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Născuți pentru a învăța. Despre capacitatea noastră incredibilă de a învăța și modul în care o putem folosi
Învățarea este sufletul speciei noastre. De la primul pas la ultimele cuvinte, suntem ceea ce învățăm. Educația prezice cât vom câștiga, cât de mulțumiți vom fi, chiar și cât de mult vom trăi. Dar, în ciuda importanței sale evidente, învățarea a pierdut contactul cu progresele umane. Trăim într-o epocă informațională și muncim într-o economie a cunoștințelor, însă școlile noastre sunt relicve ale epocii industriale.
În această carte, expertul în educație Alex Beard ne duce într-un tur uimitor prin viitorul învățării, pentru a ne arăta cum putem – și de ce trebuie – să obținem rezultate mai bune. Combinând informații din interior, anecdote amuzante și cercetări inteligente, Beard ne conduce de pe coridoarele aglomerate ale unei școli generale din Londra, pe holurile tehnologizate din Silicon Valley, în „fabricile de examene” din Coreea de Sud și în sălile de clasă incluzive din Finlanda, pentru a ne arăta că ne aflăm, în prezent, la marginea unei revoluții în domeniul învățării.
În această carte, expertul în educație Alex Beard ne duce într-un tur uimitor prin viitorul învățării, pentru a ne arăta cum putem – și de ce trebuie – să obținem rezultate mai bune. Combinând informații din interior, anecdote amuzante și cercetări inteligente, Beard ne conduce de pe coridoarele aglomerate ale unei școli generale din Londra, pe holurile tehnologizate din Silicon Valley, în „fabricile de examene” din Coreea de Sud și în sălile de clasă incluzive din Finlanda, pentru a ne arăta că ne aflăm, în prezent, la marginea unei revoluții în domeniul învățării.
480 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
August 4, 2019
Una dintre cele mai bune cărți despre ideile care aprind încet, dar sigur, revoluția în educație. E clar că educația este soluția tuturor problemelor noastre, iar cartea asta oferă câteva direcții interesante, bine doscumentate și scrise de Beard. Mi-a plăcut cât de mult insistă pe necesitatea gândirii critice, e ceea ce spun și eu aproape la fiecare ediție a emisiunii Starea nației. Gândirea critică ne oferă libertate. De asemenea, de remarcat rolul pe care ar trebui să-l joace stimularea creativității în educație, lucru care lipsește cu desăvârșire de la noi. La fel ca Ericsson în Pink și Angela Duckworth în Grit, Beard susține că pentru a fi excepțional ai nevoie de exercițiu metodic potrivit. Și adaugă o idee foarte interesantă, poate cea care m-a surprins cel mai mult, că trebuie început devreme și că modul în care privim noi educația e greșit. Lăsăm copiii doar să se joace chiar în perioada în care ei pot acumula cele mai multe cunoștințe cel mai ușor. Și privim un educator de grădiniță ca fiindu-i inferior unui profesor universitar, când, în realitate, rolul jucat de primul este cu mult mai important. O carte bună, pe care o recomand mai ales profesorilor, care trebuie să forțeze din interior schimbări majore în sistem.
October 6, 2021
Ce înseamnă sa fii un profesor bun? Care e sistemul educational potrivit pentru secolul si societatea in care trăim? Cum ii ajutam pe copii sa isi atingă potențialul sau măcar sa il descopere?
Autorul a facut o munca de cercetare imensa si a vizitat scoli de succes din toata lumea pentru a analiza diverse abordări ale educației- modelul finlandez, britanic, coreean, etc. Concluzia la care a ajuns si el este ca educația ar trebui sa se bazeze pe ce simțim, nu pe ce stim. Școala trebuie sa ne învețe sa fim oameni, sa facem parte din comunități si sa înțelegem realitatea in care trăim. Cat de departe e școala românească de toate astea…unde copiii încă repeta ca papagalii pagini din cărțile de istorie sau comentarii la romană, nu pun la îndoiala informațiile primite si nici nu stiu sau doresc sa caute altele. Unde nu contează ce emoții ai si cine esti, ci cat de mult poti retine si mai ales… colegul, cat a luat colegul? ☺️
Autorul a facut o munca de cercetare imensa si a vizitat scoli de succes din toata lumea pentru a analiza diverse abordări ale educației- modelul finlandez, britanic, coreean, etc. Concluzia la care a ajuns si el este ca educația ar trebui sa se bazeze pe ce simțim, nu pe ce stim. Școala trebuie sa ne învețe sa fim oameni, sa facem parte din comunități si sa înțelegem realitatea in care trăim. Cat de departe e școala românească de toate astea…unde copiii încă repeta ca papagalii pagini din cărțile de istorie sau comentarii la romană, nu pun la îndoiala informațiile primite si nici nu stiu sau doresc sa caute altele. Unde nu contează ce emoții ai si cine esti, ci cat de mult poti retine si mai ales… colegul, cat a luat colegul? ☺️
November 20, 2020
We live in an age dominated by progress in every area of our society. However, our school systems and our understanding of learning has somehow lost touch with human progress, according to Alex Beard. He introduces various new and different teaching concepts all around the world and analyses their advantages and disadvantages. He also forces the reader to reflect on one’s own understanding of what learning and teaching really means and how it is supposed to look like. The focus is not only on plain academic performance, but also in a way on how to raise societies with human beings in them, instead of isolated individual machine-like super-brains. Beard emphasizes the importance of teachers for societies: „A society that doesn’t love its teachers, doesn’t love its children. What kind of society would ever say it didn’t care about its kids?“.
I especially like the part where he tried to imagine what ideal teacher training should look like, and compared it to the training of doctors. „In 50 years, we‘ll treat teachers like doctors. They’ll train like athletes, research like scientists. They will be masters of learning, the role to which everyone aspires. In a future defined by the jobs we do for one another, it will be our ultimate craft.“
„School itself was humanity’s greatest and most important invention, the place where we came to cultivate our species’ most precious inheritance. It was the means through which we advanced our culture and our technology, the fuel that powered our societies. We had to build on our successes and reimagine its purpose for the next generation by thinking anew, doing better and taking care. In ancient Athens, it was for noblemen. In Shakespeare’s time, the sons of glovers. Today (almost) every child - a billion of them - had access to it, though many of them weren’t learning. But we were getting closer. We now knew the ingredients of great learning. The stars were brightening in the night sky. We had to build around people, not technology. Embrace solidarity, not competition. Develop our performance, as well as our intellect and ethics.”
I especially like the part where he tried to imagine what ideal teacher training should look like, and compared it to the training of doctors. „In 50 years, we‘ll treat teachers like doctors. They’ll train like athletes, research like scientists. They will be masters of learning, the role to which everyone aspires. In a future defined by the jobs we do for one another, it will be our ultimate craft.“
„School itself was humanity’s greatest and most important invention, the place where we came to cultivate our species’ most precious inheritance. It was the means through which we advanced our culture and our technology, the fuel that powered our societies. We had to build on our successes and reimagine its purpose for the next generation by thinking anew, doing better and taking care. In ancient Athens, it was for noblemen. In Shakespeare’s time, the sons of glovers. Today (almost) every child - a billion of them - had access to it, though many of them weren’t learning. But we were getting closer. We now knew the ingredients of great learning. The stars were brightening in the night sky. We had to build around people, not technology. Embrace solidarity, not competition. Develop our performance, as well as our intellect and ethics.”
May 10, 2018
More a list of teaching experiences across the world than a thesis on how to learn. The conclusions are quite obvious but it was interesting to read about teaching in our age of AI and big data. I particularly enjoyed the parts about the French coding school 42 and the King Solomon Academy.
January 24, 2022
Insightful.
"We learn therefore we progress".
"We learn therefore we progress".
January 1, 2020
Este una dintre cele mai complexe cărți pentru înțelegerea evoluției educației. Alex Beard, membru al rețelei globale Teach for All prezintă metodele de învățare din întreaga lume (mai puțin Europa de Est, că na...) și oferă strategii de implementare a acestor metode în fiecare școală.
Pe mine m-a inspirat să dau tot ceea ce e mai bun, am avut momentele mele de ,,aha!", care m-au ajutat să îmi schimb percepțiile asupra sistemelor de predare. Apreciez valorizarea eșecului ca spațiu de învățare și admir relaxarea scrierii lui Beard. Ar trebui să fie pe listele de lectură ale tuturor educatorilor din lume.
Pe mine m-a inspirat să dau tot ceea ce e mai bun, am avut momentele mele de ,,aha!", care m-au ajutat să îmi schimb percepțiile asupra sistemelor de predare. Apreciez valorizarea eșecului ca spațiu de învățare și admir relaxarea scrierii lui Beard. Ar trebui să fie pe listele de lectură ale tuturor educatorilor din lume.
May 14, 2019
An engaging global tour of education practices. Beard, an english school teacher spends a lot of time in classrooms looking at how some select schools are doing very well by doing things very differently (no rules, no teachers, all technology, no technology, all teachers, all rules). And how some schools, including his own in England are doing very poorly.
Beard doesn't come to any startling new insights or model for what the next form of teaching ought to be. There is no 'silver bullet' for education, even if he is a proselytiser for the idea education itself is a silver bullet for our globe's social, economic, and environmental problems.
Still, it is an inspiring book for this teacher, as a spur to think about what we can do better and the importance of education. There were a lot of interesting ideas along the way, models that in the future could possibly be adopted, but ultimately the book felt more like a travel writing style tour of modern schooling, rather than a non-fiction account of what works or doesn't in education in 2019.
Beard doesn't come to any startling new insights or model for what the next form of teaching ought to be. There is no 'silver bullet' for education, even if he is a proselytiser for the idea education itself is a silver bullet for our globe's social, economic, and environmental problems.
Still, it is an inspiring book for this teacher, as a spur to think about what we can do better and the importance of education. There were a lot of interesting ideas along the way, models that in the future could possibly be adopted, but ultimately the book felt more like a travel writing style tour of modern schooling, rather than a non-fiction account of what works or doesn't in education in 2019.
March 5, 2021
Good but a bit wordy and repetitive
June 8, 2022
3.5 stars rounded down.
I found this an interesting tour of teaching and learning (not just in humans), though it very quickly morphed into a study into different educational systems across the globe. For the content itself I thought it was well-researched, the author is a teacher himself so picks up on things that may not be obvious to the untrained onlooker when visiting other schools, and it was quite interesting to read his take on things. That being said, this isn't really the best-written - I thought he could have added a bit more commentary to tie the chapters together - it came across more as a series of reports rather than a book that's designed to be read in order (and there's no indication that this is not the intention somewhere in the introduction).
It starts off with the power of learning as a whole, comparing with other mammals and artificial intelligence, but as mentioned earlier this forms only a small part of the book. The promises on the blurb tended to be condensed in the few initial chapters and the coda, with just a series of reports on different schools padding out the middle, and I rounded down because I thought it didn't really fit what it said on the tin (back). The reports were interesting, particularly the less conventional, experimental systems though.
I read another book on a similar topic relatively recently: Cleverlands by Lucy Crehan, which I much preferred.
I found this an interesting tour of teaching and learning (not just in humans), though it very quickly morphed into a study into different educational systems across the globe. For the content itself I thought it was well-researched, the author is a teacher himself so picks up on things that may not be obvious to the untrained onlooker when visiting other schools, and it was quite interesting to read his take on things. That being said, this isn't really the best-written - I thought he could have added a bit more commentary to tie the chapters together - it came across more as a series of reports rather than a book that's designed to be read in order (and there's no indication that this is not the intention somewhere in the introduction).
It starts off with the power of learning as a whole, comparing with other mammals and artificial intelligence, but as mentioned earlier this forms only a small part of the book. The promises on the blurb tended to be condensed in the few initial chapters and the coda, with just a series of reports on different schools padding out the middle, and I rounded down because I thought it didn't really fit what it said on the tin (back). The reports were interesting, particularly the less conventional, experimental systems though.
I read another book on a similar topic relatively recently: Cleverlands by Lucy Crehan, which I much preferred.
February 24, 2021
There were some fascinating ideas and concepts in the book. I loved the discussion on best way for children to learn and the diversity of the individual.
There were some amazing schools achieving fantastic results. I think the challenge is how to make some of their endeavours work in a national system. The effort of individuals make schools great and classrooms fun with strong learning environments. That's a huge amount of work if you know and believe in what you're doing.
My conclusion is this will always be achievable in some schools, never all schools as the leadership & school teaching staff is so different and changes so often across the country.
I spent 5 years teaching secondary maths in UK as a career change in my early 40s. Loved teaching and it was only when I read this I realised how much more my classes could have achieved. In our inner city school we worked hard to make kids think and work it out for themselves but clearly there is so much else that could have been done.
There were some amazing schools achieving fantastic results. I think the challenge is how to make some of their endeavours work in a national system. The effort of individuals make schools great and classrooms fun with strong learning environments. That's a huge amount of work if you know and believe in what you're doing.
My conclusion is this will always be achievable in some schools, never all schools as the leadership & school teaching staff is so different and changes so often across the country.
I spent 5 years teaching secondary maths in UK as a career change in my early 40s. Loved teaching and it was only when I read this I realised how much more my classes could have achieved. In our inner city school we worked hard to make kids think and work it out for themselves but clearly there is so much else that could have been done.
October 2, 2023
A comprehensive, well-researched, and fun journey on the topic of education and teaching.
In the advent of LLM system like ChatGPT, we start to wonder about the uniqueness of human and how and what we should teach our kids. Though this book was written years before the popularization of LLMs, it had a foresight of discussing the future of education in the context of AI.
The book goes through a global journey, investigating a variety of education systems and interviewing teachers, administrators, and researchers around the world. While the book offers many interesting stories, interviews, and thoughts, I wish there was a stronger binder of those through the whole book. Overall, I was intrigued by the research/journey presented in the book and got inspired to rethink about the importance and role of education and teaching.
In the advent of LLM system like ChatGPT, we start to wonder about the uniqueness of human and how and what we should teach our kids. Though this book was written years before the popularization of LLMs, it had a foresight of discussing the future of education in the context of AI.
The book goes through a global journey, investigating a variety of education systems and interviewing teachers, administrators, and researchers around the world. While the book offers many interesting stories, interviews, and thoughts, I wish there was a stronger binder of those through the whole book. Overall, I was intrigued by the research/journey presented in the book and got inspired to rethink about the importance and role of education and teaching.
November 2, 2021
Thoroughly enjoyed Alex's exploration of education systems around the world. It's interesting to see that no-one has totally cracked the code to 'perfect' education - if there was such a thing! But something can be taken away from each school mentioned in this book. Our current system (UK) is so caught up in having kids memorize a curriculum it forgets the learning. Learning is so much more than facts and information; it is a process of problem solving and building on ideas. Schools should be facilitating thinking for oneself then collaborating with peers to share, compare and consolidate ideas and beliefs. Putting more resources into teaching children how to think critically, remain mindful and find their own passions will pay back tenfold in the long run.
June 20, 2020
This book is the author's account of his journey across the world as he investigates what works, and also what doesn't, in countries' and continents' different educational systems. It provides hope to me, as a university student greatly disenfranchised with the British educational system, that we can (and hopefully soon will) do better in regards to ours!
It's well written and certainly well researched, but at points throughout I did struggle to maintain interest. Having persisted through these drier sections, I would still doubtlessly recommend it for the many insights it presents and the important questions it poses.
It's well written and certainly well researched, but at points throughout I did struggle to maintain interest. Having persisted through these drier sections, I would still doubtlessly recommend it for the many insights it presents and the important questions it poses.
April 30, 2022
I thoroughly enjoyed the book, I felt that the author got a good balance between opinion & conclusion as well as open mindedness to all the practices. It was incredibly useful to see the comparison between all the practices in the top schools, and I feel I gained a lot of insight. I don’t want to read the reviews in case it spoils how much I loved it! I think it would be really interesting to have a sequel focused on schools in the developing world as well. Great book, absolutely worth a read!
April 6, 2023
A bit undecided, but given the subject an interesting read. Most of the facts stated here, I've had access to in other readings so the information is only laterally new. On the other side there is the reason of reading this, which is to learn, understand that there are various ways of learning, none particularly better than the other, various systems to engage learning, various system to measure it, but just a single focus - getting better at life.
January 13, 2019
With comparisons between the experimental classes in Silicon Valley, public schools in US and South Korea, this book offers a current view of the educational programs our children can benefit or be victim of.
By far, the best book on education I have ever read.
By far, the best book on education I have ever read.
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June 23, 2019An introduction to various experiments happening across the world seeking new paths for education for the XIX century
March 19, 2021
Jumped around too much. All the schools started to merge. You could just read the afterword and save a lot of time.
April 30, 2021
A really neat collection some of the best reflections of and innovations for education. It is as critical as it is optimistic. A must read for teachers.
September 29, 2022
Bit drawn out, repetitive writing style (each chapter/school intro the same!). Didn’t get much relevance of some chapters but overall interesting for someone with no teaching education.
May 31, 2024
Some interesting stories but overall, quite difficult to get through.
March 24, 2020
This book begins with the philosophical Aristotle tale about the idea of people living in a cave who develop an understanding of their world through the limited experiences of a cave and how your world can expand through leaving the cave into the daylight and how our perceptions of reality and truth change beyond the limited understanding of shadows, fire and rock. This book that explains our understanding of education using a hierarchical model of learnt facts is similar to the model of the world seen in a cave and then looking at how we can change learning to becoming more in line with our modern world. This book fizzes with a wealth of ideas to support the notion that children are natural born learners who are inquisitive and want to explore the world. And learning begins from the very beginning and is an ongoing cycle. Then we go to school and the author plays with the famous quote that “man is born free and yet everywhere he lives his life in chains“ to “kids are born free, but everywhere they are in schools.“. However, our models of education are limited to another time, but we need to value our schools and teachers because we seem to give them little value at this time. This book rallies with the cry teachers are a very important part of our society and we need to value them as such. The book also wonderfully looks at new ways of teaching and is one of the best books on education I have ever read. Alex Beard goes around the world looking for different methods people are using that can be useful to all children. These include ideas such as building on teamwork, supporting well-being such as developing resilience and being aware of critical thinking and instead of just learning stuff, to understand how we think about learning and the world around us. At the end of the book Beard brings everything together with a number of beautifully observed observations and points including the following:
– we need to be creative
– we should develop teamwork
– keep an open mind and develop tools for critical thinking rather than just accepting any piece of misinformation going on around us
– Learning begins earlier than we think and we should foster that inquisitive nature that exists in all babies and young children
– learning goes on forever
– we need to use technology wisely and think about how we can develop our teachers to harness the natural born learning within all children (and adults).
I wasn’t very good at school but I had begun to learn once I left and haven’t stopped. It’s a wonderful gift and we should value our teachers and schools and education as one of the most important things we can give as a gift to both our society, world, future and children. As it says in the book “‘A society that doesn’t love its teachers, doesn’t love its children.’ What kind of society would ever say it didn’t care about its kids?
An excellent and recommended book to support learning from an author who is travelled the world looking at different institutions and come to some really interesting conclusions.
– we need to be creative
– we should develop teamwork
– keep an open mind and develop tools for critical thinking rather than just accepting any piece of misinformation going on around us
– Learning begins earlier than we think and we should foster that inquisitive nature that exists in all babies and young children
– learning goes on forever
– we need to use technology wisely and think about how we can develop our teachers to harness the natural born learning within all children (and adults).
I wasn’t very good at school but I had begun to learn once I left and haven’t stopped. It’s a wonderful gift and we should value our teachers and schools and education as one of the most important things we can give as a gift to both our society, world, future and children. As it says in the book “‘A society that doesn’t love its teachers, doesn’t love its children.’ What kind of society would ever say it didn’t care about its kids?
An excellent and recommended book to support learning from an author who is travelled the world looking at different institutions and come to some really interesting conclusions.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews