The story that the world is simple and educating is easy

The story that the world is simple and educating is easy

As is known, summaries and presentations are usually made with only a few main ideas. From the general theory of knowledge, it is essential to address the issues through the main ideas, the secondary ones that explain those ideas and eventually add examples, and other complementary ideas that could even cast doubt on the above. Therefore, the main ideas constitute only the starting point of a development.

Is it the same to study with summaries than with developed texts? Who actually abused the simplified versions of the study material, today is already a graduate and begins to establish itself in the field of work, does he know the same as his predecessors? Or are we entering a risk zone in good professional practice? Is it manifested in the same way in all disciplines?

With these licenses, education only seems to want to relieve the student of the task, from the premise that they do not have such a bad time or feel that there is no point in climbing those steep peaks. In the desire for young people to be contained and helped by their teachers, the essential foundations of the knowledge apprehension process are left out of the focus of the discussions.

In line with the phenomenon, some frequent statements these days are “the amount of texts is overwhelming” or “classes are boring.” It immediately triggers the question of whether it is necessary to lighten the burden of the task or have more fun in the classroom, as if the general objective of teaching were to simplify knowledge or animation, and not to teach and learn to train.

A class cannot be easy or fun, because that implies taking people away from what is important so that they can relax and have a recreational or blank moment. And to cheapen the cost of understanding an idea or achieving a result is to mold a person with less consistency and ability to solve problems. A charming synthesis of the evolution of education that circulated a few years ago represented with examples the first leap to what was easy; The slogan of a math exercise in a 1950 second grade textbook read “A farmer sells a bag of potatoes for $1,000. His production costs amount to 4/5 of the sale price. What is the benefit of it?” For its part, the 1960 third grade manual said: “A farmer sells a bag of potatoes for 1,000 pesos. The production costs of it rise to 4/5 of the sale price, that is, to 800 pesos. What is the benefit of it?” With a punctual addition, the second slogan accounted for the facilitation of the task.

Education, in the same way as communication, must entertain, “have in the meantime”, make the adventure of knowing and learning go more smoothly, improve the predisposition, and strengthen attention. To amuse is to open an optional way for the individual to distance or distract him from the subject in which, at a given moment, he should pay more attention. For its part, to entertain (from the Latin, interim, between, and tenere, to have), more appropriate to work in the classroom, means to have a hold in the meantime or in the meantime, to keep someone attentive and busy while receiving or exchanging information; It also refers to “internity”, which wonderfully means affecting the soul of people.

Entertain – have in the meantime -, not entertain – remove from the axis or distract from the central object of attention -. That is the premise. And set problems to develop the ability to solve them, not avoid them or replace them with magic formulas that simulate knowledge and delude with a false conception of effort. Lies who presents the world as something simple. He is unaware of the complexity of the world who affirms that the path to knowledge of it is open and downward, easy to travel.

Director of the Department of Social Sciences and Humanities at UADE

Source: Ambito

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