国境も育ちも関係ない学びの場への希望

しつこくエリジウムの世界観をひきづってしまいますが、ワイズマンの本の視点はエリジウムの世界＝持つ側からの視点、先進国の現状維持の願望ではないかと思っていまうんですよね。映画の地球の場面はメキシコのスラム街で撮影されたそうですが、思い切った教育方法でそんなスラム街からメキシコ一の秀才が生まれたという希望を感じる記事がWiredの最新号にありました。

Wired [US] November 2013 (単号) (2013/10/20) 不明 商品詳細を見る

How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses
BY JOSHUA DAVIS10.15.136:30 AM

Words checked = [5172]
Words in Oxford 3000™ = [86%]

画一的なカリキュラムやペーパーテストではなく、子供達の知的好奇心を満足させていくことの重要性を説いている記事なので、目新しさはないかもしれませんが、メキシコでの実例や最新の研究など具体例を知るだけでもこの記事を読む価値があると思います。Sergio Juárez Correaという若い先生と生徒であるPaloma Noyola Buenoの話はウルウルきてしまいます。

下記の部分で企業で求められているスキルが変わりつつあり“In 1970 the top three skills required by the Fortune 500 were the three Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic. In 1999 the top three skills in demand were teamwork, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills. “とありますが、これは日本だけでなくどの国も抱えている問題のようです。

The results speak for themselves: Hundreds of thousands of kids drop out of public high school every year. Of those who do graduate from high school, almost a third are “not prepared academically for first-year college courses,” according to a 2013 report from the testing service ACT. The World Economic Forum ranks the US just 49th out of 148 developed and developing nations in quality of math and science instruction. “The fundamental basis of the system is fatally flawed,” says Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford and founding director of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future. “In 1970 the top three skills required by the Fortune 500 were the three Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic. In 1999 the top three skills in demand were teamwork, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills. We need schools that are developing these skills.”

That’s why a new breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration. Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion—and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process.

人工知能や心理学の研究から、詰め込み型よりも、失敗などから学んでいく自発的取り組みの方が効果があるという結果が出ているようです。One Laptop per Childのプロジェクトで子供達にラップトップを渡したら教えてもいないことができるようになったとあります。

Gopnik’s research is informed in part by advances in artificial intelligence. If you program a robot’s every movement, she says, it can’t adapt to anything unexpected. But when scientists build machines that are programmed to try a variety of motions and learn from mistakes, the robots become far more adaptable and skilled. The same principle applies to children, she says.

Evolutionary psychologists have also begun exploring this way of thinking. Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College who studies children’s natural ways of learning, argues that human cognitive machinery is fundamentally incompatible with conventional schooling. Gray points out that young children, motivated by curiosity and playfulness, teach themselves a tremendous amount about the world. And yet when they reach school age, we supplant that innate drive to learn with an imposed curriculum. “We’re teaching the child that his questions don’t matter, that what matters are the questions of the curriculum. That’s just not the way natural selection designed us to learn. It designed us to solve problems and figure things out that are part of our real lives.”

Some school systems have begun to adapt to this new philosophy—with outsize results. In the 1990s, Finland pared the country’s elementary math curriculum from about 25 pages to four, reduced the school day by an hour, and focused on independence and active learning. By 2003, Finnish students had climbed from the lower rungs of international performance rankings to first place among developed nations.

Nicholas Negroponte, cofounder of the MIT Media Lab, is taking this approach even further with his One Laptop per Child initiative. Last year the organization delivered 40 tablets to children in two remote villages in Ethiopia. Negroponte’s team didn’t explain how the devices work or even open the boxes. Nonetheless, the children soon learned to play back the alphabet song and taught themselves to write letters. They also figured out how to use the tablet’s camera. This was impressive because the organization had disabled camera usage. “They hacked Android,” Negroponte says.



メキシコの先生CorreasさんはSugata Mitraさんの試みに出会って自らも実践をしたとありました。

He too had grown up beside a garbage dump in Matamoros, and he had become a teacher to help kids learn enough to make something more of their lives. So in 2011—when Paloma entered his class—Juárez Correa decided to start experimenting. He began reading books and searching for ideas online. Soon he stumbled on a video describing the work of Sugata Mitra, a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University in the UK. In the late 1990s and throughout the 2000s, Mitra conducted experiments in which he gave children in India access to computers. Without any instruction, they were able to teach themselves a surprising variety of things, from DNA replication to English.

メキシコの生徒の話は是非、読んでいただきたいのですが、burro（ロバ）の寓話は印象的でした。 “Everything that is thrown at us is an opportunity to rise out of the well we are in.” 逆境をチャンスと捉えて這い上がっていこうという姿勢は生徒たちにも十分伝わったようです。

Juárez Correa also brought something else back from the Internet. It was the fable of a forlorn burro trapped at the bottom of a well. Since thieves had broken into the school and sliced the electrical cord off of the classroom projector (presumably to sell the copper inside), he couldn’t actually show them the clip that recounted the tale. Instead, he simply described it.

One day, a burro fell into a well, Juárez Correa began. It wasn’t hurt, but it couldn’t get out. The burro’s owner decided that the aged beast wasn’t worth saving, and since the well was dry, he would just bury both. He began to shovel clods of earth into the well. The burro cried out, but the man kept shoveling. Eventually, the burro fell silent. The man assumed the animal was dead, so he was amazed when, after a lot of shoveling, the burro leaped out of the well. It had shaken off each clump of dirt and stepped up the steadily rising mound until it was able to jump out.

Juárez Correa looked at his class. “We are like that burro,” he said. “Everything that is thrown at us is an opportunity to rise out of the well we are in.”

When the two-day national standardized exam took place in June 2012, Juárez Correa viewed it as just another pile of dirt thrown on the kids’ heads. It was a step back to the way school used to be for them: mechanical and boring. To prevent cheating, a coordinator from the Ministry of Education oversaw the proceedings and took custody of the answer sheets at the end of testing. It felt like a military exercise, but as the kids blasted through the questions, they couldn’t help noticing that it felt easy, as if they were being asked to do something very basic.

スペイン語はさっぱり分からないですが、YoutubeではPalomaさんの動画がありました。



下記の動画タイトルはPaloma Noyola Bueno; la "Steve Jobs" del futuroとあるので、雑誌WiredでNext Steve Jobsと紹介されたことを取材しているのでしょう。



詰め込み教育ではなく、生徒の創造性を発揮する教育をというのは恐らく義務教育が導入されてから言われてきたことだと思いますが、改めて創造性を発揮させることの重要性を感じることができました。まあ、詰め込み教育は言われたこと、決まった範囲をやればいいので、創造性のない受け身の人にはいいのかもしれませんが、われわれは自主的に英語を学んでいるのですから、自分の興味を元に世界を広げていきたいですね。