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. In fact we encourage that kind of exploration. It is how children explore and gain information about the world around them.

Can you share some of what you learned about student-directed learning

What we are essentially doing when we move to student-directed learning is undermining our own relatively stable (though I would argue obsolete) notions of expertise and replacing them something new and different.

Before urbanization, children were viewed as economic assets to their parents. If you had a farm, they toiled alongside you to maintain its upkeep; if you had a family business, the kids helped mind the store. But all of this dramatically changed with the moral and technological revolutions of modernity. As we gained in prosperity, childhood came increasingly to be viewed as a protected, privileged time, and once college degrees became essential to getting ahead, children became not only a great expense but subjects to be sculpted, stimulated, instructed, groomed. (The Princeton sociologist Viviana Zelizer describes this transformation of a child’s value in five ruthless words: “Economically worthless but emotionally priceless.”) Kids, in short, went from being our staffs to being our bosses. “Did you see Babies?” asks Lois Nachamie, a couples counselor who for years has run parenting workshops and support groups on the Upper West Side. She’s referring to the recent documentary that compares the lives of four newborns—one in Japan, one in Namibia, one in Mongolia, and one in the United States (San Francisco). “I don’t mean to idealize the lives of the Namibian women,” she says. “But it was hard not to notice how calm they were. They were beading their children’s ankles and decorating them with sienna, clearly enjoying just sitting and playing with them, and we’re here often thinking of all of this stuff as labor.”

To start with, education must be egalitarian and universal, unlike previous education, which was feudal and elitist: “So there is nothing left for us but just to apply the new system to every German without exception, so that it is not the education of a single class, but the education of the nation.” Such education will aid in the creation of a classless society: “All distinctions of classes … will be completely removed and vanish. In this way there will grow up among us, not popular education, but real German national education.”[75]

Real education must start by getting to the source of human nature. Education must exert “an influence penetrating to the roots of vital impulse and action.” Here was a great failing of traditional education, for it had relied upon and appealed to the student’s free will. “I should reply that that very recognition of, and reliance upon, free will in the pupil is the first mistake of the old system.” Compulsion, not freedom, is best for students: On the other hand, the new education must consist essentially in this, that it completely destroys freedom of will in the soil which it undertakes to cultivate, and produces on the contrary strict necessity in the decisions of the will, the opposite being impossible. Such a will can henceforth be relied upon with confidence and certainty.[76]

Soap is generally a sodium salt of fatty acids.

The result of adding different metal salts to a burning reaction mixture of potassium chlorate and sucrose.

burning mixture of potassium

He continues that we can face the future with confidence if we know how to teach ourselves, read between the subjective lines of media, process the vast amount of information that will be available, work collaboratively, and reaching for resources that will expand our capacities – for example a resource like this course!!

However, to be part of the social network and be actively involve citizens, each must become life-long learners. 

Stage managers should be good planners and organisers, with a knack for multi-tasking, prioritising and keeping calm under pressure and in a crisis. Oh yes, and being fairly technically minded is a help!

Attention to detail and good communication skills are essential here.

In a crisis, it must always be the stage management that remain cool, keep their heads and cope with it; in a confrontation situation stage management must calm, soothe and mediate.

Setting up rigid and realistic goals based on the learner's competence, therefore, is more effective than setting easy goals.

Performance goal: I want to avoid mistakes so I can get a good grade.

Mastery goal: Understanding the class materials is more important than earning a high grade, and that's why I work hard to learn. My performance is better than it was at the beginning of the semester.