Raising Kids in the New Culture of Learning

I’m surprised to find myself relating a lot of what we’re learning in this class to parenting. As a parent whose first son has just entered the public school system just a few weeks ago, I can say that I am a bit apprehensive about the education he’s going to get over the next thirteen years. I’m not worried that he won’t be taught reading and math and science, but will he be taught to be a strong, resilient, creative problem solver who seeks to make the world better through kindness and empathy?

In our reading in A New Culture of Learning, what really resonated with me was the dichotomy of traditional learning vs. new learning. To briefly summarize the Thomas and Brown’s definitions, traditional learning is when a teacher imparts information to students, and students prove that they have learned the information by taking a test. New learning is when a community of like-minded people learns from each other. Thomas and Brown suggest that optimal learning is a combination of the two.

The article we read in week two, Good Video Games and Good Learning, also spoke to me in the same way, where Gee specifically talked about video games and what players can learn from well-designed games, and especially from interacting with other players. This is precisely the type of new learning that Thomas and Brown are talking about.

I don’t know much about the curriculum of our public school, but let’s just assume that public school is traditional learning. That means our children will be fairly competent in learning facts that are unchanging. But what about everything else? It makes me start to think about how we as parents can steer our children and in what areas we can best support them. Maybe I’m not going to let my five-year-old play World of Warcraft yet, but armed with this knowledge of different ways people learn, I might be more inclined to support his ideas when he wants to make ridiculous projects. When he’s older, I might encourage him to join clubs, find groups online where people share his interests, and learn things through participatory channels, no matter what the subject is.