education of evolving knowledge?

[cKleinhuis]

hello, here in germany i have come to the point that education in school, especially in early school days does not even try to bring new concepts to the kids, for example the self similarity, or chaotic behaviour, another thing that would easily - by examples - be shown to kids, for example the "doppler effect" which pretty good is the essence of what lead to relativity theory ...

could it be that kids nowadays do not learn the "interesting" stuff that really matters ? concerning new media education even at university, it is a shame, last year i hold a lecture about multimedia programming, and there where no plans, or goals that where defined by the university, in my eyes it is a severe pitty that now even attempts exist to add new stuff to education of kids, it is so horrible, because only if whe give the knowledge to the youngest their brains can acompany with it very good, and they will become a more deeply understanding of nature, especially those sense-seekers with scientific interests who believe that universe is based on some kind of determinism would be washed clean right before those ideas, and they could straight go into the chaotic-world view - where nothing is really predictable -

i believe that we have learned so much in the last century, and we should attempt to make sure that next generations gets the points very fast, because some things ( relativity theory, chaos theory ... ) are proven to be right and useful ....

what do you think ?
and what do you think could be done to achieve it ?

[taurus]

what you describe here, is exactly my observation. a few weeks ago i complained in a discussion, that the physics our kids learn at school is at least 120 years old. in math it is quite similar.

the reason for this backwardness is imho our still ongoing belief in the reductionistic paradigm of the newton style. maybe our teachings know about the insights that came along with relativity, quantum physics and non linear dynamics, but as they don't fit in a world of reductionism, the significance of these insights is still underestimated.

John Gribbin once wrote about a quantum mechanical cookbook, our scientists use, without understanding the strange implications of quantum physics. in other parts of science it is not different. we pick the parts of theories, we can use in an engineering way (fractal antennas, gps satelites etc.) the rest - including the overall corellation - our teachings strictly ignore, as they are seen as unimportant.

i fully agree that we should make sure that following generations should benefit from insights gathered in the last century, but as long as we don't get over our still very mechanistic paradigm, we are not able, as we don't get the point ourselves.

[LMarkoya]

I will certainly agree, and working in a highly technical company I can divulge some insight. The world at large is run by old school thinkers, who, are protecting their jobs, lifestyle and even philosophy by maintaining a good old boy attitude in design processes and teaching. I'm afraid the changes you desire can not and will not happen within this generation, as the people in positions of power are protecting their own position of what may be ignorance, or misunderstanding. Of course this creates opportunities for those with open minds and educated on their own (or who happened to catch a good professor) to excel in small companies, which will eventually either become large or be consumed by the larger companies. Most simply, its greed and fear, individual, corperate and national.

My 2 cents

[hobold]

Another tangent, but not wholly off topic: you are observing some of the consequences of the future shock (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_shock). Simply speaking, the rate of change is faster than what our society or the individual person can handle. We, the "westerners", the "industrialized countries", are a society in turmoil, and have been in turmoil for at least a century already.

We didn't notice these things happening at first, because homo sapiens, as a species, is exceptionally good at coping with change. Our kids can learn at breathtaking speed, and our elders (enough of them, at least) are very good at distilling their life's experience into a few wise insights. And we have hierarchical structures that tend to feed back enough of the old wisdom to the young ones so that society as a whole can grow and develop.

However, the rate of change kept accelerating (and keeps accelerating) to the point where the experience of the elders was obsoleted by the time they were able to draw insights from it. (I believe this is one of the reasons why our society became obsessed with youth, and began to view senior citizens as a liability rather than a resource.)


Those modern day philosophers, who first formulated the concept of "future shock", believed that we were headed for a singularity, i.e. for a point where the rate of change would basically became infinite. This is not going to happen, because we make most of the change ourselves. When we can no longer keep up, we'll have reached terminal speed.

But just like with a singularity, it's pretty much impossible to predict what's beyond that point. Our kids live in a world quite different from our own, and their kids will be likewise alien to them. The institutions and structures of society have already been bent beyond the point of breaking - but don't be alarmed; we'll manage to pull through and lead happy lives. It's not the end of the world, only the birth of a new world again and again in rapid succession.