This video shows a young colt learning to use his springy feet pretty much on his own. The video also illustrates the watchful eyes of Mom and a human mentor.
The colt doing the learning belongs to a friend of an old friend of mine in Texas who received an email sending the video saying:
Howdy,
Our son Ron and the new Grand-colt. The mare is the horse that lays down so Kirsty can mount.
Clearly, this colt has an exceptional parent and Grand-human – yet we see him discovering on his own, then learning and drilling himself. Education is about nurture, teaching, and mentoring, of course.
The video illustrates the aspect of education that is the matter of taking one’s learning into one’s own hooves. For 21st century human colts, a mobile internet browser is the new hoofschooling.
“ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN — With a curriculum that glorifies violence in the name of Islam and ignores basic history, science and math, Pakistan’s public education system has become a major barrier to U.S. efforts to defeat extremist groups here, U.S. and Pakistani officials say. . . .
“. . . according to education reform advocates here, any effort to improve the system faces the reality of intense institutional pressure to keep the schools exactly the way they are.”
How widespread is this intransigence toward changing schooling? This kind of stubbornness is not just found in Islamabad. Intense pressure to keep schools as they are ranges in different places and cultures from orthodoxy to tradition to profit issues by vested interests and control demands by unions and, most sadly, a panoply of corruption.
While we deal across the planet with the inertia and intransigence that promises to perpetuate failing schools for at least another generation or two of kids, why not let the kids trapped in these schools learn the basics with handschooling? To do that, we need to get a mobile that browses the internet to each kid, and focus more on sharpening the findability online of basic subjects. Every boy in the picture above could learn his algebra from a mobile friendly tutorial in Urdu, Punjabi – and one day the full range of local languages. My guess is that many Pakistanis of their generation are already doing some handschooling beyond their school walls — or when they have no school to attend.
Originally posted in GoldenSwamp.com
The strong echo continues in schools and across the world of what Jonathan Kozol indelibly named savage inequalities. The mobile window opens a global commons that is the same for each and oblivious to who is visiting it to learn.
