comps reading - Learning In School and Out

Written by Lauren B. Resnick, this paper is also the 1987 Presidential Address. Resnick first pointed out four distinctions that school learning differs from other learning, listed as follows:

1. Individual cognition in school versus shared cognition outside
2. Pure mentation in school versus tool manipulation outside
3. Symbol manipulation in school versus contextualized reasoning outside school
4. Generalized learning in school versus situation-specific competencies outside

Followed by the four distinctions, Resnick further raised the question: what role for schooling then? And what kind of schooling? He considered the two questions from three points of view:

1. Schooling and economic participation: the question of job training
2. Skills for learning outside school (i.e. learn how to learn)
3. Revising schooling: the civic and cultural functions of education

Throughout the article, I found two statements most interesting to me.

1. Tool use is not only a way for people of limited education to participate in cognitively complex activity systems; it is also a way of enhancing the capacity of highly educated people well beyond what they could do independently (P.69).
2. Some people argue that the economically advantaged - whether individuals, regions, or countries - demand more and choose to pay for more education; education is, thus. more a consumer good than a vehicle for increasing economic productivity (P.71).

To me, the first statement has two implications. To begin with, everyone, regardless the social and economic status, needs the capacity of using tools. Secondly, tool exploitation is even more important for the socially disadvantaged, for tools provide them more opportunity to success. To some extent, this speaks for my belief that education technology can help distribute education resources in a more even way, offering the socially disadvantaged more access and opportunity to realize themselves. With respect to the second statement, to me, it seems to highlight the phenomenon of education commodification. It is not education itself choosing the direction but the people having more access determine the direction for education.

That's pretty much it so far.