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Why do we need schools for understanding?*
Understanding is the ability to think and act flexibly with what one
knows. This definition is the basis of Education for Understanding.
Currently, our schools and methods of teaching are not organized to promote
understanding.
Day by day, in more countries around the globe, the headlines of major
newspapers highlight poor educational results, both quantitatively and
qualitatively. One complaint is that schools today don’t teach students how
to think critically. Students spend 12 or 14 years in a structured school
system, going from one grade to another, from one level to the next with no
guarantee that they will be able to think once they leave.
Among other things, the ability to think indicates the ability to establish
relationships between concepts, which, in turn, indicates understanding of
each of the concepts involved. Teaching for understanding asks “how should
we teach so that students really understand?” Understanding is a form of
learning that stimulates personal growth; it is the ability to think and act
flexibly with what we know. The act of understanding has two dimensions:
thinking and acting, both of which are present in our daily activities.
Years of academic research and practical experience show that understanding
is a challenge both in and outside of schools. Obviously understanding does
not just take place within a scholarly learning environment, but it is a
responsibility of the schools to help construct it.
Learning for understanding requires learning by doing. It is impossible to
understand simply by receiving information, although clearly basic
information is necessary. Learning for understanding implies committing
oneself through reflective action, with actions that build understanding.
The educational system, which was created over three centuries ago, requires
profound changes in order for it to reconstruct its original role of
transmitter of knowledge and allow it to overcome the mechanisms that
produce segmentation. The educational system must play a democratic role,
but this time “for all” with a much more inclusive “all” than before.
Educational reforms have been achieved in recent years with varying results.
It appears that most actions have been retrospective rather than prospective
in nature. In general, educational reforms are limited to replicating and
expanding the model of the eighteenth-century school; modernizing it with
new issues, teaching materials and, most importantly, with the greatest
possible number of technological resources. This is not enough, however.
Society needs and demands schools that can teach us how to think and help us
to understand.
Teaching how to think requires a new pedagogy. This, in turn, requires a new
structure both in the classroom and in the school in order to create new and
different methods of teaching. Our real challenge is to put a School for
Understanding into practice on a large-scale basis.?
Paula Pogré and Inés Aguerrondo
Guest Editors
Coordinators of the Southern Node of the L@titud Network
(Initiative for Understanding and Development in Latin America)
School of Education, Universidad de San Andrés
*The ideas, thoughts, and opinions expressed are not necessarily of the OAS nor of its member states. The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors.
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