Stephen Downes attire notre attention sur un texte dans lequel David Wiley réfléchi sur les enjeux éducatifs contemporains, le rôle des technologies et les idées de Paulo Freire ‹ un de mes penseurs pédagogiques favoris. j’y faisais encore référence récemment.
Le texte est provoquant. Sa lecture importante.
« … there is a larger educational research problem to solve than making instruction more effective […] the most pressing problem facing us today isn’t making education more effective, it is making education more available [so] let’s spend billions of dollars and millions of person hours per year making significant progress on the access problem […] instead of committing those same resources to making almost unperceivably small incremental improvements in the effectiveness with which we keep instructing the same subgroups. »
C’est un peu dichotomique, d’accord, mais sur le fond, j’endosse tout ça!
Et les différentes étapes du texte sont aussi forts qu’amusant, partant d’une rencontre imaginaire entre Freire et Morpheus, personnage central du film The Matrix:
« I think the author was right. Morpheus and Freire would agree that […] youth (and many other individuals) are controlled and manipulated by systems of oppression [and that] our role, as educators and human beings, is to ³free their minds² […] »
« …we must base all we do in education in love. Love for the student, the learner, the other. […] »
« …ll that we say, think, and do is robbed of its power if we lack integrity in our lives. Integrity that involves truly living out the principles of peace, freedom, love, and spirituality. […] »
« There is a political problem with talking about the scalability of instruction that makes it morally inappropriate. ³Scalability² looks at the ability to reach large numbers of learners, and the economics of doing so. This is morally inappropriate because ³scaling to a large number of learners² implicitly and purposefully excludes some learners. […] we should never talk about scalability of instruction because the language of scaling is the language of exclusion […] »
Jeux de mots et d’images 
Je me permets de suggérer la lecture du génial Illusions libérales, individualisme et pouvoir social de M. Jean-Léon Beauvois (2005). Il s’agit d’un auteur que je viens tout juste de découvrir. Psychologue social, il s’est spécialisé dans l’étude de l’illusion de liberté et des outils qui permettent d’entretenir cette illusion. Génial!