Ten Years on ...

Back in June 2, 1998 at Imperial College, London for the 11th Colin Cherry Memorial Lecture on Communication, Professor Bruce Sayers, Emeritus Professor, Imperial College introduced Dr. Seymour Papert to the audience. I was not there but now reading what he said, prompted by a blog post form Betchablog in my feeds, I so wish that I had been. The resonance of his statement:

“The model that says learn while you’re at school, while you’re young, the skills that you will apply during your lifetime is no longer tenable. The skills that you can learn when you’re at school will not be applicable. They will be obsolete by the time you get into the workplace and need them, except for one skill. The one really competitive skill is the skill of being able to learn. It is the skill of being able not to give the right answer to questions about what you were taught in school, but to make the right response to situations that are outside the scope of what you were taught in school. We need to produce people who know how to act when they’re faced with situations for which they were not specifically prepared.”

.....so clearly applicable (and growing even more so) today should show the way forward in institutionalised education systems. Perhaps our ability to learn is not what we would all like it to be.