(2013-10-15) Davis Correa Radical Student Centered Schooling

Joshua Davis on Juarez Correa's work on Student Centered Schooling in Matamoros Mexico. He began reading books and searching for ideas online. Soon he stumbled on a video describing the work of Sugata Mitra... “If you put a computer in front of children and remove all other adult restrictions, they will Self Organize around it,” Mitra says, “like bees around a flower.”... His defining principle: “The children are completely in charge.”... Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College who studies children’s natural ways of learning, argues that human cognitive machinery is fundamentally incompatible with conventional schooling. Gray points out that young children, motivated by curiosity and playfulness, teach themselves a tremendous amount about the world. And yet when they reach school age, we supplant that innate drive to learn with an imposed curriculum.

John Spencer sees good things there, but in a silly packaging. Wait a minute. That doesn't sound radically new. That sounds an awful lot like Connectivism and Constructivism. That sounds like the Maker Space-s I've seen. That sounds like a techie version of what John Dewey proposed.