Translator: Marija Stepanovic Reviewer: Ivana Gadjanski
Good afternoon.
It is a great honor and pleasure
to have the opportunity to share with you some of my thoughts on education.
I didn't have stage fright until I watched
this talk given by Sir Ken Robinson,
and now I do, because I don't believe I can be as good as him,
but I still hope I'll be able to spark your interest.
I started my presentation with the question
"Where is education going?"
and offered an answer I thought was obvious
to anyone who thought about it a little:
Nowhere. It's standing still.
And that is actually the main problem with education today.
When talking about education,
we have to consider the wider context and think about
the origins of the education we know today.
It was developed as a response to the needs
brought about by a revolution more than 200 years ago.
It was the Industrial Revolution -
the time society entered that famed Industrial Age.
Why did this revolution happen in the first place?
Because the markets at the time were hungry,
and people were hungry for goods no one was there to produce.
Craft workers could not produce enough to satisfy market requirements.
The Industrial Age came as a solution to that problem.
With mechanization and, more importantly, work distribution –
breaking up a single process into smaller parts,
splitting the creation process into organizations,
which meant someone had to be in charge of orders,
sales, production, or some other activities –
human productivity was increased tenfold or even hundredfold
depending on the branch of industry.
That was the biggest increase of human productivity
in the previous 50 generations.
Education followed the same pattern of organization.
A certain body of knowledge
was splintered into courses, years, semesters, faculties,
and some intellectuals said,
"this is the quantum of knowledge a person should possess
in order to become skilled at something;
he must learn it the way we tell him," and that sounds basically
as if they were to open up your head, put a funnel in it,
pour in the necessary amount, close up, and you're all set.
However, with the increase in productivity,
the Industrial Age brought a lot of problematic issues as well.
Namely, mass production required you
to make multiple samples of the same product,
all of the same shape and identical properties,
which led to aesthetic grayness, dubious quality,
and the impossibility to keep up with the emerging fashion
and technological demands.
But it was a normal course of events for the period.
Beggars couldn't be choosers.
With hungry markets,
you produced as much as you could, and all of it would sell.
It was acceptable to build a factory
that was to operate in the same way for 300 years.
Things changed rather slowly for today's standards.
You could safely assume that the way
your father had lived was the way you were going to live.
The education system was in accordance
with those needs and requirements.
I don't know how much we here in Serbia are aware of it,
but humanity is at a crossroads today.
We are speedily stepping out of the Industrial Age and into a new one
called the Information Age.
Markets have become overly satiated.
Whatever you produce today you are never certain
whether you are competitive enough or if someone is better than you,
whether there is a better and more interesting product,
and whether it is made in a better and more attractive fashion.
Education is no longer in line with the current requirements.
The paradigm has shifted.
There was a time when possessing information
was considered crucial for gaining a competitive advantage
in business in general, which is still, like it or not,
the essential part of our lives.
Today, it is considered that
the ability to create new working knowledge,
those that will lead to inventing new products, technology,
business management,
or something else of interest or value to buyers,
is what provides a competitive advantage.
Why have I written "From Stojadin to Toyota"?
Believe it or not, when its production began
in the seventies here, the Stojadin was declared
the European Car of the Year.
And indeed it was at that time.
But 40 years have passed, and the Stojadin hasn't changed one bit.
Now – I'm not sure if anyone will take offense –
I can safely say that the Stojadin has gone from
being the car of the year to being the clunker of the year.
No one finds it interesting anymore. What happened?
Within those 40 years, car air conditioning,
airbags, ABS, EBRD, and whatnot has appeared,
and all the while we were changing grilles on the Stojadin.
Consider how much this is different from the whole story about education.
Let us have a look at some theories.
Thomas Davenport, in his book "Working Knowledge"
wrote that "Knowledge is a fluid mixture
of framed experience, values, contextual information,
and expert insight
that provides a framework for evaluating
and incorporating new experiences and information."
How much does our education system enable students
to put the information gained into context?
How much experience does it provide? Not to mention expert insight.
Now he says it takes a fluid mixture of all that
to enable us to create new knowledge
that would maintain the rapid pace of global change.
All knowledge can be divided in two major categories:
explicit knowledge,
which can be codified, recorded, read in books,
notebooks, PowerPoint presentations, tutorials, etc.,
and tacit knowledge –
also referred to as unconscious knowledge –
which comprises of skills, attitudes, creativity, intuition, experience.
Obviously, the latter knowledge type is much harder to acquire,
but it is far more important from the viewpoint
of this story about constant change and the transition
from the Industrial Age to the Information Age.
In the book, "Knowledge Creating Company",
Nonaka and Takeuchi say knowledge is created
through a sort of spiral, which grows wider and wider,
where the four types of knowledge creation processes
alternate continuously.
Socialization: students use their teacher's tacit knowledge
in order to create their own tacit knowledge.
This was immanent in craft working and vocational education.
Becoming an apprentice to a master tradesman
is an unparalleled form of socialization –
you work with and learn from your master,
use his knowledge and help
to develop your own tacit knowledge: skills, experience, attitudes, etc.
Internalization comes after socialization,
and that is when the teacher's explicit knowledge
is used for creating students' tacit knowledge.
Here textbooks and notebooks should come into play – but how?
If when trying to solve an actual, solid problem,
you encounter an obstacle, and can't move past it on your own,
you open a textbook and read the instructions,
and try to solve it again based on that,
if that doesn't work, you read something else, and so on.
Externalization refers to the teacher's attempt to write down,
make explicit his tacit knowledge
with a goal of making it useful
for students in the process of internalization,
and partly with a goal of becoming aware of them.
As this is unconscious knowledge, he gains a better understanding of it.
Finally, there is Combination,
which is commonly considered a science at our universities.
It is the use of explicit knowledge – by codifying, arranging, grouping,
statistical analysis, tumbling and jumbling –
in order to create other explicit knowledge.
When you look at our education system,
try to recognize these types of knowledge creation processes.
I don't think you will be able to.
Where is Socialization, Internalization, Externalization?
There is only the transferral of explicit knowledge
from one medium, the book,
to another, our own memory,
and later on, repeating it for the purpose of being graded.
How does that saying go?
"When you hear something, you'll forget it.
When you see something, you'll remember it.
But not until you do something will you truly understand it."
Here's Peter Drucker, the guru of modern management.
He says we have to constantly think about effectiveness and efficiency,
that is, whether we are doing the right things,
and whether we are doing them right.
He also says, "Knowledge is information
that changes someone by making them
capable of different or more effective action."
How much of this kind of knowledge
does our education system offer, you judge for yourselves.
Imagine now, enrolling in a swimming school,
within our current education system,
or a faculty – higher swimming education.
You'd probably have to take about a dozen courses:
hydrodynamics,
kinematics of limb movement in swimming,
types of swimming, comparative analysis of swimming styles,
the history of swimming,
Olympic records in swimming.
Your professors would be using the latest teaching methods,
computers, video projectors, PowerPoint presentations,
everything necessary to teach you all you need to know about swimming.
You, of course, would be listening carefully,
taking notes, asking for a copy of the presentation
on your flash drive to watch at home once again.
At the end of the course, you'd be asked to answer the teachers' questions
and demonstrate how well you can swim.
You'd receive grades: 6s, 7s, 8s,
finish your studies and earn a degree in swimming.
The best among you, who had all 10s,
would become teaching assistants,
and later on, docents and professors,
and teach others how to swim,
even though you might never have swum or got in the water before,
but who cares,
because you mastered the coursework outstandingly.
You cannot learn how to swim without getting in the pool.
So, first the pool, then a bit of splashing around,
a few mouthfuls of pool water...
We have to develop skills.
When you learn how to swim in the pool,
the teacher may take you to the Danube,
so you would see that a river is not quite the same as the pool.
With the lapping waves and the river current,
it makes a great way to gain some experience.
So when you go to the sea and see 5-meter waves,
you'll know better than to get in, because you'll drown.
The result of all this is intuition.
As for attitudes, there is an interesting anecdote.
A Vojvodinian gets recruited into the Navy –
back in the time when we still had a sea coast –
and the petty officer asks for his first and last name and hometown.
At last he says, "Can you swim?"
The Vojvodinian, deadly serious, says, "Why, has the ship sunk?"
(Laughter)
Proper attitudes are very important here.
Keeping this brief retrospect in mind,
and the discrepancy between our theory and practice,
what should our education look like?
I can imagine an education that –
I wish I may live to see it, and who knows, maybe I will –
that would look like this:
professors don't work at faculties only, or perhaps they don't work there at all,
they work in business firms, enterprises,
or at least they do most of the time,
and semesters no longer exist,
neither do students nor courses,
because courses have artificially diminished something meaningful.
How many times have you required knowledge
from another course in the same semester?
And why isn't it in an earlier semester?
Because according to the Bologna Convention,
there is a fixed number of professors per semester,
and someone has jumbled them up, and created a myriad problems.
And that is precisely what production is about.
Re-engineering reconstructs those fragments into a whole.
The same should be done in education.
Professors should be a collective that would regularly come together
and provide actual jobs from actual firms.
Today's jobs mostly require teamwork.
They are often multidisciplinary, or interdisciplinary.
No more isolation and individual work.
Education should be like that, as well.
A real project from a real firm
should involve teams of students,
from different study programs,
different years, departments,
even from different faculties if necessary.
Professors should work together with them,
and through those four processes,
they all acquire new knowledge.
Why shouldn't professors learn something new –
they didn't learn everything when they received their PhDs –
and make education better, more interesting
and livelier, and make students more competent.
We perceive creativity as something you're born with.
Creativity, too, can be taught and learned.
There are studies that prove it.
This would be a good way to do it.
Finally, I'd like to conclude with this.
When you mention the word "dogma" -
Sir Ken Robinson mentioned it in his talk too -
my immediate association is the Church.
The Church is supposed to be something unalterable.
However, if you give it a little thought
and take a look at our education system,
it is more dogmatic than the Church.
Everything changes at lightning speed.
When I was born, there were no TV's.
Black and white television was a sensation.
Look at kids today,
they can't imagine life without computers, mobile phones, etc.
The watch was an excellent comparison.
Only our education remaines the same for hundreds of years.
It's become like the Stojadin.
And when will it be like the Toyota or BMW, who knows.
As far as exams are considered,
what is achieved by taking a written, oral, or midterm exam?
The only thing achieved is to have students
show how well they've managed to take explicit knowledge from a book,
put it here, and simply reproduce it. That's pointless.
There has to be another way. Thank you.
(Applause)