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“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”
Leopold, Aldo: Round River, Oxford University Press (via seanfitz)
(Source: gargravarr.cc.utexas.edu)
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Why are young people like this?
photo: APEX by otherthings on flickr
There are 2 concurrent activities in education and training that are running headlong into each other. e-learning will be a proposed solution but i’m not sure it will cut the mustard. So what’s going on?
firstly in several states of Australia the leaving age for school leavers is being raised. secondly the government (or Council of Australian Governments aka COAG) has set targets for increasing the education of young Australians. They want to halve the proportion of those without qualifications at Cert III level and double the number of higher qualifications.
This is at a time when 1 in 5 of those between the ages of 20 and 25 are neither engaged in education or employment.
How will the above factors impact on young people? Are they suddenly going to flood into courses?
danah boyd has suggested that historically, raising the school leaving age leads to increased activity in online social networking. This is due to lost opportunities for interaction and social connectedness caused by turning our schools into defacto prisons. I have previously suggested that what is happening is a collective unconsious compensation towards sponteneity, creativity and relatedness, elements that go missing in the way that limitations and educational training structures are imposed. Please note i think that limitations and structures are useful (and indeed essential) in education. (And I don’t think graffiti is bad either.) What I am concerned about is how these things are implemented. putting a blanket leaving age a year higher for many young people could block developmental needs for relatedness (as part of a wider socialisation) as well as creativity.
E-learning solutions may go part of the way towards engaging youth but I suspect it will not be enough. While money is tarteting activities soley connected with accredited training it will miss the mark. Money also needs to go towards support and engagement outside of training and education but which might in a targeted individualised way, leading students to the courses that will best suit them. In the mean time the social networking and graffitti is only small symptoms of a problem that looks like avalanching.
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