A couple days ago, I
watched Dan Brown’s video entitled “An Open Letter to Educators”, which was talking
about how education should be in 21th century. In this writing, I will argue my
agreement for the points that he mentioned, and my critics to the some of his
statements.
Firstly, he said that
education is about empowering students to change the world for their better
life. I do agree with that because students are humans and education should
approach them as humans. I believe humanism is appropriate foundation
philosophy in learning and teaching processes. As Tangney said (2014), the conception of
learning according to humanist is empowerment, emancipation, confidence,
self-believe, trust and emotional activities. Therefore, teachers have to assist the pupils to get
those concepts, so they will be able to change their lives.
Moreover, he said that because the world is changing,
the teachers should also be changing. Of course this is true because teachers
who cannot adapt with alteration will be left behind, then will result in ineffective
teaching. Consequently, the students will get the negative impact for this such
as bored, unmotivated, confused, and feeling fall behind. Maybe this is what
Dan Brown implied so he dropped out of his school.
Talking about his dropping out, however, I am still
confused about his reason. He said that he dropped out of the school because
the school was interfering with his education. What did he mean about
interfering? That is fine if interfering was that “the school was hindering him to
learn independently”. But, if the school giving him some instructions and rules
in his education was interpreted as interfering, I think that is wrong since school,
teachers and students are one unit. They must interact each to get best results.
Effective communication is the key to do that.
One of the changes that Brown suggested was education
institutions should adapt to landscape of the information age. This means the
institutions should run the system based on computers, digital and the
internet. This is a good idea for those who have enough access to those
facilities. However, if we want to talk in global context, there are still a
lot of countries that do not have those facilities. Let’s take an example.
Indonesia is an archipelago country possessing 17.500 islands. Wow, can we imagine how many those are? Educational
institutions in big cities in Indonesia have already applied learning based on
information age, but not yet in small and rural islands. The government is very
difficult to reach some of them. The children over there have a simple dream. Instead of thinking about using online learning; they just want to get
textbooks and studying in buildings with teachers standing in the classes.
The last but not least, the
existence of the teachers makes us feel optimistic about the world. The world
needs and will always need the teachers. Teachers take big responsibilities in
human civilization. In the formal institutions, learners need to be assessed, trained,
and given positive values. But a student cannot acquired those treatments if
he/she is just looking the information by himself/herself.
My closing statement is if
the teachers cannot change as the world changes, it does not indicate the
teachers are not needed by the world any more, but this means, the world loses
its heroes.
Reference
Tangney, S 2014,
'Student-centred learning: A humanist perspective', Teaching in Higher
Education, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 266-275.
