Back in June I was urging you to go to the ChangeThis site and download Russell Ackoff and Daniel Greenberg’s manifesto, “Turning Learning Right Side Up”. Now, some six months later, I say again, go and download this one. Just to wet your appetite, here is another snippet that I think throws some light on the difficulties we face today:
“Much of our formal education focuses on problems and problem solving. It fails to reveal that problems are abstractions extracted from experience by analysis. Reality consists of sets of interacting problems—messes. Students are seldom taught or learn how to deal with messes. Instead, they are given exercises to “solve.” Exercises are abstracted from problems, themselves an abstraction; they leave out the information required both to formulate the problem and to solve it. They are purposeless problems. Questions often leave out the information required to understand the context of the problems from which the questions are an ultimate abstraction. For example, the answer to the question: “How much is 2 + 3?” depends on the context of the question, “Two plus three of what?” The answer will differ depending on whether we have in mind degrees Fahrenheit or Celsius, logarithms, or books on a table. Worse, creativity is suppressed in schools in which students learn to provide teachers with the answers they expect.”