The world has changed…
The Fellowship of the Ring, the fist film of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings adaptation began with a fantastic monologue from Galadriel (Cate Blanchett): “The world has changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air”. Despite that it is one of my favourite films, these three sentences describe perfectly our reality. Everything is changing very fast: our ways of communicating and behaving, our environment, our food…Changes are so fast that many times, we are not totally used to our new reality when it has changed suddenly… again.
This is the main reason why education should also change. We still want to form Leonardos in the 21st century; we want students to maintain huge amounts of knowledge, to know about everything, when that is virtually impossible; not only we have a lot of sciences that were unknown in the Reinassance, but also those who were known have advanve increibly in the last few years… what is more, probably most of the knowledge that we learn today, will be obsolete soon.
So, what should we do at schools? Forgetting about learning things?
Absolutely not. We all must know things. But we must foster as well other kinds of learning, how to learn to learn about things. In our present situation, teachers are teaching for the unknown, no one really knows in which kind of situation would today-students develop their professional careers.
From my point of view, it is in this point where ICT develop a strong influence. Even though we may not like all of them, computers and friends (specially internet) have come to stay with us. Knowing how to use them effectively and how to distinguish among all the information that we receive should be one of the most important functions for teachers nowadays.
