Ira Socol says:

If your school, and your school day, is not about students collaborating, connecting, and building knowledge and understandings together, why would anyone come?

Serious question. If students want to learn in isolation; if they want to sit at a desk and work on their own stuff, occasionally checking in with an “expert,” they have no reason to come to school. They can do a lot better at home, or at their local coffee shop, or even the public library, where both the coffee and the WiFi connection will be better.

…

[A] vast assortment of educators, from that crusty old mathematics teacher … [to] Salman Khan, believe that kids sitting alone, working by themselves, with canned, inflexible data in front of them, is the best preparation for life in the present and future.

Somehow, these educators think the information of the world still moves via paper and pencil, that there are “correct answers” to everything, and that there is a structured cultural norm of learning behavior, best exemplified by the silent child bent over a wooden desk with a thick physical book, which must be duplicated if a student is to succeed in their learning spaces.

No wonder nobody wants to come.

via http://speedchange.blogspot.com/2011/09/if-school-isnt-for-collabor...

Image credit: The ABC of Animals