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DESIGN | EDUCATIONAL REFORM
Tagore and Mau: design ideas for a post-Freirean model of education
(learning skills to get lost in the forest)
urgently required: massive change
Most of our models of education and (corporate) learning are essentially flawed. By allowing learners to learn only what we think they need, we are committing a massive form of oppression. The world is in constant flux, and representatives of the past, with stakes in the status-quo, should have no say in the learning adventures of those who are co-creating the future. Rather than learning what is prescribed, students must ready themselves, by design, to be ready for constant design.
Designing massive change (Mau, 2020) in learning and education requires “de-oppressionizing” the binary model first — and replacing it with a systemic approach based on cooperation of all the stakeholders in a community — of all generations, from the very old to the very young, everyone.
A binary model of education is where everything is organized into us-vs-them frames. Think of the teacher/student dichotomy. The teacher is endowed with surmised knowitallness, while the student is an empty vessel. Or the inspector/teacher divide. The teacher (presumably) masters the skills of teaching, while the…
