I have been thinking lately about the question of Education; America and the world’s preoccupation with running around to try and find a solution to educating our young people and future generations endowing them with what we have learned. We want to pass down or in today’s venacular to download what we have learned to them to use in their lives, to hopefully give them the tools to live better, longer, richer. We seem to be running around trying everything we know to force feed the some total of what we have learned into their conscienceness. We have even created the internet to download to in hopes that they will search, google, twitter and tweet their way through all of the information amassed on the internet and somehow finally learn from there all those things we have stored.
I believe that we are on the wrong track, that we may be failing them, we may be able to educate however education is not a substitiute for knowledge. Yes there is a difference, a vast difference, education is no more that the teaching (even if by rote) of theroms, formulas, facts, etc, but knowledge is something totally different.
Knowledge is gained by a person only when they experience and believe what it is they are learning and make those experiences and beliefs part of their life. Yes the concept of 2 + 2 equaling 4 is still just as valid but instead of memorizing it as a fact, it now becomes much more, the knowledge of the concept of addition is much more important than the numbers; sad to say that many of the young people today have not been taught the concept, or not caught on to it, but rather have settled (as we have allowed them to) to just memorize the information.
PA Kern's Blog 