or universes.  But I understand that we are all on the same path towards enlightenment, which might be defined as our ultimate goal for the growth and development of our consciousness.  We have our individual paths and we seek to be the best that we can be; we seek truth.  But our individual minds seek other people and they share their ideas and they form thoughts together.  They learn from one another and they begin to think quite a bit alike.  They take on similar characteristics and form their own group mind.  It's like a club that we join, but we pick people who are like minded and we want to get in good with the group so we want to be popular in the group.  The group becomes our identity and we don't want to upset others in our group.  We don't want to disagree with the group mind.

A group mind could be formed around a family, a religion, a culture, or any interest of likeness of mind.  It has led to political minds, conservative and liberal.  We are not all of like mind in this nation and we are made up of many small and larger group minds and we do not agree with each other.

So now Covid has pushed us into trying to come to some agreements and learn to develop a more united national mind.  The upcoming election in November is also challenging us to deal with our fragmented national mind or we could destroy our opportunity for growth of our consciousness.  How we deal with this situation will determine the direction of our human consciousness for many years to come.  The key to the development of the human consciousness is the ego.  The more self-centered we are, the more ego-centric we are.  Amoral means someone who has no consciousness about the life or feelings of anyone else.  This is the lowest level of ego development.  This state of mind would be people who are mass murderers or people who supported Nazis' torturing and murder of millions of people.  There are so many examples of people who seem to be able to hurt others without having any remorse and we cannot understand how anyone could do such horrendous things.  Then there are people who have some moral feelings for others but if they only feel for others who are like them.  They are racist or bigots and whatever you want to call them, but their egos are developing better than the amoral mind but they are still quite ego centric.  Then there are people who have expanded their consciousness to think beyond their own ego mind and they can feel what others feel and they want others to be happy and have a good life, just like them.  They even think beyond their smaller group minds and think about everyone in the society.

We presently have leadership that is very close to the amoral mind and I am very concerned that too many people in this country is being lured into this very dangerous mindset.  Our national mind cannot afford to go back to a white, male, supremacist mindset.  We must choose leadership that supports unity, freedom, and cooperation for all.  Our national human consciousness is at stake.  We need to put our fragmented and conflicting group minds together so we can grow and develop together in a positive way.

What will we do?  Be selfish.  Refuse to wear masks.  Fight each other.  Support leaders who lie to us on a regular basis.  Or are we going to put our minds together and solve our problems in a cooperative manner?

Let's have an educational revolution for a constructivist educational system

We need to have an educational revolution. Politicians and Mr. Money have controlled our educational system for over a century and it's time that we, the people, take over our own education.  We should decide what an education is and how we want to get our education and what our children's education should be.  The problem is that educators have been advocating for decades big changes to what and how we teach in the schools, but no one does anything about changing the system.  Politicians and big money control a required curriculum for every person in our nation and they control the type of instruction we receive in order to learn the curriculum.  The state is controlling what and how we learn and so they control us.  The state is taking away our freedom by controlling us as children and throughout our lives.  They make us go to a school and follow their orders, learn what they say to learn, do what they tell us to do, and make us do things when they say so.  Our children's time is controlled by the state along with their minds.  We were once children who were trapped in the educational system and we went along because we didn't know any other possibility.  We have been effectively brain-washed into thinking this brain-washing system we refer to as our schools is normal.

What I see as an educational revolution is all of us taking control of our own education and the education of our children.  I don't mean that we just physically seize the school buildings and take armed control of them.  I mean changing the curriculum and instruction so that each person creates his/her own education and decides on what to learn and how to learn it.  Each person should determine their own curriculum and instruction.  We need to stop letting politicians tell educators how to be educators.  That's like them telling medical doctors how to do their job and control the medical profession.  I have been in education for over 40 years and in higher education for over 20 years.  I know that most educators believe in a constructivist learning approach but they do not know how to implement such an approach when our entire system controls curriculum and instruction.

So we need a revolution.  We need to create a national constructivist educational system.  I won't go through a long and formal definition and explanation of constructivism, but I will say that in this approach children decide on what they will learn and they decide on how they like to learn.  Children create their own educational goals and objectives along with their parents and teachers.  The children, parents, and teachers also decide upon individualized instruction as well.  So the options for children are not limited by state controlled expectations and tests.  When the state controls testing of our children, then they control the curriculum and they control their minds.

We have a lot to do in this revolution and it has to start by our present teachers, administrators, professors of higher education, and all educational professionals must take the educational system away from politicians and business.  Our children deserve freedom.  Freedom to learn and freedom to think.  A constructivist educational system needs to replace the current education of controlled curriculum and instruction. 

Teachers and administrators in local schools should create their own constructivist school and implement without asking for permission.  We have the right to create our own education and we have a right to create our own public schools.  We don't need the state or federal OK.  A local school has the right to create a fully constructivist school without using any of the state's curriculum guidelines, instructional expectations, and testing.  Just refuse to give any mandated tests to your students.  A school should create a constructivist school so that every child and parent creates an individualized curriculum and instructional plan.  They can also plan how to evaluate and improve upon their own educational goals as time goes on.  This can be done and it's long past time for it to happen. 

So, teachers, go out their and talk your principal into creating a constructivist school!!!! 

Creating a constructivist school system

We need to change our educational system and we all need to get involved in the conversation about what we want to change to.  We cannot agree what an education should be.  We have a long way to go in figuring out what a new educational system will look like.

One thing we have to understand about education is that we have been moving toward a constructivist learning approach and so more people need to understand what that means and teachers need help in understanding how they can implement a constructivist learning plan.  I have written a book called The Probe Method: A Transformation of Human Consciousness and in it I have outlined my ideas about creating a constructivist school system based upon the Montessori approach and the Probe Method.  The Montessori approach is one created by Marie Montessori and it is an excellent way to help young children obtain independent learning skills and other positive developmental skills.  I designed and developed the Probe Method as a cooperative learning, problem-based learning, and technology infused constructivist learning model.  The Probe Method refers to having students thoroughly investigate a topic, question, or problem and work in cooperative groups to dig deeper and deeper to understand the topic and solve problems.  Students would work on topics and problems that interest them and they form groups of like interests and groups to solve personal and social problems.  Students learn the basic 3R's in the process of working on Probe projects.  They learn reading and writing by reading a lot of materials about a topic and by writing about the topic in essays and various written communication.  Students learn the basics of math and science as they are learning to solve problems related to science and requiring math.  Students learn about our history by solving social problems and examining our past to understand how we got here.

I hope you want to change our present educational system because it is very outdated and it is doing more harm than good.  We have to give children freedom to learn and we have to create a learning environment in which they can be free and they can learn to be kind, loving, and responsible adults.  We can create a constructivist school if we change what and how we teach.  That's a huge challenge but I know we can do it.

Take care of home

I have set and watched the sky and just felt the sun on my face. Who hasn't?  But it is absolutely amazing to feel the heat and a light breeze on my skin.  I love to sit on an ocean shore, a mountain top, a desert, or by a river in a canyon.  This planet is absolutely beautiful.  There are too many gorgeous places in the world to name.  I have done some amazing traveling but not nearly enough.  There are so many more places I would love to experience.  Just being there and feeling it.

I hope that we will take care of this fantastic place we call home.  Some people call it being environmentally aware and such.  But it's where we live.  It is literally our home.  Why wouldn't we want to take care of it, protect it, keep it clean, and not do any harm to it?  I know there are a few people who don't take care of their own home.  Some people might even trash their own home and live that way.  But most people want a nice home in which to live.  They want a nice, clean home where they can be safe and feel good about having a nice place to live.  So we should treat our whole planet like our personal home even if we don't live on the ocean or the mountains or the desert, we should realize the whole planet works together and every part affects the whole, just like parts of our body affects the whole body.  If a kidney is not working well, the whole body could be affected.  You get the point. 

Let's take care of home.