"The ecosystem that is developing around the ideal of preventative health care should serve as a model for the design and development of an educational care system." (Savery, 167)
I wish the author had gone into more detail or listed a reading to showcase what they meant about the ideal of preventative healthcare. It is difficult for me to see anything related to healthcare in this country as aspirational. Particularly I struggle because at the level most of use receive preventative healthcare there is very little other than expected autonomy being supported. Perhaps if I consider the ways cancer treatments have progressed to (for the privileged) being administered based on looking at genetics and developing a highly personalized plan where applicable. Though, it is one thing to have such literally microscopic personal details being used to guide what's a most effective way to treat someone, and quite another to imagine that in an intentional learning plan.
I wonder what it would be like on an emotional level, as a child, to find yourself the constant recipient of sensors and gadgets and measuring tools turning your day to day activities into categorized 'learning experiences.' What does it do to a brain built for discovery, built to delight in curiosity, to have a narration of that process? I want to believe it can be better than the manufactured classroom experience. I think I can believe that. It also becomes an easier vision to pull away my concept of any sort of system that centers on a lecturer in a child's ear as they move through life. An education system designed to monitor a child at play, that embeds in that process small extensions to were a child's gaze is being tracked, where their hands reach, the sounds they hear, etc. The embedding of information as though it was always there into a child's mind before it is old enough to understand the process of existing any other way has the potential to powerfully alter the capacity of the human mind in what is unconscious knowledge and what that then does to their development, relationships, and ways of interacting with the world.
"...we can know a learner is in a particular context and connect that context to one of that learner's learning goals and the context to turn that from a performance situation to a learning opportunity." (Savery, 169)
Here though is a problem. Because unless we have some distinctly new theories or very carefully approached methods of determining the learning goals of children (unless Savery was only referring to learners old enough to have learning goals in the ways we know them in the education world) I think it is a misdirect to call them the learner's goals. Learning goals are largely prescribed. Which always must beg the question, who is doing the prescribing, why, and what measures has it been stress tested on?
We know curriculums can fail. They can be written poorly. They can perpetuate stereotypes, prejudice, racism, ableism, sexism, homophobia, and all manner of things that are embedded into cultures that build themselves on methods of othering some to privilege others. Dissatisfaction and hierarchy are great business tools. Education is already a system that struggles with its dicey relationship with both of those things. To embed the failings of these ways the system struggles into an even more effective teaching design I wish had been more of an alarm bell in the rejoinder.
"becoming a self-aware, self-regulated, and self-directed learner is the intended learning outcome of most competency-based models of instruction." (Savery, 171)
After considering this idea from a couple angles, I do see the appeal of a system of learning that must be navigated using the skills that its content also hopes to foster. Though I do wonder if that could create easier burn out or distaste in learning for kids? If they sense they are having to work twice for the same goals - once to manage through the learning as process, and once to manage through the learning as content ... I wonder if that will disillusion children emotionally before they are old enough or have gained the self-awareness to understand what has been being asked of them, and how exhausted they were and for what payoff?
Which leads well into Chapter 22 in which the discussion focuses on the dangers of letting a pithy saying built to move an idea along the channels of power needed to make it ubiquitous, because at one point, if a failsafe wasn't built into the original plan, do people have to step up and say Hey, too good of a job, pull back, speed is no longer the primary goal! We are not trained well to shift from a 'growth' mindset to a sustainable one. We tend to conflate the two instead. All things good must be growth and thus good = growth. Whereas sustainable means looking at the realities and finding ways to help nudge those realities towards actions that can weather storms, and adapt with changing times. It's that rigid vs flexible systems idea applied to the ways we carry on the rallying cry that originally inspired widespread consciousness of a cause. Educational technologies made big promises to get in to the rooms power dwelt and convince them to fund and believe in online schooling for kids. Though it did so without the consent of the people who would be impacted most, the kids. Kennedy and Freidhoff being willing to call out the failures of the system in terms of all kids being able to meet the expectations and what some kids need versus others, and this whole idea that anyone may differ in their abilities to learn at all, and that a system that was living up to its grandiosity would be funding action and research and available grants to do what was needed to personalize the system that had to be reduced to platitudes to get it off the ground. Or at least, that is the argument I heard happening, the larger context being who should take responsibility for that, with Raish seeming to argue that the onus should be on the individual to know their needs and communicate them instead of K&F's stance that a new contextualizing campaign could be the answer.
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