Sometimes long speeches are necessary to convince people of some not-yet-clear truths. Sometimes very simple words can do the same.
I think that Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computers, Inc. got the whole thing right with this very short paragraph:
"But my teacher got a Sunnyvale [computer] company to let me come in and program. I just read a programming manual and wrote whatever programs came to my mind — I didn’t program just what some teacher said to. " ( http://woz.org/education/index.html)
He wanted to CREATE things, programs in his case, and he did not wait for some adult to tell him what to REPRODUCE something they had thought of. If he had gone the standard, traditional way that so man schools around the world still want their pupils and students to go, then he would not have gone very far, and we still would not have (or maybe somebody else would have had to start the computer revolution instead of Woz and Jobs) all the beautiful digital tools that allow us to be creative producers of meaning and also self-publishers of it (like I do with this blog…).
I highly recommend Woz’s auto-biography iWoz (http://www.signedbywoz.com/) to every pre-service and in-service teacher, because he very beautifully shares his passion for learning, creating & inventing, his own way of being an auto-didact and all the help and support that adults and peers provided him with.
Because, after all, we are all auto-didacts, we all have to learn what we learn by ourselves, ideally also for ourselves, and with the help and assistance of other humans around us (and not "malgré nos professeurs ").
And when I think about the fact that Logo, Turtle Graphics, is still experienced by some many students (and probably teachers) in Luxembourgish schools as a non-tool, as something to hate, as something that one has to use to reproduce shapes that some teacher wants you to draw INSTEAD of being a tool to create a world of your own imagination, a tool to generate worlds that had not existed before, as a tool to express your own creativity, as a tool for learning… It’s a bit similar to the way I was drilled to writing, drawing letters for hours, instead to learning to use written letters to express what I thought and felt. Hopefully I had another way to express all that: drawing… and I could draw very complex scenes, with hundreds of little details… but, well, when drawing itself became a school-bound discipline where we were drilled to reproduce & copy, then it became uninteresting for me, it turned into something I really started to hate and that’s still the way I feel about visual arts today… in a sense… except when it come to computer-assisted visual arts, where I can, again, create things instead of copying a model imposed by a teacher. I’m free again to love drawing and visual arts.
when I think about all this, I feel that we still have a very long way to go before schools really become places where it’s worth learning, teaching and living in…