I think one of the issues is we tend to think of education as being the content. We overemphasize the importance of content, as opposed to emphasizing the part that’s really difficult in any good education, which is adult-supervised motivation—the motivation of the child to learn something.
The interview, on the limits of technology as a solution for problems in underdeveloped areas, is wise throughout.
Do they do it? How do teachers “teach” motivation? Grades, sure, but the students bring their salience for that reward with them for the most part. I’ve never seen or experienced good motivation that I know of.
“adult-supervised motivation—the motivation of the child to learn something”
Learning at the time, place, pace, and in the manner of someone else’s choosing.
I could see how that would be difficult. It takes time to break down the independent spirit of a child and enslave it to the teacher. The classroom environment is very rigorous in the constraints. Technology can remove all the controls but what content must be learned and perhaps spark motivation.
Don’t underestimate how good e-learning is when the kid is motivated to learn. My son taught himself programming, via Kahn Academy and other online resources, just to be able to make Minecraft hacks. There’s a lot of resources out there for those who are motivated to learn. Perhaps unprecedented resources.
I said it before. The nuts and bolts of my job involves Autocad. I have no doubt that if Minecraft were involved my 7 y.o. could learn it. I want to do the Java training for him too but the bottleneck is me. He’d probably pick it up in a day or two.
Wow, three comments from people who know nothing about teaching. You don’t teach motivation, you don’t enslave children, and most kids don’t want to learn so elearning is a whole big pile of who gives a rat’s ass.
I wrote about this here (last paragraph)
https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2014/08/29/opening-day-as-opening-night/
“People tend to construe the “education as entertainment” paradigm as “show the kids movies all day” or “keep the kids laughing”, but just as all entertainment isn’t comedy and happy endings, so too is education more than just giving the kids what they want.
I’m a teacher. I create learning events. I convince my audience to suspend disbelief, to engage. Learning happens in that moment. Some of the knowledge sticks. Other times, only the memory of learning remains, and I’m starting to count that as a win. “