There are two ways of viewing work:

• Work is something you have to do, like it or not, to make money that will allow you not onlt to sustain yourself but also, and most importantly, do the things you really enjoy doing;
• There are many things you really enjoy doing, and the best way to work is by getting people to pay you to do the things you would do anyway, even without pay.

Running the risk of oversimplifying the issue, I believe that there are two alternative, competing ways of viewing educational practice that are somehow analogous to these two ways of viewing work: 

• There are many things (information, knowledge, values, attitudes, skills, competencies) that you have to learn, like it or not, and the function of the teacher is to present these things to you and (in the case of teachers considered good) to look for ways of motivating you to learn them by trying to make learning them either fun and interesting or otherwise rewarding;
• There are many things that you are interested in doing, and the function of the teacher is to find ways to get you to learn important things (competencies, skills, information, knowledge, values, attitudes) while you are doing the things in which you are interested.

At Lumiar we opt for the second of these alternatives.

Over Great Falls, Montana (United flight 755, from Chicago to Seattle), on the 11th of March of 2008, 8:00 Pacific Daylight Time

In one of the discussion groups of the site of the twelve schools that participate in Microsoft’s Innovative Schools Program, Allison More placed the question below and I answered with the text that comes after the question… EC

>From: Allison Moore
>Posted: Sunday, February 17, 2008 7:02 PM
>Subject: Issue 2: Innovative Curricula

>People from across the world—educators, business leaders, and other thought leaders—have expressed concern that our schools are not preparing students as best they might for the demands of the 21st century. There have been calls for changes to curricula, teaching practices and assessments that will personalize student learning, better teach students to problem solve, think critically, communicate effectively and work in teams, and will help ensure that they acquire the skills to adapt to new innovations, innovate themselves, and learn effectively in the future. <

>QUESTION: From your perspective, what innovations in curriculum, pedagogy and assessment have you made or do you think are important to make, and why? Share your current thoughts on best practices and exemplary curricula and assessment practices. What benefits and challenges have you experienced (or do you anticipate experiencing) in the process of implementing these innovations? <

 

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Let me try my hand at answering this thought-provoking question…

Curricula are attempts to define what must be learned in a given context. Methodologies are attempts to to define how best to learn what must be learned. Evaluation is the attempt to assess whether what was to be learned was in fact learned.

It seems to me that the main issue in relation to curricula – including innovative curricula – is philosophical, not scientific, and so not approachable from a “research-based” perspective, at least if “research” is understood as “empirical research” (as it commonly is, especially in the United States). The main issue is:

What learnings are of most worth today in 21st-century post-industrial societies?

This issue is not scientific – it is not answerable by any of the academic disciplines or by a survey of specialists, for instance. This issue is clearly philosophical, since it involves an important discussion of values.

To be historically fair, this is basically the same question that Herbert Spencer asked more than 150 years ago (in 1854), when he asked “What knowledge is of most worth?” I chose to replace “knowledge” by “learnings”, because the word “knowledge” is frequently identified with typical academic – or even scientific – learning. The word “learnings” is more general, and therefore better suited to my purpose, even if it looks and sounds a bit odd in the plural.

Spencer said: “before there can be a rational curriculum, we must settle which things it most concerns us to know; . . . we must determine the relative values of knowledges” [Herbert Spencer, Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (New York: Appleton and Co., 1909), p. 11]. Please observe that the word “knowledges”, in the plural, is also a bit odd…

I would like to change Spencer’s question and ask:

“Before there can be innovative curricula, we must settle which things it most concerns us to learn; . . . we must determine the relative values of distinct learnings.”

Spencer’s question, and its paraphrased counterpart, make it clear that we are dealing with values, here. And, I add, values are not the sort of issues that one handles through scientific methodology or “research-based” approaches.

This being said, we are ready to suggest the lines along which we ought to look for answers to this question:

What learnings are of most worth today in 21st-century post-industrial societies?

The first thing to emphasize is the last part of the question: “today in 21st-century post-industrial societies”. Unless we intend to arrive at very general answers, applicable universally (anytime, anywhere), such as “the true, the good and the beautiful” (that which traditional philosophy called the “transcendentalia”), our search for the most worth learnings must be contextualized – in time and space.

The most worth learnings in Western Medieval society are certainly not the most worth learnings in 21st-century post-industrial societies or knowledge-based economies. To begin with, science and technology, as we know it, did not exist in the Middle Ages. To take just another example, reading and writing were a rather specialized kind of learning in the Middle Ages, best left to monks in monasteries (in the monasteries dedicated to the preservation of culture, to be more precise: there were monastic orders dedicated, for instance, to agriculture or even to war). So, changes in time do make a great difference here, even if we maintain the variable space intact.

My friend Rubem Alves, one the greatest living Brazilian educators, never tires of saying that the variable space is also very important in education. The learnings that are of most worth to a child living in a Middle Eastern desert village will not be identical to those of an indian living in the heart of the Amazon forest – even in the 21st century… To stay within the confines of the West, the learnings that are of most worth to a child living at the top of the austrian Alps will not be identical to those of a child living along the Mediterranean sea: in Monte Carlo or Marseille, or in the Algarve, in Southern Portugal – or in the Harlem, in New York… So, changes in space do make a great difference here, even if we maintain the variable time intact.

The second thing to emphasize, especially given the emphases of traditional schooling, is that there are at least two important kinds of learning, which must not be made to appear as only one kind: there is “learning that…” something is the case and there is “learning how…” to do something.

Traditional schooling has emphasized the first: that is why the academic disciplines are so central in traditional curricula. Most of the learnings that the traditional school considers of most worth are “learnings that…” something is the case. Even in my area, philosophy, if I may take it as a typical example, the traditional school tries to get the students to learn that Plato thought this or that, that Descartes is the father of modern philosophy, that Kant was influenced by the rise and the incredible early success of newtonian science, that existentialism is a revolt against the rationalism of the Enlightenment, etc. All “learnings that…”

Contemporary technology has made it quite unnecessary for the school to “deliver” this sort of “content” to the students: a quick search of the Internet answers all of these questions, or at least brings up texts and media clips that allow one to easily find the answer. “Learning that…” is basically equivalent to “finding out”, “come across a given piece of information”.

I am convinced that the learnings that are of most worth today, in the West, are “learnings how…”. To learn how to do something one did not not know how to do before is to acquire a skill – or, if the “learning how…” is to mobilize and integrate lower-order skills to perform a higher function, it is to develop a competency. These learnings are typically transdisciplinary. It is not the case that they are multidisciplinary (involve more than one academic discipline) or interdisciplinary (integrate different academic disciplines): they transcend the disciplinary model or paradigm. Most of what we call “21st-century skills” today (some of which are listed in the question) are nothing but complex competencies that mobilize and integrate lower-order skills.

To use philosophy again as an example, what students need today is to learn how to philosophize – rather than learn that this or that philosopher thought this or that over two thousand years ago.

So, to finish, one of the basic requirements for innovative curricula is that they be based on competencies and centered on the development of competencies.

At Lumiar, in São Paulo, that is the kind of curriculum that we endeavor to implement. If you are interested in these ideas, check this blog.

–Eduardo Chaves
International Advisory Board
Partners in Learning
Microsoft Corporation

In Campinas, on the 17th of February, 2008

Even a conventional school can become home to some innovation. I think, however, that the expression “Innovative School” ought to refer not to schools that host one innovation or another, but to schools capable of innovating themselves – that is, of creating themselves anew.

To create itself anew a school must rethink its pedagogical vision: its view of education, of learning, and of its own role in the learning of its students.

Education

To be innovative today the school must shed the traditional notion that education is the process by which older generations transmit their culture heritage to the new ones. This process, besides being centered on the needs of society and focused on the past, neglects the fact that human beings are born incomplete (incompetent and dependent) and that education is the process by means of which they become competent and autonomous adults. Education, thus understood, is a process centered on the needs of the individual and focused on the future.

Learning

To learn is not to assimilate information: it is to become capable of doing that which one could not do before. Thus, learning aims at building competencies and expanding capacities.

The school

The school is a formal learning environment the objective of which is to help students learn what they ought to learn in order to become competent and autonomous adults. Since helping students build competencies and autonomy is essential to the school, the school must be democratic, a place where students are capable of practicing their competencies and their autonomy.

Given that we are all different from one another, the curriculum of an innovative school ought to be sufficiently rich, and its implementation sufficiently flexible, to take into account the unique talents and different interests of the students. A “one-size-fits-all” curriculum is inadmissible.

Its methodology ought to recognize that there are many ways of learning essential and important things. Letting students free to choose the projects in the course of which they will learn what they need or want is a way of respecting their freedom to learn and solving the difficult challenge of motivation. But the focus must be on the development of competencies and autonomy.

Learning assessment, finally, ought to contribute to student learning as well, and not merely bring out what students have not learned. So, learning assessment must not be a series of episodic events that take place periodically in the school: it must be integrated into the very fabric of the school and must be focused on ascertaining whether students are developing their competencies and autonomy.

Are there many schools willing to create themselves anew according to this vision?

[This article appeared in Microsoft APAC’s PIL Newsletter]

Oulu, on the 1st of November of 2007

What I call Lumiar’s “Pedagogical Proposition” is the set of pedagogical theses that Lumiar sustains, defends, and proposes to its clients (students and their families) and to the public in general.

A. Innovation and Change

Lumiar sees and defines itself as an Innovative School.

The expression “Innovative School” needs, of course, to be clarified.

The fact that Lumiar defines itself as a school (and not as another kind of institution) imposes upon it a certain type of institutional nature, which it cannot escape: Lumiar sees itself as a formal learning environment. This means not only that children come to it in order to learn (or, more precisely, to be helped in their learning), but also that Lumiar

· has a clear proposal about what it is that these children can and ought to learn while in a formal learning environment such as the one it offers to its students;

· assumes the responsibility of seeing to it that its students learn it.

(Lumiar of course knows that children, even while in school, also learn many things in non-formal learning situations and encounters, as they live together with others, such as their family, their acquaintances, their friends and peers, and other significant members of their communities. It also knows that children learn many things in contact with impersonal material resources available in their homes and in other environments familiar to them: books, radio, television, video, videogames, computers, the Internet, etc.

If the fact that it defines itself as school points to what it has in common with other institutions of the same kind, the fact that it defines itself as innovative points to its “specific difference”, that is, to that which makes it different from other schools.

The choice of the term “innovative”, in this context, is significant.

As David Hargreaves and several others have pointed out, institutional change comes in at least two forms:

a) Minor, gradual, incremental, piecemeal change that does not depart too far from existing practice (and that can be said to lead to institutional reformation);

b) Major, systemic, all-inclusive, comprehensive change that departs considerably from existing practice (and that can be said to lead to institutional transformation).

Not surprisingly, the vector that is responsible for this distinction is innovation. Reformative change – change that refurbishes present form without transcending it – is weak in innovation; transformative change – change that goes beyond present form or paradigm – is strongly innovative.

Lumiar has gone for transformative change of existing school practice and its conceptual and theoretical underpinnings. It wants to be a new kind of school – a school where the “novum” that is in the root of the term innovation is real.

Lumiar is convinced that Jay Allard, one of Microsoft’s vice-presidents, was right on the mark when he said in a December 2006 interview to Business Week: “The only way to really change the world is to imagine it different than the way it is today. Apply too much of the wisdom and knowledge that got us here, and you end up right where you started. Take a fresh look from a new perspective, and get a new result” [emphases added]

So Lumiar is not aiming at simply another reform of the school. It is convinced that reforming a few aspects of the present school paradigm (creating more comfortable and functional buildings, introducing state-of-the-art technology, enforcing standards, systematically testing the students, conditioning public funds to the school’s overall performance, especially to the results obtained by students in standardized tests, training teachers and administrators to implement and supervise all of this, etc.) will not do.

Lumiar wants to radically transform the school – to create a new paradigm, to reinvent schooling.

Before we see what Lumiar proposes, it is necessary to show why it opted for such radical alternative.

Education, including school education, does not happen in vacuum. It takes place in a social-historical context – that includes cultural, political, economic and technological elements (the importance of which is not necessarily reflected in the order in which the elements are presented here). When this context changes drastically, it is inevitable that education, in special school education, should also change drastically (despite the understandable resistance of its main practitioners, the teachers).

When there is drastic change in the context in which education takes place, the decision to go for minor, gradual, incremental, piecemeal changes in the school will not bring the necessary results. Reformation will not suffice: what is needed is transformation, that is, major, systemic, all-inclusive, comprehensive change.

Lumiar is a school that attempts to be radical in its curriculum, methodology and assessment. And it is able to do so because it has a different conception of education, of learning and of the role of freedom and autonomy in student learning and in the management of the school. In the process of reinventing schooling, the role of the pedagogical professionals (educators) that work in the school had to be redefined.

Let us rapidly analyze describe the main elements of Lumiar’s Pedagogical Proposition.

B. Vision of Education

Lumiar sees education as a process of human development in which the baby that is born incompetent and dependent becomes a competent and autonomous adult. This process is indispensable for the non-parasitic survival of the human being – but it goes beyond that.

Human beings are capable, in due time, of defining their life project and of transforming it into reality, thus reaching personal realization (or happiness). One’s life project specifies what one wants to do of one’s life, what one wants to become as a human being. It is evident, then, that the life of developed (i.e., educated) human beings goes much beyond their survival: it culminates in their self-realization, which, as Abraham Maslow showed, is the greatest human need.

Although they are born incompetent and dependent, human babies are born with an incredible capacity to learn. That is what makes education possible.

Education, understood as human development, is a process that takes place during one’s entire life and through one’s every interaction – with other people and with other aspects of natural and social reality. But schools, as formal learning environments, can be very important for education, if they are organized and function according to the principles here detailed.

C. Vision of Learning

To learn is not synonymous with absorbing and accumulating information. To learn is to become capable of doing that which one could not do before. This vision of learning implies that learning is something eminently active (interactive, collaborative, etc.), related above all to things one becomes capable of doing. The “doing” involved in learning is not a mechanical sort of doing, in which the body instinctively, as if by reflex, goes through some motions, but an intentional activity that results from a decision consciously made and is oriented to the accomplishment of purposes freely chosen.

According to this vision, learning, in a school context, is not a savoir teachers inculcate into their students, but a savoir faire that the students actively construct – not by themselves, it is evident, but interacting and collaborating with their teachers and their peers (and, outside the school, with their family, friends and acquaintances).

D. Curriculum

A school curriculum is the set of that which students can and should learn in school.

This formulation, containing, as it does, two verbs that are clearly not synonymous, shows that the term “curriculum” has, for Lumiar, a double meaning.

On the one hand, curriculum, in its broadest sense, is the list, organized by “megacompetences”, of the competences, with their respective skills, that the school, as a formal and structured learning environment, is committed to helping their students develop while attending the school. In this broader sense, curriculum is the set of the competences and skills that the student can develop with the help of the school. It makes no sense to expect that every student – or even some students – will learn everything that the school is committed to helping them to learn. But it makes every sense that the school should define some things that every student should learn – or that every student ought to develop some competences in every area (megacompetence) in which the competences are organized.

On the other hand, as a result of what was just said, curriculum, in a narrower sense, is the sub-set of competences and skills that each student, taking into account his interests, talents, and, in due time, his life project, and under the advice of his mentor and his parents, commits himself to learn. Given the existence of individual differences in interests and talents, given the possible and real difference among the life projects of any random group of students, and given the fact that the student has freedom of choice with respect to what he will learn, the sub-set of competences and skills that each student does learn can be unique for each of the students. This fact leads to the de-standardization and personalization of the curriculum.

E. Methodology

The learning methodology adopted by Lumiar is an active methodology: Lumiar is convinced that the best way to learn is by acting, doing, transforming projects into reality. It is this way that one learns to live – that is, to transform projects of life into lived lives. Lumiar’s methodology is, therefore, centered on the development of learning projects.

This methodology sustains itself on the principle that there are many ways of learning that which must be learned. Children learn to talk, generally before going to school and without any “classes of speaking” that teach them that sounds are produced by controlling, with one’s lips, tongue and teeth, the passage of air through one’s mouth (and, in part, through one’s nose), and that therefore there are labial, nasal, guttural sounds, etc. Children learn to talk in the process of doing other things, that is, as they involve themselves in projects for which speaking is essential or important. Children see other adults and children talking with one another, conclude that speaking must be great, and decide that they are going to learn how to do it also… They start by imitating the sounds made by others and by inventing other sounds of which only they know the meaning. They are helped, supported, corrected, they receive incentive when they learn to say new things, until they become able to say a number of things important to her – first imperfectly, requiring from those who listen to her considerable effort to “interpret” what she is saying, but, in due time, more and more in ways that reflect the accent and the habits of speech of those around whom she lives.

Project-based learning methodology sustains itself on a second principle: the best learning projects are those in which children are interested and in which they engage themselves with pleasure. This does not mean that children only learn while they are having fun. What this means is that, in order to learn, children must see and understand that what they are doing makes sense, that is, contributes to something they want to achieve, reach, do or be. They are able to focus their attention on very difficult – even painful – learning tasks if they see that they contribute to something that they consider important, value or want. Anyone who has watched children learning to ride a bicycle or a horse, swim or ice skate, play soccer or the piano, cannot but conclude that children are capable of incredible learning feats through processes and activities that are difficult and hard – if only they are convinced that those means lead to objectives that they want to reach.

Project-based learning methodology sustains itself on still another principle – the third: as we are focused on learning something, we often learn other things as well. Children are especially apt at this kind of multitasking in their learning. A child can be dedicated for some time (weeks or even months) to something quite specific, such as, for instance, finding out whether there is homosexuality among birds. To find an answer to this question she observes the behavior of several kinds of birds, checks books out from the library, does searches on the Internet, interviews biologists and veterinarians, discusses with teachers and peers, etc. In this process she collects a lot of information, some of it contradictory, a lot of it not entirely relevant to the task. She organizes this information, analyzes it, tries to find a trend, and, in due time, reaches a conclusion. At the same time that she was finding an answer to her question, the child was learning to focus on an issue, to do research to find an answer to a question the answer to which she originally did not know, to organize and analyze information, to infer answers from a lot of relatively disconnected bits of information, to reach conclusions, to present her conclusions in a persuasive manner, together with the supporting facts and arguments, to reply to objections, etc. This means that, working on a project about “Homosexuality among Birds”, or even on a more specific one, such as “Can parrots be gays?”, she is developing a number of competences and skills that are going to be extremely useful for the rest of her life – more useful, perhaps, than the answer to the question that triggered the project. And she developed them because, as she was focused on learning something, she was also capable of learning many other things as well.

Lumiar is not a libertarian, laissez-faire school that practices a type of “negative education” that leaves the students alone as they go their learning projects, only reacting when provoked by them. Lumiar is proactive and proposes a range of learning projects to the students, every month or couple of months. Each project has a specific focus and involves participation in a number of tasks and activities – some to be performed in group, others individually. The focus of one project can be to map and then create a 3-D model of the region where the school is located. Students here must learn to get to know their physical environment through observation, to measure it, to represent these measurements on a different scale, to map the region out, to represent it through a 3-D mockup, etc.

As it was mentioned before, there is more than one way of learning a given thing. Because of this there is considerable redundancy in the competences and skills that can be developed through the different learning project. It is this that allows the students to choose the projects in which they are going to take part. They choose – but they do not do it alone. They are helped in the process by their mentors and their parents. Their learning portfolio will show the gaps that still exist in their learning. On the basis of this portfolio, mentors and apparent will engage in a pedagogical dialogue with the students, showing them the importance of learning this or that, of participating in this or that learning project. But they do this perfectly aware that there are many learning projects in which the students can develop their competences and skills – and that sometimes they learn very important and lasting things doing things that, initially, did not seem likely to lead to very significant and far-reaching learning.

As in the case of the curriculum, also here there is, on the one hand, the list of learning projects that the school makes available to the students, and, on the other hand, the lists, much smaller, of the learning projects in which each student chose to participate and in fact did successfully participate until the end.

F. Assessment

Constant assessment is an essential part of the work of the school. Students are assessed when they enter the school, in the school they are assessed daily, weekly, monthly by their mentors, as they participate in the projects they are assessed by the masters who lead the project, and they have a final assessment at the end of each year.

Everything significant they do at the school is recorded. Parents receive assessment reports and a folder with the work of their children.

It is through assessment feedback that students find out how well they are progressing developing in the multiple aspects involved in their development. Assessment becomes an integral aspect of the pedagogical work of the school.

G. Pedagogical Professionals

Besides its management team, the support personnel and the trainees, Lumiar has two kinds of pedagogical professionals: the mentors and the masters.

function to coordinate and supervise the activities of the students. Each mentor is responsible for about twenty students, in relation to whom he functions as counselor and adviser – in other words, as mentor. As seen, among the functions of the mentors is to accompany the students and constantly assess their learning performance and their overall development.

Masters are responsible for the learning projects and coordinate their execution. They are the “content specialists”. But, as it is going to be made clearer later on, their specialization is not to be found in the “legacy content” of an academic discipline, but on the competences and skills required to exercise a given profession. The masters are also responsible for the articulation between the projects (the methodology) and the matrix of competences (the curriculum)

Lumiar then replaces by two different professionals the teachers of the conventional school.

H. Democratic Management

Lumiar sees itself as a democratic school.

It is necessary, in the first place, to demarcate a democratic from what could be called a libertarian school. In most of the schools that can be called libertarian (Summerhill, Sudbury Valley, etc.) the following seems to obtain:

· There is a series of rules and norms, explicitly accepted by the school community as a whole gathered in a general assembly, and these rules and norms regulate the behavior of everyone in the community: students, pedagogical staff, management, support personnel and other staff;

· These rules and norms are only approved if they are coherent with the principle that everyone’s space for discretionary decisions is as large as possible, the only actions that are forthrightly prohibited being those that cause harm to others or to their property or that violate their right to an equal share of freedom;

· Every charge that someone caused harm to third parties or violated their rights is analyzed in an assembly, general or only of the students, and the responsible party can be punished;

· With respect to learning, there is total freedom to learn, which includes the freedom not to learn;

· The pedagogical staff of the school only intervene in the learning process of the students when explicitly required to do so by the students;

· The management of the school is conducted collectively: norms and rules are chosen collectively in assemblies in which everyone participates and their application is discussed in problem-solving circles.

Lumiar sees itself as a democratic school. As a democratic school it accepts most of the principles just described. As a matter of fact, it only rejects two of them: the fourth and the fifth. It is its rejection of these two principles that makes it non-libertarian.

Lumiar believes that an institution that defines itself as a school cannot be, in relation to the learning of its students, purely reactive, determining that its pedagogical staff should only intervene in the learning process of its students if asked to do so by them. Lumiar believes that a school worthy of this denomination must have a non-negative pedagogical proposition, such as the one outlined in this chapter. As seen, it proposed to make available to its students the following substantive contribution:

· A curriculum: the “Matrix of Competences”;

· A methodology: Project-Based Learning;

· Professionals (the masters) that devise, plan and offer to the students learning projects that can help them develop the competences and skills specified in the Matrix of Competences;

· Professionals (the mentors) that actively engage the students and participate in their lives as counselors, advisors, coaches, mentors;

· Parent involvement in the counseling and advice of their children in the choice of the learning projects in which they are going to be involved;

· Mechanisms for the systematic and periodical assessment of the learning of the students by masters and mentors.

Within this context, Lumiar holds as an important principle the respect to the freedom to learn of its students. This means that if a student does not want to participate in a learning project, after being counseled to do so by his mentors and parents, his decision is respected. Also, if a student chooses to participate in a learning project, but in the middle of the project concludes that the project is not what he expected, or that he simply wants to abandon it, he is given a hearing, and if his reasons are deemed legitimate is given permission to leave the project.

With respect to discipline, Lumiar has, similar to what exists in libertarian schools, clear rules and norms that prohibit students from acting violently against other persons, from causing damage to their property or to the property of the school, or from interfering with the rights of anyone else in the community. The assembly called “The Circle”, that meets every week, deals with members of the community who are charged with violating these rules and norms. If the violation is confirmed, the violator can be punished. If a student is found guilty of a serious violation, and is suspended, The Circle chooses the members that are going to communicate to the parents of the punished party that their child was suspended. Fellow students are often requested to participate in this unpleasant task.

In other aspects (strategic planning, human resources, budgeting and finances, etc.) Lumiar’s management is in the hands of specialized personnel hired to take charge of these challenges.

Salto, on the 18th of October, 2007

The conventional school demands too much – and, paradoxically, too little — of teachers.

It can be safely assumed that teachers (whatever the name they had then) were originally supposed to help children in their learning. Period.

For thousands and thousands of years, learning was mostly done at home or within the confines of the family circle. The teacher, therefore, was the family: mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, aunt, uncle, older siblings, cousins… In the simplified context in which this took place, the older family members had, in their ensemble, all that was necessary to help the younger ones learn. Among them they mastered the content of what was to be learned:

· First, practical stuff: language (for a time only spoken language; later, and not in every family, reading and writing), rudimentary arithmetic, and the practical skills required for the family businesses: the external business (generally, farming, herding, hunting, fishing, etc.), as a rule reserved for men, and the domestic business of keeping the home (cooking, cleaning, sewing, needle work, etc.), as a rule reserved for women;

· Second, still practical things, but now placed on a “higher plane”: the “art of living”, or moral, spiritual and (perhaps on slightly lower plane) aesthetic education.

The first component was more or less taken for granted as of course, but the second one was considered really important, since it was meant to prepare children to live their lives not only in this life, but also in the next… The “art of living” generally included:

a) Moral education: help children understand the difference between (moral) right and wrong [concept], understand (or simply accept) what makes a given action (morally) right or wrong [criterion], classify different concrete actions as right, wrong or (morally) indifferent [according to the criterion], and, more importantly, do what is right and refrain from doing what is wrong;

b) Spiritual education: [generally, especially in Christian circles] help children understand that we have a body but we are a soul, that the soul survives after the death of its body, that how we behave here on earth will bring us rewards or punishments in the next life, that, therefore, it is important to read (or listen to) the scriptures, pray for divine guidance and help, go to church, etc.

c) Aesthetic education: [more directed to girls] help children develop some finer habits, such as draw, paint, sing, play an instrument and, in general, appreciate what is beautiful and shun from what is ugly.

As life became more complex, the family had to resort to external help in the task of helping their children learn all that was considered worthy of learning. It was then that figure of the tutor or mentor appeared – and it was in this context that the modern school, as (supposedly) an assembly of tutors/mentors, was invented.

Many things made these developments necessary – but one of set them is quite important (and they took place around the end of the fifteenth, the sixteenth and the seventeenth century): the invention of printing, the explosion in writing that followed (and that marks the beginning of literature in the vernacular of most modern languages), the discovery of up to then unknown parts of the world, the Protestant Reformation, and the appearance of modern science… The protestant reformers had an important role in the process, because they insisted that everyone ought to learn how to read in order to read the Scriptures and not by deceived by the catholic priests (the cost of not doing this could be eternal damnation…). The result was that schools started appearing everywhere next to most protestant churches.

One important consequence of this was that the business of educating children became more complex and a gradual “division of labor” (with its consequent creating of specialized functions) began to occur. The family, for a time, retained the practical functions of preparing boys for the external family business and girls for the business of housekeeping. Moral and spiritual education were to a large extent shared by family and church. Aesthetic education (“education of sensibility”) somehow lost importance. And tutors/mentors and/or the school (“assembly of tutors/mentors”) assumed an area that did not quite exist before, but that was destined to grow: “intellectual education”.

With the appearance of various modern languages and their accompanying literature, with the discovery of new worlds, with the creation of several protestant denominations (competing amongst themselves and not only with the Catholic Church), with the appearance of modern science, that gradually evolved from astronomy and physics to biology and chemistry, with the appearance, from the 18^th century on, of the so-called “human sciences” (history, geography, psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, etc.), the intellectual scenario – the world of ideas – grew in complexity and importance. Suddenly the family seemed quite inadequate to the task of helping children learn things that were so varied and complex. And, curiously and somehow paradoxically, this new world of ideas aroused the interest in the old world of ideas of the Greeks and Romans…

Not even one single individual tutor/mentor, usually employed by families of higher means, could be expected to master all that children, especially those of the higher and middle classes, were expected to learn… Richer families began to hire several specialized tutors/mentors. The emerging middle class (and, later one, also the rich) had to resort to the assembled tutors/mentors provided by the schools… (The poor generally were left out – until quite recently).

And this way we come to the present (conventional) school… This school is, from the beginning, and almost by definition, a specialized learning environment: it tries to deal with intellectual education alone, and even then, only with one segment of it. Moral, spiritual and aesthetic education are normally outside its scope. And professional and vocational education are generally assigned to specialized institutions and are not considered as important.

The convention school of today (and society, in general) wants teachers to be a number of things…

Above all, it wants teachers to be content specialists, that is, it wants them to know well one of the subject-matters (academic disciplines) in which the curriculum is presently divided.

With the explosion of information that characterizes our age, expectations regarding the area of specialization of the teachers were proportionally adjusted (that is, reduced). Today it is not considered reasonable that a teacher should be a specialist in the whole of biology, or physics, or even history. Teachers must choose sub-specialties: 20th-Century Brazilian History, for instance, in the case of a (Brazilian) history teacher…

But expectations became also more and more “focused”… Besides the choice of specialties within specialties, teachers started to concentrate on the specific content that is supposed to be taught to the classes under their responsibility: “I’m an eighth grade Math teacher”; “I’m a High School English teacher” (or “I’m a teacher of English as a second language”…). (So, in the latter case of the specialized English teacher, do not expect him to know how to get children to learn how to read and write, much less enjoy reading and writing… When he receives them, he expects them to be way past that stage).

But the level of specialization has an even more problematic consequence.

Each of the different areas of specialization can be divided into two parts: one that contains what we could call “the legacy content” produced by specialists in the past (even recent), and another that contains “the method of thinking or inquiry” that, when applied, can produce similar content…

This distinction is very important.

I will try to show why using as example my own area of specialization, philosophy. It is likely that human beings have been philosophizing for a long time. But philosophy, as a systematic form of inquiry into what there is, where we come from, what is the purpose of us being here, what is the right thing to do, what is the right way to organize ourselves in society, why do we consider some things pretty and attractive and others ugly and repugnant, and how do we know all that we presume to know – this form of inquiry had its birth among the Greeks during the centuries that preceded the Christian era. And it spread, far and quick. More than two thousand years later, we do have an incredible amount of written records about what past and contemporary philosophers have thought. This is what I call “the legacy content” of a given area of specialization.

To help a child to learn philosophy can, in this context, be interpreted in two different senses:

· to help the child assimilate the most important ideas (according to some criterion) of what other philosophers have thought and written;

· to help the child develop the competence and the skills needed to like in a similar manner.

Most teachers of philosophy do only the first – and often do not even know how to think philosophically for their own consumption. I have no doubt that the second is the most important. As a matter of fact, the written thought of other philosophers only becomes interesting when one begins to master the art of philosophizing yourself. Otherwise it is terribly dull.

What I have just said about philosophy can be said with the same propriety about the other academic disciplines. Most teachers in today’s conventional schools are not involved with helping children learn how to philosophize, how to think like a scientist, or an artist. They are only involved with imparting to the students what philosophers, scientists and artists have thought and done. Their business is “content delivery” – an ugly expression that, unfortunately, reflects quite well what most teachers do: their area of specialization is, for them, only a bunch of content that others have thought and that must now be delivered to students, who, almost by definition, are unfamiliar with it.

Since the content of a given area of specialization tends to grow fast, teachers are unable to keep track of the content even of their narrow specialties and so tend to narrow even more their specialization down to the point where they know almost everything about almost nothing. And that is what they transmit to their students.

Just to be clear, here is what they do not do – and are not required to do by their schools:

a) Help their students master the methods of inquiry of their specialized disciplines;

b) Help their students understand the larger context in which disciplines were defined and function;

c) Help their students understand that most interesting issues transcend the boundaries of traditional disciplines and even the boundaries of mega-areas such as philosophy, science and art;

d) Help their students deal with the practical competencies and skills required by different professions;

e) Help their students deal intelligently and honestly with moral, aesthetic and spiritual issues they will inevitably confront.

That is why I said, above, that the conventional school we have today demands too much – and, paradoxically, too little — of their teachers.

Lumiar tries to face these issues in several different ways.

Perhaps the most creative and interesting way is by splitting the teacher into two pedagogical figures: the tutor/mentor and the teacher/master.

The tutor/mentor is a full-time employee of the school. Each of them is supposed to be responsible for about fifteen to twenty students. This responsibility involves the personal development of the student in every relevant aspect (physical, social, emotional, moral, spiritual, intellectual). The tutor/mentor is supposed to get to know well the children for whose development he is responsible. He is responsible for knowing what the children already know when they enter the school, what their natural talents, inclinations, interests, hopes and expectations are (inasmuch as it is possible to discover these things with respect to small children), he is expected to help the children, with the help of their parents, to choose the learning projects in which they are going to be involved, he is responsible for overseeing the children while they are at play, he is charged with periodically assessing their learning and the overall development (with the help of his observations and of reports written by the teachers/masters), etc. And, above all, unless problems arise, he is not replaced by a different tutor/mentor as the children progress in their development: he is a constant reference to them.

The teacher/master is, in a way, the content specialist to whom the responsibility for the children’s development of specific competencies and skills is – to use an almost abusive word in the context — outsourced. They are not full-time staff. They are hired to offer specific learning projects to the children – to plan, develop, implement, execute and evaluate the project and to assess what students have learned by and after taking the project.

There are three features that are sought in the teachers/masters:

a) They must be masters of a particular content – that is why they are called masters;

b) They must be able to look at that content from the point of view of the competencies and skills required to produce it (or something similar) rather than as a content to be delivered to the students – that is why the school is reluctant to call them simply teachers;

c) They must have a genuine interest in the area and a visible love for what they do.

If these three features are present – mastery, focus on methods of inquiry, and motivation – they ought not to have problems with getting students to voluntarily offer to take part in their learning project: they do not have to be cajoled, persuaded, seduced, much less compelled, to participate.

If the tutors/mentors provide constancy and continuity, the teachers/masters provide change and diversity.

The administration of the school is responsible for guaranteeing that all the essential areas of the Matrix of Competencies that serves as curriculum are covered by learning projects offered, led and coordinated by the teachers/masters. These are responsible for guaranteeing that the students involved in their learning projects not learn the content of the project itself, but that they also develop the basic competencies and skills defined by the Matrix of Competencies. And the tutors/mentors are responsible for guaranteeing that what students learn in the different learning project contributes to their coherent development as persons – not only as the unique individuals they are, but also to their social existence as citizens and to the preparation that becoming a 21^st-century professional requires.

The conventional teacher has been split in two at Lumiar – and even his mastery of a given content, in the case of the teachers/masters, is refocused to the methods of inquiry rather than to the transmission of the legacy content produced in his area of interest.

Campinas, on the 12^th of October, 2007

 

[At the end of 2006 and beginning of 2007 I gave two interviews to the press in Taiwan which may be useful in this context. This is the second]

Block I: On the origin and the spirit of the school of the future

Question 1:
How will the development of technology transform education? What are the advantages and disadvantages that may result from these transformations?

EC: The development of technology, by itself, will not necessarily transform education. It is undeniable that technology changes the world: the way we do things, the way we work, the way we communicate with one another, the way we access information, the way we amuse ourselves, the way we learn. By changing the world, it makes it advisable or even necessary to change education. But the decision to change how we educate is always ours. George Scharffenberger once said that educators can use technology to support what schools already do, maintaining their practice and resisting change; or to supplement what schools already do, reforming their practice piecemeal and so partially accepting change; or to subvert what schools do, so making it necessary to reinvent their practice. So technology is, at best, an inductor or a catalytic agent for change.

Question 2:
How was the idea of the school of the future originated? Why should the school of the future be promoted?

The idea of the school of the future originated from the fact that the world in which we live and educate changed – changed drastically – in the last sixty years or so. Throughout this lengthy process of change, the school, as an institution, changed very little. Things came to a point, however, in which some people concluded that the school must either change or gradually become obsolete as an organization where people learn and are educated. So these people became engaged in a process of creating a new school – and this new school received the name of “school of the future”. The name is a bit misleading, because this new school is not needed in the future: it is needed right now. The school of the future should be promoted because the school we now have is no longer doing what it ought to be doing: serving as an environment where people can effectively learn – that is, acquire the knowledge and the competencies necessary for living and being successful in the complex, changing and flexible world of the 21^st century.

Question 3:
How is the school of the future defined and characterized? What can the school of the future do or provide that cannot be achieved by regular schools in general?

The school of the future is focused on the future, not on the past. It exists not to transmit knowledge, beliefs, values, customs, traditions of the past from one generation to the other, but to help people construct knowledge and mental models, develop skills and competencies, and forge values and attitudes that can make the world of the future a better place. Regular schools have not succeeded in forming people that are committed to avoiding violence, terrorism, war, fanaticism and promoting security, freedom, peace, tolerance. The school of the future must set the promotion of these values at the heart of its objectives. It is only when they have security and freedom in a peaceful and tolerant environment that people can develop to their fullest potential.

Question 4:
What are the influences the school of the future may have on functions of schools in society?

It is not going to be possible to create schools with a new profile in the required quantities fast enough. But we need to create a few to show that a new school is possible. And these new schools, these schools of the future, will serve as examples and seedbeds of change for present schools.

Question 5:
What should we be cautious about when developing and promoting the school of the future?

If we want to create a new school, a really innovative school, we cannot start from assumptions and presuppositions very similar to the ones we have today. If we do, we will end up with a school that will not be very different from what we have today. To arrive at a new, truly innovative school, we need to start with radically different assumptions and presuppositions. I give one example. Present schools assume that children learn by being taught, and that the best way to teach them is to assemble them physically in a specific place (the school classroom) and teach them together in groups during periods of equal duration (the class). The school of the future will probably assume that students learn a lot of important things by themselves, reading, watching TV, navigating through the Internet, interacting with their peers, inside and outside the school. That is: it assumes that people learn anytime and anywhere – and in several different ways. The challenge is to create a school that is a technology-rich learning environment that takes seriously how technology-empowered people learn.

Question 6:
How will the concept of education and methods of teaching as we know them be affected by the rise of the school of the future?

It is not the case that the new school will affect our concept of education and our methods of promoting learning. It is the other way around. The fact is that a new concept of education and new conceptions of how learning is best promoted will force us to create a new school – the school of the future.

Question 7:
How will the roles of teachers and students be affected in the school of the future?

For one thing, teachers will not teach (present information, transmit knowledge, deliver content) in the new school – because in a technology-rich environment information, knowledge, and content are at the fingertips of anyone. Teachers will not be content specialists, but mentors, coaches, counselors, advisers, and facilitators of learning – and learning will not be synonymous with absorbing or assimilating information, but with becoming capable of doing that which we could not do before… Students will need to focus on becoming autonomous and competent learners. And, unless they have already been corrupted by previous schooling, they normally are curious, inquiring, desirous and motivated to learn.

Block II: On the planning and the vision of the school of the future in Taiwan

Question 1:
What is the key to success in building a school of the future?

Vision, motivation (commitment), competence (planning, serach and mastery of resources, execution and persistence).

Question 2:
What approaches have been taken to promote the school of the future in Taiwan?

This I cannot tell. I know that Taiwan has been involved with this program for several years now, with a project in the city of Taipei. Now a new project is going to be launched Kaoshiung. I am convinced that both will be a success. But I do not dare answering specific questions about the implementation of the program in Taiwan.

Block III: On the current development of the school of the future in the world

Question 1:
What are the trends in the development of the schools of the future in the world?

The School of the Future program started with a pilot in Philadelphia, PA, USA. Now it is being implemented in about 20 countries all over the world. Taiwan is one of these countries. The projects are very diverse, respecting the local reality of each country.

Question 2:
What are some major features of the schools of the future that have been built around the world?

Except for the Philadelphia project, recently inaugurated, they are all beginning.

Eduardo Chaves
February 2007

Transcribed here from Salto on the 5th of October of 2007

[At the end of 2006 and beginning of 2007 I gave two interviews to the press in Taiwan which may be useful in this context. This is the first]

Question 1:
What is a School of the Future? (Can we say that a school that has many computers is a School of Future? If not, what is a good School of the Future?)

Schools are social institutions: they are created to help us, human beings, perform better some of the functions that we consider important in life. There is nothing sacred about them, that should make us preserve them in their present form. There is even no guarantee that we need schools, as we presently know them, in order to educate people well. Existing to serve social functions, schools must change when society changes.

Our present schools were created in the Industrial Age to serve the needs of Industrial Civilization. But we are rapidly moving out of the Industrial Age into a Post-Industrial Age – which some call the Information Society, the Knowledge Economy, etc.

The schools that existed in the Middle Ages, that in the West were run by monks in monasteries and served only religious clerks, were not capable of performing the education that was needed in the Modern Period, introduced by the Industrial Age. So our present schools were created. That was over 200 years ago.

The present age, however, is not being adequately served by schools created for a previous age. So schools must be changed in order to perform the educational task that society expects from them.

What we call a “School of the Future” is, despite the name, a school desperately needed already in the present. But we do not have it. Our society changed much more rapidly and radically than our schools. So today we have a new age (the society that is erupting in our midst) with schools of the past. When we speak of a “School of the Future” we are referring to a school that will be fit to educate our children – and our adults! — in the Information Society and in the Knowledge Economy.

It is evident that the mere introduction of computers and other technology into present schools will not make them “Schools of the Future”. Somebody one day aptly said that if we bring computers and other technology into schools and leave their other features unchanged, the resulting institution will not be a School of the Future, but a much more expensive traditional school.

In order to have a School of the Future we need to develop first a new vision of education – the education that is needed at the present time — and then design from scratch the sort of institution that will best help us promote. It will certainly have objectives, methods, organizational structures, administrative principles, links with the community and with the larger world that are quite different from the ones that prevail in present, traditional schools. Those that we today call teachers will need to have different functions: they will not teach, as they do today, but they will help students learn. And students will learn through collaborative interactions with their peers, with the school staff and with the outside world (that will no longer be considered external to the school, because every organization in society will be invested with functions that will facilitate learning in its citizens – every organization will be a learning organization).

This sort of School of the Future will certainly not lack technology. But technology, by itself, will not bring it about. If we do want a School of the Future – and there may be more than one template, following overarching principles – we must not be afraid to open the “pedagogical black box”, as somebody one day called it. It is here that the essential changes must be made.

The School of the Future will be new not because it will have technology – but because it will be built on the basis of a new vision of education, a new understanding of learning, and novel ways of promoting learning.

Question 2:
How should school administrators, teachers and students prepare for future learning environments?

Of all these categories, the students are, perhaps, today, the ones best prepared for new learning environments – and beware that these learning environments are not in the future: they are already here today.

The reason I say that students – children and young people in general – are the ones best prepared for the new learning environments that characterize our age is that they have been born in this new age, have used its technology from the day they are born, and feel totally familiar and confident with it. Older people – and here I include school administrators and teachers that are over 25 – are “digital immigrants”, as somebody one day correctly labeled them. They may even know how to deal with digital technology, but they will “speak digital with an accent”. Young people, those born after 1980, when computers became not only “home appliances” but personal tools and toys, are, in contrast, “digital natives”: they “speak digital without any accent”. So they are already prepared for new learning environments in ways in which we, older folks, are not.

The problem is that we, the older folks, are the ones that presently have authority to decide what, how, when and where younger folks ought to learn. And most of us think that they, younger folks, ought to learn the same things we learned, in the same order, through the same teacher-centered methods, with the help of the same tools, at the same time in life, and in the same sort of institution.

Many people tell and ask me: “You studied in a traditional school, and you are doing fairly well. Why should traditional schooling not work as well for present kids?”

To answer this question it is necessary to point to the fact that the world changed in substantive ways between the time I entered primary school (1950) and today. Assuming that what I turned out to be was due to the school I attended (which is a questionable assumption), a school that was good fifty years ago will quite likely be outdated today – unless it changed with the times. The world underwent drastic change, the students changed. The student that enters school today is much better informed about the world than I was when I got out of school – and he has an incredible network of resources to keep him constantly well informed.

So our great challenge is to prepare present and future school leaders and teachers to deal with change: to perceive change and to understand it in order to manage it well. There is nothing necessarily good in change itself. But we cannot prevent it from happening. So we must understand it in order to manage it, using change to promote the educational goals we endorse – which, in my view, must be centered on the task of human development.

This challenge is great because we have millions of teachers in the field, that need to be prepared on the job, and we have hundreds of thousands of people being prepared in Schools of Education and Pedagogical Institutes in ways that are clearly inadequate.

Question 3:
What are the main critical success factors to set up a School of the Future?

It is essential that we place first things first.

And the first thing of them all is pedagogical vision. The School of the Future will not be characterized by its building or by its technological infrastructure: it will be characterized by its pedagogical vision, that includes a new view or concept of education, a new understanding of learning, and novel methods for promoting learning.

The second critical success factor – and it is closely tied with the first – is people. It is essential that we find people who are more than willing – who are eager! — to embrace this pedagogical vision and are dedicated to promoting it. And then we need to give them freedom, incentive and tools without which it is virtually impossible to reinvent schooling.

It is only after these two factors are adequately faced that issues relating to curricula, technological infrastructure and buildings ought to be raised.

Question 4:
Will the School of the Future change the way we learn now? What sort of change can we expect and how will it happen? Will these changes be good both for students and teachers?

I have no doubt that there will be enormous changes in the way we learn in the future – and the School of the Future will have to assimilate them. These changes can be classified in the following way:

· Changes in what we learn

· Changes in how we learn

· Changes in when we learn

As we will see, these three things are interconnected.

Most of the learning that present schools try to promote involves assimilation of information. I do not even say “acquisition” of information, because acquisition is an active process – and what takes place in school is not an active process from the student point of view. What happens at school is that students are expected to assimilate – mostly in a passive way — information that teachers deliver to them.

In the School of the Future learning will not be identified with assimilation of information. Even though all learning involves the acquisition of information, that is not the most important element of learning. The most important element of learning is capacity building, the development of competencies. To learn is to become capable of doing that which one could not do before. Every learning involves a doing – even if the doing involves acquiring some information in the process. The object of learning is not a mere “knowing that” (“savoir”), but a “knowing how” (“savoir faire”).

So, the curriculum will not be a set of subject matters (academic disciplines) organized by grade: it will be a mosaic of competencies, in which each competency will be linked to the skills, to the attitudes, to the values and to the information required to develop it.

And the curriculum will not be “one size fits all”. There are, of course, some basic competencies that everyone will need to develop (communication competencies, interpersonal competencies, management competencies – including managing priorities, managing time, managing resources, managing negotiations, managing conflict…). But human beings have different talents, interests, goals in life (life projects). It makes no sense that everybody ought to develop exactly the same sort of competencies in life.

This brings us to the second set of changes I mentioned: change in how we learn. Since competencies involve “knowing how” (“savoir faire”), learning must be active, learning must basically imply doing. But this doing is not doing what other people tell us to: it must be self-generated and self-directed doing, a doing that is related to one’s interests.

This is the essence of what some people call today “project-based learning” (or “problem-based learning”, or “inquiry-based learning”). However, this approach to learning is not effective if the projects, the problems, the inquiries are determined by the teacher for the student. That is why I emphasize the need for learning to be self-generated and self-directed.

So, we, the learners, ought to choose not only what we are going to learn – what sort of competencies we will need to develop, given our talents, interests and goals in life – but also how we are going to learn – what sort of learning projects are most worthwhile.

It goes without saying that learners, or students, do not live and choose in a vacuum. They are born into a family and into a community and learn all of what they learn by interacting with others. Learning is essentially a collaborative endeavor (but collaboration can take place at a distance). Human beings are quite curious and inquisitive, and they very early develop talents and interests of their own, that must be allowed to flourish. These talents and interests will eventually be consolidated in a life project.

Some people – mostly parents and teachers – worry when they hear me defending this view. What if a child does not choose to learn something that is important for him? My answer is: if the “something” is really important for him, he will inevitably choose to learn it, and quite early – and will learn it quite effectively.

Many people are under the impression that children do not like to learn things that are difficult to learn. This is a false impression. The opposite is true: children love challenges, they love to learn things that are difficult to learn. Many times, in playing a computer or video game, they lose interest in a game once they master it!

The truth of the matter is that children do not like to learn things the learning of which does not seem to carry any point or purpose – even if they are easy to learn.

Finally, the third the second set of changes I mentioned: change in when we learn. Children – and adults, too – have not only different learning styles but also different learning rhythms. Learning is something we do during our whole life – that is the essence of “life-long learning”. There is no sense, therefore, in demanding or expecting that young folks learn everything there is to learn between the ages of 6 and 17 – or 6 and 21. Many of them do not even know with precision what their life project when they are this age. And interests change as they come across new environments and realities. And society changes – and changes very rapidly. Many of the very interesting professions that exist today did not exist twenty-five years ago – and many of the professions that will exist twenty-five years from now do not exist today! Professions that existed and even were important, no longer exist or are no longer important…

So schools in the future (that is, in the present) must take seriously the fact that we will be learning throughout our lives and be open for people of any age who are interested in learning a new competency. This means that schools in the future will not need to pack everything there is to learn into 12 years of a kid’s life. Children, young people, and adults can learn things when they realize they need or want to learn that – and this facilitates learning tremendously.

A corollary of this is that learning can be, and often ought to be, piecemeal, structured in small modules. For some of our learning needs a two hour chat with a specialist will be enough – there will be no need to take a semester-long course! In other cases, we need somebody’s help only to get us started, or to help us overcome a hurdle.

Another corollary of this is that, with technology-mediated communication, we can learn anytime, anywhere… So schools in the future may need very strong technological infrastructure, but they may not need a lot of fancy buildings…

Question 5:
What is the difference between technology-based learning and traditional learning? Will students be different?

I think we began to touch on that in the last paragraph of the previous answer.

If learning is active and collaborative, if we learn by doing things and we learn to do things by interacting with other people, then the issue that this question raises is rather whether the doing and the collaborating that is mediated by technology is essentially different from the doing and collaborating that happens in “face-to-face” environments.

I think it is not – but I am willing to hear the arguments of those who say that it depends on what it is that is being learned.

You see, I am a philosopher by training. Socrates would probably disagree with me (he was even against the use of writing in philosophical discussion!), but I am convinced that technology-mediated interaction (discussion, collaboration) is a much more effective environment for learning philosophy than “face-to-face” environments. (But this is not the place to argue for this view). But I recognize that learning to do a heart bypass surgery may not be quite as effective without “face-to-face” contexts.

So our challenge is double: first, to help our students realize the active nature of learning and the essential collaborative nature of most of our activities; second, to help them develop the competencies necessary to communicate, interact and collaborate in virtual environments. The second challenge is, I believe, easier to meet than the first.

Question 6:
How are Schools of the Future doing in places other than Taiwan?

I would say with all confidence that no country in the world has jumped ahead in transforming their present school system into a system of Schools of the Future. Sometimes we see in a country a school that was built from scratch and labeled School of the Future. In some of these cases the school has some advanced innovative features, in other cases the innovations are purely cosmetic. It is very difficult to build a totally new school – even if we are dealing only with one.

The challenge is much greater if we try to change an entire school system, beginning with the schools we presently have. In this case we have great obstacles. People resist changing. Changing the way we work implies developing other competencies, modifying our attitudes, sometimes adopting new values – and all of this has an important counterpart: letting some old competencies fall into disuse, giving up some attitudes that were dear to us, parting with values of which we have become fond…

So, no country has jumped ahead in the undertaking of creating a system of Schools of the Future.

Question 7:
There are many Taiwan schools interested in becoming a School of the Future. Please give them some suggestions about what to do first.

The first step is to do some strategic thinking and ask:

· Where are we today?

· Where do we want to be?

· How do we get from here to there?

This is the first step. It is not an easy one.

First problem: most schools may not be able to agree on where exactly they are – much less on where they want to be…

Second problem: some schools may analyze where they are and quickly conclude that they are fairly good and do not need to change much (only in some minor aspects)…

Third problem: some schools may conclude that they are far away from where they ought to be – but may not reach agreement on exactly where they ought to be…

Fourth problem: some schools may conclude that they are far away from where they ought to be, and may reach basic agreement on where they would like to be – but do not know how to get there…

So this exercise in strategic thinking is essential – and that is where any process of change must start.

Question 8:
What is the most important meaning of having Education?

Well, thank you for asking this question at the end. I said earlier that we need a new view or concept of education. I will try to sketch what, in my opinion, this view or concept ought to be.

There are many people that think that education is the process whereby a given generation transmits to the next the culture heritage of a given social group. Education, in this view, is something older people to do younger folks, to prepare them for their place in society.

I disagree with this view.

I think that education is a process of human development. Differently from other animal species, human beings are born quite unprepared for the task of living – even if living is understood merely as surviving. We are born totally incompetent, and, therefore, are absolutely dependent on the care of others.

But we are born two important features:

· First, an incredible capacity to learn;

· Second, with a “hardware” that requires “software” to run…

That the human beings, including very young human babies, have an incredible capacity to learn I find it unnecessary to argue here.

I will, therefore, concentrate on the second feature – apologizing for the “technological analogy”…

The young ones of most animal species are born quite ready for life. Most everything they need to know in order to survive is “wired” into their brains. Their brain is basically “programmed” by the time they are born.

This is not the case of human beings. We are born with an excellent piece of “hardware” – our brains – but it comes with minimal “programming”. The rest of the “programming” we have to do ourselves – and we do it through learning.

So, this is what education is all about: a process of human development that allows us not only to survive (become competent) but to choose a life for ourselves (become autonomous). Education is the process through which the incompetent and dependent beings that are born become competent, autonomous adults.

Technology must not be understood only in terms of high (or most recent) technology. Technology is whatever we, human beings, invent to make our life easier or more pleasurable. Sometimes life is difficult, other times it is dull. That is why we invent tools and toys – that is, technology. Art (literature, music, painting, sculpture) is technology. Its function is not utilitarian: it is to make life more pleasurable – to make life worth-living. It is a toy, not a tool. Technology is the product of our problem-solving ability. It helps us survive by making life easier – and it makes us want to survive by making life more pleasurable.

Eduardo O C Chaves

Oporto (Portugal), the 12^th of November, 2006, transcribed here from Salto, on the 5th of October, 2007

[This article was written by me (Eduardo Chaves) in June 2006. It is not specifically about the Lumiar School project, but it helps clarify the issues involved in the project.]

Content

1. Microsoft’s School of the Future Program

II. The Future of Schooling in Large, Diversified Emerging Countries

1. “The Six I’s Model”

2. A Blueprint versus a Compass, Maps and Travel Guides

3. The School we Have versus The School we Want to Have

A. The Need to “Reconceptualize” Education

B. The Need to “Reconceptualize” Learning

C. The Need to “Reconceptualize” Schooling

D. The School of the Future

1. Microsoft’s School of the Future Program

Microsoft invested considerable financial, material and human resources in the project School of the Future (SOF) in Philadelphia. After several years, it looks as if we will, finally, be able to see the results of that investment.

Microsoft seems also quite willing to invest more resources in launching a worldwide School of the Future program (the name may still change before the initiative is officially launched) — to be deployed in at least twenty sites in different regions of the world, several of which in emerging countries.

Ironically, if this program is to succeed, the first requirement is to “de-philadelphia-lize” it…

I will explain what I mean.

If we are going to take seriously Alvin Toffler’s ideas that:

* civilizations should be understood in very “macro” terms,

* the world, up to the mid-fifties in the United States, had lived through only two “macro-civilizations”, the agrarian and the industrial one,

* the world is only now beginning, in a more generalized manner, its inroad into the third, the information- or knowledge-based civilization,

* then it is necessary to recognize that in many parts of the worlds these three civilizations, that Toffler calls “waves”, in fact coexist, side by side, within one single country.

My own country, Brazil, is an example of that. My state, São Paulo, takes prides in being the “locomotive” that pulls the country ahead. Not too long ago, in the beginning of the twentieth century, this locomotive ran on agriculture — mostly coffee. By the time the United States was beginning to enter the third wave, in 1955, São Paulo was beginning to enter its second wave (starting its automotive industry, and so bringing Brazil into age of industry). Now that São Paulo has clearly embarked on the third wave, developing or emerging states in Brazil scramble to get a piece of what is left of the second wave. At the same time, Brazil’s most radical and violent social movement, the Movement of the Landless (Movimento dos Sem Terra), has as its main flag the need (as they see it) to get the Brazilian poor a piece of land, so they can settle in it, cultivate it, and thus enter (! sic) the first wave…

What is the School of the Future supposed to be like in Brazil?

The model of the School of the Future that is adequate for Philadelphia may be — I insist: MAY BE — adequate for the most developed regions of the State of São Paulo (like my own city, Campinas, considered by many to be “The Silicon Valley” of Brazil). But even of that I am not sure (see below, the discussion of Scharffenberger’s and Negroponte’s insights). But of one things I am sure: that model is not be adequate for regions that are struggling to leave the first wave and benefit from what is left from industrial civilization. Much less for regions that are still heavily dependent on traditional agricultural methods, not much affected by automation, and so are clearly in the first wave.

What I am saying about Brazil probably applies to other countries. Toffler’s latest book, released just a few weeks ago, Revolutionary Wealth, makes much of China’s “twin track” strategy of development: enter the second and the third wave simultaneously. But this fact only underlines the fact that a large part of the Chinese territory is still in the first wave. The same with India. The same (probably less so) with Russia.

So much for The School of the Future in the BRIC countries…

In what follows I will try to outline some considerations about how I see the future of schooling — and consequently the School of the Future — in countries like Brazil, in the hope that what I say will also apply to Russia, India, China, and, perhaps, to several other countries struggling to enter the information- or knowledge-based era while still facing some very typical second- and even first-wave challenges.

II. The Future of Schooling in Large, Diversified Emerging Countries

The School of the Future project of Philadelphia has taught us some importance lessons and produced an interesting methodology.

Perhaps the most important lesson to be learned from the Philadelphia project is that no School of the Future project, not even in a developed, third-wave region, can be technology-led. If Microsoft hoped to help create in Philadelphia a model school that would showcase its state-of-the-art technology, these hopes had to be rapidly shelved (at least temporarily) in favor of more down-to-earth goals and solutions. Creating (sic: Philadelphia’s School of the Future is being created from scratch) a school that will serve as a reference for the 21st-century information- and knowledge-based civilization, requires some carefully developed methodological tools.

1. “The Six I’s Model”

One such methodological tool that emerged from the Philadelphia project was “The Six I’s Model”:

* Introspection

* Investigation

* Inclusion

* Innovation

* Implementation

* Introspection (again)

In what follows I will give my own rendition of how this models is supposed to work…

INTROSPECTION

In the beginning of any process of change — and creating a new kind of school is a huge process of change — lies introspection. Where are we with regard to our present schools? Are we satisfied with them? Are they doing the job they were supposed to do? Better than that: are they doing the job we would like them to do in present — and profoundly changed — (social, economic, cultural) conditions? No change process will ever get started if our answer is “yes” to these questions.

This shows us that a change process must begin with introspection — but will only be really put in place if the result of our introspection is dissatisfaction (should we say “insatisfaction” to stick with the “i’s”?) with present conditions. Change is something difficult to achieve — even on a personal level (think of a diet, or of quitting smoking). Our only hope of achieving is if we are profoundly dissatisfied with present conditions.

INVESTIGATION

The second step is investigation. What is out there? What are the alternatives? What could we be doing with our schools that is different from — and better than — what we presently do? If we embark on a large-scale change process, what are our possible destinations? To answer these questions we need to investigate, see what is being done in other places: What has succeeded and what has failed? What are the critical factors of success? What are the main obstacles and constraints? Some of this investigation can be done through reading. But some of it will have to be field work.

INCLUSION

Once we investigate as well as possible the alternatives, it is time to reflect on what we found out. But this reflection cannot — ought not — be done only by teachers or educators. Other stakeholders have to be brought in, especially parents, the community, business people, persons involved in not-for-profit organizations, important government leaders… In fact, everybody has a stake in education. Education, of which schooling is the institutional face, is too important an undertaking to be left to teachers and educators. (In this phase we need to be as inclusive as possible. I almost added: but, please, leave unions out – but I don’t want to limit inclusiveness, and so be more controversial than I need).

The broad group of stakeholders will need to look at all the results of the investigation, bring in their own experience, and try to define a common, shared vision. Inclusion is, so to say, the process — a common, shared vision, the product of this phase.

INNOVATION

The vision we reach must be innovative — or the whole exercise may not be worth the effort.

It is important to recognize that change, as such, need not be innovative. There is change that has, as its only goal, to allow things to remain the same. There is change that is piecemeal, incremental, consisting of small fixes (often techno-fixes) that try to guarantee that we do not seek more radical change. This sort of small, gradual, incremental change has been described by some as the main goal of reform. When we reform things we maintain their form — only improve it a little bit. But if we are to believe what some people are saying — and trust our basic intuition — what we need in relation to our present schools, especially in emerging countries, is more than reform that preserves present form: it is innovation that leads to transformation, that is, to transcending present form.

Please note that we are not speaking necessarily of technology here — but technology, and the changes it has helped bring to society, looms large in the background.

George Thomas Scharffenberger, who used to head the NGO WordLinks, associated with the World Bank, once said that technology can be brought into schools with three different goals in mind (that he described as the three “s’s”…):

* Sustain what is already being done there

* Supplement what is being done there

* Subvert what is being done there

When technology is brought into the school with the first goal in mind, technology becomes a conservative force.

When technology is brought into the school with the second goal in mind, technology becomes a reformative force.

When technology is brought into the school with the third goal in mind, technology becomes an innovative, transformative force.

The choice, is ours. What is it going to be? I have no doubt about what the answer ought to be for emerging countries.

Nicholas Negroponte uses to say that the degree of radical innovation that we are willing to accept for our schools in different countries is likely to be inversely proportional to the perceived quality of the school system of these countries.

Countries that perceive their school system as very good will not be willing to change it, much less engage in processes of radical, innovative, transformative change: what for? the system works well, we only need, perhaps, to “tweak” it, to “fine tune” it. They are conservative.

Countries that perceive their school system as average, or fairly decent, will be willing to change it — but only piecemeal, bit by bit, gradually, incrementally, in order to improve it while retaining the positive aspects it has already developed. They are reformative.

Countries that perceive their school system as bad, however, will be willing to subject it to radical, innovative, transformative change — change that will go beyond present form and try somehow to reinvent schooling. They are innovative, transformative. Perhaps, revolutionary.

Negroponte makes a daring bet: the most radical uses of technology in school may come, not from developed countries, but from countries where the school system is so bad that people will dare much more in the hope of transforming it — where people will be willing to use technology to “subvert” school’s present form (if I may mix Scharffenberger’s and Negroponte’s insights) and replace it with something else that, perhaps, still has to be invented. That is what is meant by “reinventing the school” – a concept people in developed countries even have difficulty to understand…

Is it evident, now, why innovation is not necessarily a question of bringing technology into schools — even if we acknowledge that, today, no worthwhile process of school change can ignore technology? Before we bring technology into schools, we must decide what the purpose of technology in the school is: to sustain, supplement or subvert what is presently being done there?

But I said we cannot ignore technology even as we are discussing this. This means, however, that we must not simply choose which technology should be brought into the school, but also take VERY seriously the technology that children and adolescents will be using outside the school (videogames, cell phones, mp3 players, digital cameras, instant messengers, e-mail, blogs, discussion groups, etc.). Technology can be a powerful learning tool for children exactly because, for them, technology is a toy, not a tool…

IMPLEMENTATION

This is the stage where vision (“dreams”) must become reality. This is the phase where we have to worry about resources (financial, material and, of course, human), about managing the process of change, guaranteeing that “first fruits” appear soon enough to forestall discouragement… This is the phase of execution. The previous phases are certainly more charming — but without this one, all the previous work will become just the chronicle of what was once a dream…

INTROSPECTION

Once the process is implemented it is time to rest and enjoy the work well done? NO! It is time to start all over again… to check if the changes produced are bringing about the results that we aimed for… Introspection again.

o O o

This “Six I’s Model” is a very important contribution of the Philadelphia project. I have added a lot of my own views to its description here — because I wanted to show that this very model may be a powerful instrument to justify my contention that, if Microsoft’s worldwide School of the Future program is to succeed, the first requirement is to “de-philadelphia-lize” it… But the tool to de-philadelphia-lize it was produced within the Philadelphia project!

2. A Blueprint versus a Compass, Maps and Travel Guides

I am convinced that nobody at Microsoft — certainly not anyone that has been involved with the School of the Future initiative — believes that the Philadelphia project ought to become a blueprint for other countries. But the danger is real that many countries, upon seeing what has been done there, may be tempted to simply copy it — using it as blueprint for their own projects. And, worse, the countries that may be tempted to do so may be the ones that would need the most to go a long way beyond it (while using the model that was developed in the process).

I have in the past suggested that, in education, especially when we deal with school change, we do not need blueprints — what we need is a compass and a set of maps and, perhaps, travel guides. Nowadays the compass may probably be replaced, with advantages, by a GPS system.

A compass or a GPS system tells us where we are. Everything must begin where we are. It is of no immediate use finding out how to get from Salzburg to Vienna if we must begin our journey in Cortland, Ohio.

A map shows us the many places we can go — as well as the roads that can take us there. If the map is more than a basic roadmap, it will show where rivers, lakes, and mountains (“natural obstacles”) are, it will describe scenic routes, it will indicate where national parks are located, which are the zones of environmental protection and interest, etc. In other words: a “rich map” is almost a travel guide…

The most important information, after where we are, is where we want to go. Yogi Berra is credited with saying that “if you don’t know where you’re going, you may end up somewhere else”. A different version of the saying (perhaps influenced by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland) states that “if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there”… Very true.

A common map will show us all the places we can go — but it will not suggest places worth going… Nor will it suggest the most interesting routes and itineraries…

A travel guide does just that. It describes a few of these places in some detail and suggests worthy destinations, that is, places most worth visiting — and, perhaps, the best itineraries: if you have plenty of time, you may choose a long, winding, scenic road… If you are in a hurry, you can take the “all-roads-look-alike” freeway — where you, besides not being able to appreciate the beautiful scenery, may have to pay a toll for getting there quickly…

The destination may be, well, Paris. If you are in the United States, you may fly straight to Charles de Gaulle airport. Or you may fly to Lisbon, rent a car, and drive through the back roads of Portugal, Spain and “deep France” until you get to La Place de la Republique… Here you have many different ways of getting to your destination. But the destination may be, let us say, Prague… You could still fly to Charles de Gaulle first — or even to Lisbon, and then get to Prague in part by car, in part by train, stopping over in Paris… Those who know human nature say that an important part of the joy of traveling is not just getting there: it is “in the getting there”, in “how you get there”…

I suggest that the School of the Future program that Microsoft is about to launch be more like a compass (a GPS system) and a set of maps and travel guides than like a blueprint… This is what I mean by saying that the key to its success will be in Microsoft’s ability to “de-philadelphia-lize” the program…

3. The School we Have versus The School we Want to Have…

When we introspect and analyze where we are, and when we define where we want to go, we must have some important indicators in mind. I suggest the following:

* The view of what education ought to be

* The view of what learning is

* The view of the best curriculum for promoting this kind of learning

* The view of the best methods for bringing about this kind of learning

* The view of the role of teachers in the process

* The view of how much say students ought to have in deciding what, when, where and how to learn (don’t we speak of anytime, anywhere learning?)

* The view of how the institution ought to be managed

* The view of how the community ought to be involved in the school

* The view of how technology can best contribute to promoting this kind of learning in this kind of context

This is not the place to go into detail into all of these indicators. I will briefly comment on just three of them.

A. The Need to “Reconceptualize” Education

I know Microsoft Word will balk at the term “reconceptualize”: it may suggest “reconcept” instead. But the right idea is that we have to reconceptualize education: we need to change our concept of education, is schools are to be effective in the 21st century…

Until now we have conceived education more or less in a durkheimian fashion. According to the French sociologist, Émile Durkheim, education is something the older generations do to the younger generations in order to make them absorb and assimilate the ideas, beliefs, values, attitudes that allow society to maintain, preserve and reproduce itself across time and allow children to fit into society… To educate, in this view, is to transmit the culture heritage of a society (or of humanity, depending on how broad- or local-minded we are) from one generation to the other… To educate, in this view, is to “deliver content” from teachers to students…

But this is not the only possible view of education. This view is society-centered. In it children (students) are the object – not the subject of education. It is possible to conceive education in a learner-centered manner, in which students are the subjects of their own education…

We are born totally incompetent, and, because of that, absolutely dependent. The babies of other animal species can walk and communicate and, to some extent, take care of themselves, from their first day of life. Human babies take basically one year to walk on their own and two to three years to communicate reasonably with their peers (something that some never seem to become able to do…). And yet, we are born with an incredible capacity to learn. This capacity to learn is what allows incompetent and dependent human beings to become competent and autonomous adults.

But there is something else that is quite important: humans are not totally “programmed”. They are undeniably born with some basic programming. But this programming is open: it allows them, from a given time on, to decide what they want to be, what they want to make of their lives, how they want to build their future… That is why we ask children what they want to be when they grown up — but don’t dream of asking that to our favorite pet (dog or cat)…

This undeniable set of facts about human nature must be kept in mind as we reconceptualize education… Education must the process by means of which we transform ourselves, from incompetent and dependent human beings, into competent and autonomous adults – but into adults of our own choosing! Education is a process of human development — not of content delivery, from a generation to another…

Of course, we are not able to educate ourselves alone… But, as a Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, once put it, nor must we imagine that, because of that, others have to educate us! According to Paulo Freire, neither do we educate ourselves, nor do others educate us: we educate one another, through interaction, through communication, through collaboration — through what he calls “communion”. And we do this having the world as our background, as our stage, as our scenery…

Back in the sixties Paulo Freire shocked the world when he said that we must not conceive education according to a “banking analogy”. And older generation has funds in its account. Since it knows it is not going to last forever (it is going to die), it must transfer those funds from their account into the account of the newer generation. Education, in this traditional view, is a process of funds transfer from the older to the newer generations… NO, he said: education is a process of human development, in which we become competent and autonomous as we define and implement a project for our own life (where we learn by “practicing our freedom”…).

Viewed this way, education does not have to do with teachers teaching content to students… but with students trying, with the help of teachers, to develop themselves into the competent, autonomous human beings they want to become!

B. The Need to “Reconceptualize” Learning

If we reconceptualize education along the lines suggested in the previous section, then we must also reconceptualize learning… To learn is not to absorb and assimilate information and knowledge (no matter how important it is)… To learn is not to absorb and assimilate our cultural past in order to allow culture to be preserved and reproduced… To learn is to become capable of doing that which we were not capable of doing before… (Vide Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline… He is miles away from Paulo Freire in many ways, but so close in others…). To learn is to become able to develop ourselves from the incompetent and dependent human beings we were at birth into the competent and autonomous adults we must be in order not only to survive – but to choose and achieve a life that brings personal realization and fulfillment!

This kind of learning is not a passive by-product of teaching: it is only achieved as we actively gain control of our lives and destinies… “as we practice our liberty”, as Paulo Freire would say. Learning is not something others do to us… Nor is it something we do by ourselves. Learning is something we achieve collaboratively, interactively, as we live our lives in this world.

C. The Need to “Reconceptualize” Schooling

If all of this is true – and I, personally, have no doubt it is – then the school we ought to have must not be a place where we sit, in a disciplined manner, one after the other, well uniformed, perhaps even in numerical sequence according to our enrollment number, and where we have to raise our hands to get permission to talk (or to go to the restroom!), in order to listen to a teacher speak… It must be a place where we are actively (sometimes disruptively) engaged in learning the things that contribute to transforming our life projects (our dreams) into reality…

Schools are supposed to be learning environments – not teaching environments. The most important persons in schools are students, not teachers: if there were not students, there wouldn’t be any schools… Schools must become student-centered, not teacher-centered – that means, they must be learning-centered, not teaching-centered… And they must be focused on the development of competence and autonomy – not on the delivery of content (much less on the “delivery of learning”, a concept I can’t even begin to understand”…)

And since people are so different one from the other, they will want to learn different things… One student will want to be a scientist. The other, an artist. The other, a carpenter. The other, a football player. The other (heavens forbid!), a politician or a lawyer. If schools are to be rich learning environments, they must make room for all these differences…

Schools must not be factories where only Henry Ford’s black cars are produced… They must be open learning environments, where people use all of their creativity and innovation to forge their own future… Where young people decide that their profession will be one that hasn’t been invented yet… Or even that they will not have a profession…

D. The School of the Future

The School of the Future must be open – because the future hasn’t been invented yet… At the MIT’s Media Lab they presumptuously state “here we invent the future”. That is not true. The place where we invent the future is our schools. Our future will be pretty much like the past if our schools are conservative. Our future will be a series of small improvements upon the present if our schools are allowed to reform themselves. But our future may be a brave new beginning if we allow our schools to be radically transformed, to be places where real learning takes place, to be the places where the future is really invented.

Eduardo O C Chaves

Salto, SP, Brazil, on the 17^th of May of 2006

Transcribed here from Salto (Brazil), on the 5th of October, 2007

[In May 2006 2006 Microsoft organized, in its Headquarters in Redmond, WA, USA, the the Microsoft School of the Future (SOF) Quarterly Meeting/Briefing. Microsoft Brazil was represented there, with a delegation of four: Ana Teresa Ralston, Senior Academic Program Manager, Fernando Almeida, then President of the Lumiar Institute, Mônica Gardelli Franco, a vendor, and Eduardo Chaves, member of the International Advisory Board of Partners in Learning. The document below was written by Eduardo Chaves, on behalf of the Brazilian delegation, to express Brazil’s intention of participating in the School of the Future (SOF) program — later renamed Innovative Schools Program (ISP). A portion of this material that has to do with the “Mosaic” was incorporated into the article “Lumiar: The ‘Mosaic'”, which was just made available here.]

Despite the timing, just at the close of Fiscal Year 06 [May 2006], Microsoft Brazil brought a small delegation to participate in the Microsoft School of the Future (SOF) Quarterly Meeting/Briefing conducted in Redmond on May 22nd-23rd. This was done to reiterate Brazil’s interest in the program and to gather subsidies to submit a formal proposal.

I. The general context, as we see it

As we preliminarily see it, it is possible to divide the SOF Program in some basic components – some of which have been the object of “Discovery Briefs” by the Philadelphia project:

a) The idea of creating a “new school” for the 21st century, different from, and much better than, the schools we presently have, as an effectively learning environment for children that have been born and certainly are going to live, exercise their citizenship, work, and – why not – have more and more time for leisure in the global knowledge economy

b) “Methodologies for Strategic Planning”, that is, a set of concepts, principles and methods (tools) that are very important in the process of conceiving and planning the “new school” – this was the object of Discovery Brief 01

c) “Principles of IT Infrastructure Planning”, that is, a set of concepts and principles that are important in the process of planning the role that technology will have in the “new school” – this was the object of Discovery Brief 02

d) “Key Attributes of Architecture”, that is, a set of concepts and principles that should help planners and decision makers choose the best organization for the physical space of the “new school” – this was the object of Discovery Brief 03

e) “Strategic Leadership Selection”, that is, a set of concepts and principles that should help planners and decision makers choose the best personnel for the “new school”, especially its leadership – this was the object of Discovery Brief 04

As much as we consider important the last four items (the ones that were the object of the four Discovery Briefs), we felt that a “Discovery Brief” on the pedagogical concepts and principles that should help us organize the “new school” as an effective learning environment – something that involves much more than the material infrastructure of buildings and technology – is noticeably missing. And this is exactly the area which the Brazilian team considers the most critical success factor.

It was stated in one of the presentations that not everything can be critical. This means that, when resources are limited, we have to choose the most critical success factors and invest time, money and other resources in it.

This is what we intend to do, in the hope of creating a School of the Future in Brazil that will:

a) Be an important contribution, in terms of pedagogical model, for Brazil and also for the School of the Future program, especially for countries that do not have the financial resources to invest in expensive buildings (new or renovated) and in the most sophisticated technology infrastructure imaginable;

b) Make full use of the of the subsidies provided by Discovery Briefs 01-04;

c) Make this model easily transferable to the public school system of Brazil and, therefore, scalable.

We asked the organizers yesterday if it was possible that Philadelphia’s School of the Future, despite the amazing features of the physical and technological infrastructure of the new school, could, except for the pedagogical vision and commitment of those presently involved in the project, one day be the scenery of very traditional and conventional pedagogical practices. The answer was yes. We hope to reduce this chance by suggesting a pedagogical model that, in our view, seems to answer the hopes and desires that, for a long time, have been expressed in the educational community.

II. The challenge regarding the pedagogical model

A few years ago, as the new millennium approached, and as the global knowledge civilization gave evidence that it was here to stay, the whole world started worrying about the fact that our present schools, created to serve the needs of industrial civilization, were not preparing students to live their personal lives, exercise their citizenship, work and make fruitful use of their free time in the new reality that was emerging.

This concern often expressed itself in a call for defining a basic set of competencies and skills that would be required in the 21st century or in the new civilization and for changing schools so that they would adopt a new educational paradigm that would allow them to become effective learning environments for the development of these competencies and skills. Microsoft itself participated in more than one of many such efforts.

In Brazil, a new Constitution, approved in 1988, declared that education – and therefore schools – should form the person, the citizen and the worker. A new law providing frameworks and guidelines for the national system of education was approved in 1996. A whole set of binding “National Curriculum Parameters” emerged from 1997 through the early years of this century.

Although these documents came short of declaring traditional education illegal, they made it unequivocally clear that, in a society where information and communication technology was pervasive and, more and more, easily accessible, it made no sense for the schools to continue focusing on their traditional tasks of delivering information and what they called knowledge to the students. The documents proposed the notion that education – and therefore schools – should be effective learning environments where students could develop the competencies and skills they needed in order to live as individuals, citizens and workers in the 21st century. The documents also proposed that schools adopt project-based learning as their methodologies, and that they should pay great attention to the need of connecting what motivates children (and should therefore be the focus of their learning projects, with a “competency matrix” that outlines what children ought to learn – all of this in a flexible environment that takes very seriously the fact that children (as human beings in general) are different from another, have different natural talents, have different interests, and so schools should have curricula that shied away from the “one size fits all” model.

As one can imagine, these documents initially created an outcry in the educational community. Gradually, the “new pedagogical discourse” came to be accepted – but in theory, only, because practice continued very much what it had always been.

The main difficulty on the way of translating this new educational vision into effective pedagogical practice in the schools has been the lack of workable pedagogical models that show how this can be done.

One important contribution to this effect is being made in São Paulo by the Lumiar Institute: the Lumiar School. This is a private school with a public vocation. It brought together paying students from the upper middle classes and very poor students from the periphery who pay a symbolic monthly fee (less than 5 dollars). And the school is committed to being an open, democratic, flexible and very powerful and effective learning environment.

The members of the “Brazilian delegation” have been involved in this project, some from the very beginning. Prof. Fernando Almeida is the present president of the Lumiar Institute and Prof. Eduardo Chaves has been a consultant to the project even before the school opened its doors.

The project contains important contribution to what we could call “school governance” (instead of “school management”), but what interests us here is its “Mosaic” model of curricular organization, the main elements of which we will try to rapidly summarize here.

First, there is a “competency matrix” – an attempt to organize the competencies and related skills needed for living as an individual, a citizen, a worker, and a permanent learner in the 21st century.

Second, there is “project bank” – a database of learning projects to be developed by people from the community (business leaders, professionals, artists, workers of all sorts, housewives and househusbands, etc.) who have interesting competencies and skills that they can share with the students and are willing to donate their time, for short periods (from one to two weeks to two or three months) in helping interested students become involved with these competencies and skills. (These people are the so-called “masters” of the school. The database has presently more than 350 such projects, as well as the names and other features of the people who can coordinate them).

A series of “nodes” that link and connect, for each learning project, the competencies and skills it will most likely help students develop with the “competency matrix” — thereby creating a “mosaic”. [This task is to be performed by a group of permanent educators in the school, trained to do this work, who accompany and analyze the learning projects to identify in them the elements that are part of the “competency matrix”].

Third, a “learning portfolio”, that registers, for each student:

* An initial evaluation of their competencies and skills as they arrive in the school and begin each school year;

* The projects they have been involved in;

* Whether, and how well, they developed the competencies and skills that were linked and connected with each project in which they were involved;

* For students in higher grades, information on their life projects and the competencies and skills that life project requires.

[This “learning portfolio”, in way, relates “the pleasant” and “the useful”: beginning with what motivates student, and therefore leads them to engage in a given project, make the connection with what they ought to know. This task is also to be performed by the group of permanent educators in the school, who constantly evaluate how well the students are doing and how far they are progressing in relation to the “competency matrix”].

The “learning portfolio” also registers, for each student, its progress in the appropriation of what could be called “traditional curricular content” that is needed for the development of their learning projects: knowledge of their own language, of mathematics, of science, etc.

Although the school is convinced that there are competencies and skills that all students ought to develop (in communication and in interpersonal relations, for instance), it clearly allows, especially for older children, ample space for the pursuit of competencies and skills that could be qualified as more idiosyncratic – and that have to do with each child’s specific “life project”.

This is a very short summary of the pedagogical model.

To finish, a consideration about technology. All of this is being done mostly manually at the present. With a small number of students, this is not a major challenge. But it would clearly become impeditive in the case of applying the model to larger schools.

Therefore, the main technological challenge of our proposal is going to be to develop, with Microsoft technology, the technological infrastructure for this “Mosaic”.

Redmond, May 23, 2006

Eduardo Chaves

Transcribed in Salto (Brazil), on the 5th of October, 2007

1. The Rationale

After investing millions of dollars in information technology, corporations concluded that the mere addition of technology to their unchanged business processes would not guarantee survival, much less survival with greater productivity, larger profits, and increased competitiveness.

It was only when executives realized that the changes taking place in their business environment required them to review the core competences of their companies, reengineer their business processes, and, in some cases, entirely reinvent them, that technology started to fulfill its promises.

The quantum leap was given, for instance, not when bookstores automated their conventional business procedures, no matter how well they did it, but when virtual bookstores, that easily could, and have, become virtual shopping malls, were invented.

With schools the same principles apply.

The mere addition of technology to the teaching and learning processes of an otherwise conventional school will not produce a school of the future – certainly not an innovative school – but only a more expensive conventional school.

The quantum leap here will be given when educators, seriously facing the changes that are taking place in the way people communicate, access information, collaborate, have fun, and learn in the real world outside the school, decide to review their view of education and learning, redefine the way they understand the curriculum, reengineer the spaces, times and methods that allow people to learn through interaction and collaboration, recast the roles of teachers and students, and, so, reinvent the school as an institution.

Here we have a few examples of the dissonance between the schools existing today – even the good ones – and the school environment brought about, largely, by technology:

a) Today information is abundant and access to it is extremely easy – and today’s approach to information is much more centered on “pull” than on “push”. Yet the conventional school is organized and operates on the basis that education is transmission of information, and that, therefore, the main function of the school is to transmit information (“deliver content”) to the students – an approach clearly centered on “push”.

b) If education is not mere “delivery of information”, learning is not simply “absorption of information”: to learn is to become capable of doing that which one was unable to do before. To learn is, therefore, capacity and competence building. And humans learn from the time they are born to the time they die – and they learn all the time.

c) If to learn is not simply to absorb information, a school curriculum cannot be a canon with all the information that one is supposed to absorb, drawn from the academic disciplines, and then retain for the rest of his life: a curriculum is more like a mosaic of competencies and skills that are necessary for living in this world.

d) If they are not to be deliverers of information, having students as its absorbers, teachers should be seen as mentors, coaches, advisors, counselors of their students, and in this capacity they ought to instigate and facilitate their learning, or even, under some conditions, present challenges to learning that is more presumed than real, acting, therefore as “difficultators” of learning.

e) If we learn from birth to death and do it all the time, and we learn mostly by communicating and collaborating, a school cannot be a place in which some teachers pack information into students, face-to-face, when the students are aged 6-23, but, rather, a learning environment to which people can turn to, physically or virtually, at any time during their lives, to try to acquire or develop, through interaction and collaboration, competencies and skills they do not have and yet need or desire to possess.

This is the pedagogical roadmap for the Innovative School – for the true School of the Future.

Lumiar aims at bringing about this kind of School of the Future.

So, Lumiar’s proposal is not simply another program that aims to bring technology into the schools that we now have: it is a program that aims to help schools reinvent themselves in an age of ubiquitous and diffuse technology.

2. Summary of the Proposal

In Brazil, most of the pedagogical principles outlined in the previous section have become mandatory for schools through the set of National Curriculum Parameters and Guidelines.

Although these documents came short of declaring traditional education illegal, they made it unequivocally clear that, in a society where information and communication technology was pervasive and, more and more, easily accessible, it made no sense for the schools to continue focusing on their traditional tasks of delivering information and what they called knowledge to the students.

The documents proposed the notion that education should be seen as a permanent process of human development and that schools should be effective learning environments where students could develop the competencies and skills they need in order to live as individuals, citizens and workers in the 21st century.

The documents also proposed that schools adopt project-based learning as their methodologies, and that they should pay great attention to the need of connecting what motivates children (and should therefore be the focus of their learning projects, with a “competency matrix” that outlines what children ought to learn – all of this in a flexible environment that takes very seriously the fact that children (as human beings in general) are different from another, have different natural talents, have different interests, and so schools should have curricula that shied away from the “one size fits all” model.

As one can imagine, these documents initially created an outcry in the educational community. Gradually, the “new pedagogical discourse” came to be accepted – but in theory, only, because practice continued very much what it had always been.

The main difficulty on the way of translating this new educational vision into effective pedagogical practice in the schools has been the lack of workable pedagogical models that show how this can be done and the absence of concrete examples that demonstrate that this new educational vision has been successfully translated into everyday pedagogical practice.

Lumiar’s main pedagogical objective is to incorporate these principles into its daily practice.

Lumiar is maintained by private efforts – but it has a public vocation. It is committed to being an open, democratic, flexible and very powerful and effective learning environment (where technology indeed has its place) that will, eventually, contribute to bringing about an “epidemic” of change in the public schools.

The Lumiar proposal also contains important contributions to what we could call “school governance” (instead of “school management”). However, what interests me here is its model of curricular organization, the main elements of which I will try to rapidly summarize here.

First, there is a “competency matrix” – an attempt to organize the competencies and related skills needed for living as an individual, a citizen, a worker, and a permanent learner in the 21st century.

Second, there is the “project bank” – a database of learning projects to be developed by people from the community (business leaders, professionals, artists, workers of all sorts, housewives and househusbands, etc.), who have interesting competencies and skills that they can share with the students and are willing to donate their time, for short periods (from one to two weeks to two or three months) in helping interested students become involved with these competencies and skills. (These people are the so-called “masters” of the school. The database has presently a good number of such projects, as well as the names and other features of the people who can coordinate them).

A series of “nodes” will link and connect, for each learning project, the competencies and skills it will most likely help students develop with the “competency matrix” – thereby creating a “mosaic”.

Third, a “learning portfolio” that registers, for each student:

* An initial evaluation of their competencies and skills as they arrive in the school and begin each school year;

* The projects they have been involved in;

* Whether, and how well, they developed the competencies and skills that were linked and connected with each project in which they were involved;

* For students in higher grades, information on their life projects and the competencies and skills that life project requires.

This “learning portfolio”, in way, relates “the pleasant” and “the useful”: beginning with what motivates students, and therefore leads them to engage in a given project, it makes the connection with what they ought to know. This task is also to be coordinated by the group of permanent educators in the school, who constantly evaluate how well the students are doing and how far they are progressing in relation to the “competency matrix”.

The “learning portfolio” also registers the progress of the students in the appropriation of what could be called “traditional curricular content” that is needed for the development of their learning projects: knowledge of their own language, of mathematics, of science, of the social fabric in which this project is being developed, etc.

Although the school is convinced that there are competencies and skills that all students ought to develop (in communication and in interpersonal relations, for instance), it clearly allows, especially for older children, ample space for the pursuit of competencies and skills that could be qualified as more idiosyncratic – and that have to do with each child’s specific “life project”.

The whole process is democratic and has full involvement of the students – and here the methodology links with the question of governance. The itinerary of each student, the evolution of the group (including disciplinary issues), and the governance of the school are objects of discussion and decision in “decision rounds” that take place every week.

This is a very short summary of the pedagogical model.

3. And what about Technology?

And what is the role of technology in this process?

There is, first, the role of technology in systematizing this model in order to make it transferable to public schools, where it can be scaled up. All of this is being done mostly manually at the present. With a small number of students, this is not a major challenge. But it would clearly become impeditive in the case of applying the model to larger schools – as is the case of most public schools.

Therefore, the main technological challenge of the proposal is to develop the technological infrastructure that will make this pedagogical vision applicable to public schools. This infrastructure will have to fully integrate Microsoft’s interactive technologies and tools for use by the students: e-mail, instant messaging, group chat, discussion groups, personal spaces (information sharing), etc.

There is, second, the use of technology by those involved in the learning process in the school: masters, educators, students and those responsible for specific tasks in the governance of this process. Once completed the development of the technological infrastructure, Microsoft technology will also be used to make us of the various elements of this infrastructure.

The challenge here is to transform technology into an effective learning tool.

Eduardo O C Chaves

São Paulo (Brazil), on the 22nd of December, 2006. Transcribed here from Salto (Brazil), on the 5th of October, 2007

The thesis that the traditional school is either irrelevant to the education of children, or, worse, pernicious to their sound and healthy development, has noble antecedents.

Famous nineteenth-century luminaries defended this thesis: Leo Tolstoi, Samuel Butler, Charles Darwin and Mark Twain, among others. In the twentieth century Albert Einstein, Karl Popper, and Howard Gardner, among many others, considered the traditional school, more than obsolete and irrelevant, harmful to children.

In this article I will, little by little, add quotations from these people.

Here is what Leo Tolstoi said:

“Children are everywhere sent to school by force, while parents are compelled to send their children to school by the severity of the law, or by cunning, or by offering them advantages. But the masses everywhere study of their own accord, and regard education as good.

How is this? The need for education lies in every man; the people love and seek education, as they love and seek the air for breathing; the government and society burn with the desire to educate the masses. And yet, nothwithstanding all the force of conning and the persistency of governments and societies, the masses constantly manifest their dissatisfaction with the education which is offered to them, and step by step submit only by force.

What experience can prove to us the justice of the existing method of compulsory education? We cannot know whether there is not another, better method, since the schools have heretofore not yet been free. It is true that at the highest rung of education — universities, public lectures — education strives to become even more free. But maybe education at the lower rungs must always remain compulsory, and maybe experience has proved to us that such schools are good.

Let us look at these schools, without consulting the statistical tables, but by trying to know the schools, and learn their influence on the masses in reality.

This is what reality has shown me: Schools present themselves to the child as an institution for tortuing children — and institution in which they are deprived of their chief pleasure and youthful needs, of  free motion; where obedience and quiet are the chief conditions; where he needs special permission to got out ‘for a minute’; where every misdeed is punished. What the results must be, we again see from what they really are, not according to the reports,  but from the actual facts. Nine tenths of the school population take away from school a mechanical knowledge of reading and writing, and such a stong loathing for the paths of knowledge traversed by them that they never again take a book into their hands. Not only does school breed loathing for educaiton, but in these years it inculcates upon these pupils hypocrisy and deceit, arising from the unnatural position in which the pupils are placed.

Every instruction ought to be only an answer to the questions put by life, whereas school not only does not call forth questions, but does not even answer those that are called for by life. It eternally answers the same questions which have been put by humanity for several centuries, and not by the intellect of the child.

It is enough to look at one and the same child at home, in the street, or at school: now you see a vivacious, curious child, with a smaile in his eyes and on his lips, seeking instruction in everything, as he would seek pleasure, clearly and frequently expressing his thoughts in his own words; now again you see a worn-out, retiring being, with an expression of fatigue, terror, and ennui, repeating with the lips only strange words in a strange language — a being whose soul has, like a snail, retreated into its house. It is enough to look at these two conditions in order to decide which of the two is more advantageous for the child’s development.

The compulsory structure of the school excludes the possibility of all progress.”

[Leo Tolstoi, “On Popular Education”, in Pedagogical Articles, 1862, translated from Russian into English by Leo Wiener (Dana Estes & Co., Boston, 1904), above excerpted from pp. 7-18 (emphases added). Quoted apud Daniel Greenberg, Announcing a New School: A Personal Account of the Beginnings of the Sudbury Valley School (The Sudbury Valley School Press, Framingham, MA, 1973, p. 175)]

Here is what Samuel Butler said, commenting on why it was that, “in spite of the treachery of their leaders, there are quite a number [of people] who are decent, and intelligent, and devoted to their task” (words in quote from Karl Popper — see below):

“I sometimes wonder how it was that the mischf done was not more clearly perceptible abd that young men and women grew up as sensibly and goodly as they did, in spite of the attempts almost deliberately made to warp and stunt their growth. Some doubtless received damage, from which they suffered to their life’s end; but many seemed little or none the worse, and some almost better. The reason would seem to be that the natural instinct of the lads in most cases so absolutely rebelled against their training, that do what the teachers might they could never get them to pay serious heed to it”.

[Samuel Butler, in Erewhon (1872, Everyman’s Edition), p.135, apud Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. I: “The Spell of Plato” (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1962, 1966, 1971), p. 136 (emphasis added). This passage also appeared as motto to the section “Replies to My Critics”, written by Karl Popper, in The Philosophy of Karl Popper, org. por Paul Arthur Schilpp (Open Court, La Salle, IL, 1974), Vol. II, p. 1174]

Here is what Karl Popper said in the passage that preceded his quotation from Samuel Butler, transcribed above:

“It has been said, only too truly, tt Plato was the inventor of both our secondary schools and our universities. I do not know a better argument for an optimistic view of mankind, no better proof of their indestructible love for truth and decency,  of their originality and stubborness and health, than the fact that this devastating system of education has not utterly ruined them“.

[Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. I: “The Spell of Plato” (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1962, 1966, 1971), p. 136 (emphasis added)]

Salto (Brazil), on the 5th of October, 2007

Before it became a school, with buildings, rooms, furniture, computers, yard, trees, a tree house, Lumiar was a concept: a vision of a school that was different, innovative, and democratic. 

The people that conceived Lumiar were convinced, from the very start, that a school does not need to look like a factory, or, worse, like a prison: a serious, even sad, place, in which uniformed and regimented children practice, against their will, the difficult, even painful, duty to learn.

They knew that children, when they are not in school, are active, restless, curious creatures that like to ask questions, handle things, pry, investigate – because they literally love to learn. Children want to understand how things are made or how they function, and they do not hesitate, sometimes, to disassemble toys (or, on occasion, things that are far from being toys…) simply in order to understand how they were built or how they operate.

They knew that, even though children are rather ignorant at birth, they are born already knowing how to learn… In reality, children are beings that seem to have been programmed to learn. Very early, and without being taught, they learn to recognize the face and the voice of their mother, father, siblings, close acquaintances. They greet relatives and friends with a smile – and, as to strangers, well, they find them strange… They soon learn, once again without being taught, to recognize sounds and to perceive that some sounds have meanings, and thus they begin to enter the marvelous and fascinating world of language. They then learn to sit up, to stand on their legs, to balance upon them. More or less at the same time they learn to talk and to walk – in a rudimentary way at first, but they improve quite fast. In a short time they are running, walking, climbing on furniture and ladders – and speaking as if they were grownups. Then they learn how to dance, often in a natural and gracious way. At the same time they learn to sing the words of children songs, to follow their melody, to keep the rhythm. And they learn all of this without difficulty and with great pleasure – not because they are forced to do so, or because they are taught these things, and never in a grievous and painful way. Those that say that children, before they can learn, must learn how to learn, and that imagine they learn how to learn by being taught, must have never paid close attention to the physical, mental and social development of a child.

The questions that the people that conceived Lumiar asked were: Why not build a school that can leverage this enormous capacity to learn that is natural to children? Why not build a school that respects and promotes children’s innate curiosity, their interests and natural talents, their preferred forms of learning and their favorite learning styles? Why not build a school in which learning can be as pleasurable as it is outside the school, even when what is being learned is difficult and demands a lot of effort and great concentration?

Critics of the traditional school abound – and many of them are quite famous. And their criticisms have been made well over a century. See the article “Criticisms of the Traditional School”, presented in the sequence. Many of them have proposed differing alternative schools: anarchist, libertarian, progressive, constructivist schools… However, most of these proposals end up falling either into the Scylla of a “negative education”, totally “laissez faire”, “à la Rousseau”, in which the role of the school as a learning environment almost disappears, or into the Charybdis of a totally structured learning environment, not very different from the traditional school, an environment that does not respect the interests, natural talents and freedom to learn of the children.

The people who conceived Lumiar intended, in a bold move, that it should successfully navigate between these two undesirable dangers. And the school has, so far, been able to stay clear of them. Lumiar is a truly innovative, democratic school that respects their students’ individuality and freedom to learn. But it does so without abdicating its share of responsibility in their learning. Lumiar is not, therefore, an anarchic, libertarian, “laissez faire” school: it has a clear pedagogical vision and proposition that covers curriculum, methodology, assessment and, naturally, the democratic management of the school.

In this blog/site I will try to explain Lumiar – especially for those that are not satisfied with what other schools are offering. Lumiar knows that it is not a school for everyone: it is a school for those who are dissatisfied with the traditional school and with alternative schools that lack a coherent and effective pedagogical vision. For it to reach its objectives, it is necessary that the parents who bring their children to the school accept its pedagogical proposition – and be convinced that this proposition is not utopian, but, to the contrary, it is feasible and capable of effectively contributing to their children’s development as conscious, critical and responsible individuals, active and involved citizens, competent and successful professionals. The school never forgets, and it does not want parents to forget, that learning is the continuous and permanent destiny of human beings – beings who are born ignorant, incompetent and dependent, but with an enormous capacity to learn, and that, through learning, become adults that know the reality around them, are free and autonomous to define their life project and have the competences that are needed to transform this project into reality, that is, into fully lived lives.

Lumiar does not demand blind faith from those that bring their children to the school: it expects them to become acquainted with the “idearium” of the school – its conceptual and theoretical framework — and with its daily pedagogical practice.

The “idearium” will be presented here, little by little, in small pieces… The pedagogical practice is in the school, for whomever wants to see it: both in its original site, in the Bela Cintra neighborhood in São Paulo, and in Lageado, in the Habitat of the Mellos, in Campos do Jordão. Please, visit also the official site of the school: http://www.lumiar.org.br. This blog/site is not the official site of the school. It is my personal contribution to the understanding of Lumiar.

And what about me? Who am I?

I am Eduardo Chaves, retired professor of Philosophy of Education and Political Philosophy at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), in Campinas, SP, Brazil. A convinced classical liberal, à la Locke, Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, I was involved with Lumiar at the beginning, when its vision was being elaborated, and I am involved again now, as a member of the Lumiar Institute, which is the institutional arm of the SEMCO Foundation (that maintains the school) that is responsible for detailing the conceptual and theoretical framework of the school and for ensuring that this “idearium” and the pedagogical practice proceed in step, hand-in-hand (as if it were). Whoever wishes to contact me can e-mail me at eduardo@lumiar.net or eduardo@chaves.com.br).

[In time: In January 2007 Lumiar’s innovative nature was recognized and acknowledged by Microsoft: the school was chosen as one of twelve innovative schools worldwide by the Innovative Schools program, part of Microsoft’s global Partners in Learning initiative].

Salto (Brazil), on the 20th of September, 2007