Cognitive education: from mastering to cognition. From engineers to cognitaria
Like all areas of social activity, education is now experiencing a transition from the industrial model to the post-industrial, to the information society. And, as in all areas of this global transformation, a number of contradictory processes arise in education. Obviously, the necessary partial dismantling of the industrial model of education, for the construction of information, is perceived by many as a pullback to the "dark ages", a triumph of simplification. It can be noted that the emotional reaction of people who have dedicated their lives to education is absolutely justified, but it comes precisely from a misunderstanding of what a new education should be.
To understand which model of education is needed, one needs to accept the changes that have occurred around adhoc. The “fast world requires fast learning” model has already become a common place; we read about the “fast world” from Pereslegin. Obvious and success in this.
What else has changed in the technologies of the last decades to greatly affect education? Of course, this is a transparent hint of the Internet, more precisely WorldWideWeb. Already, the Network / Internet / WWW is a hypermedia environment in which access to a huge amount of multimedia information is carried out in seconds. It is reasonable to assume that education in the hypermedia environment will go in other ways than in the library. The first and most obvious way is that since data is accessed almost in real time, there is no need to learn.
Forty years have passed since the requirements for the skills of a quick count have disappeared since the calculators have become an accessible tool. Already twenty years, as it is not necessary to keep in mind the tables of logarithms and trigonometric functions - engineering calculators, and then personal computers also took these calculations on themselves. The emergence of the Internet / WWW, hypermedia, allows not to learn and arrays of facts of all types of sciences: abstract, natural, humanitarian - they are available in Wikipedia and then - by reference, in seconds. That is, it is already possible to use Internet hypermedia as an “external memory”, “loading” the necessary theoretical and factual material out of necessity, without cluttering the memory with “redundant” data, retaining only the necessary information patterns-structures. Now every thinker: researcher, engineer, lawyer — can use the technology of Sherlock Holmes’s “empty attic” —to remember, to keep only the necessary tools in his head, since all additional tools are available on the Internet in a few clicks. The scale of the revolution that has occurred is so great that it can be compared, perhaps, with the invention of writing, when for the first time the opportunity arose to separate the storage of knowledge from their bearer. Indeed, the productivity of researchers of past centuries was largely determined by the amount of information stored by them, because any request to external sources of knowledge took from several hours (search in the university library) to several weeks (correspondence with libraries, colleagues in other cities). Now these terms have been reduced by tens and hundreds of times - to minutes and hours respectively.
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Thus, a new education must operate with the possibilities of ultrafast access to information in the Internet hypermedia environment. Where to put so much freed up time and a brain of pupils? In the conditions of the exponential growth of the flow of information, the de facto new Information Singularity, the emphasis of training should obviously shift towards accelerating the processing of information. From the unnecessary learning of a set of facts and technologies to learning cognitive methods: search, systematization, analysis, comparison, synthesis and synthesis of new knowledge. That is, for the transition to a knowledge society, we must create an education system where those cognitive skills that previously were owned only by professional researchers will be taught en masse. It can be said that education should become widespread, when every educated person possesses techniques, techniques and skills - research, analysis, synthesis. This is a quality transition. For example, if in the existing industrial education model “assembly point”, this or that discipline is taught axiomatically, a priori (and not always and not in all universities), then in a new education, the average specialist should be able to find, create this assembly point in the area in which he is currently working.
It turns out that in the new education a training methodology should be created that will allow massively, at the level of 20-25% of the population, to prepare cognitarians - specialists with research skills, at least at the level of the modern candidate of science (PhD, doctor of science). Now the share of such specialists is 2-3% of the population. The growth of the share of “candidates of science” 10 times now may seem utopian to someone, but we need to recall that a hundred years ago, in 1914, only 27% of the population in Russia were literate, and now almost 100% and 35% of the population are literate possess higher professional education diplomas.
In conclusion, it can be said that the presence in the society of a significant number of people with cognitive skills - the cognitive system is a condition for solving the problem of information singularity, an exponential growth of the information flow that we are currently seeing. It is specialists with cognitive skills that will be able to process, classify, synthesize and create new knowledge from a large flow of disparate facts.
Apparently, this problem is best realized in the United States, Japan, and the PRC, where discussions are already under way about universal higher education. Apparently, as in the XX century, universal literacy, so in the XXI century the overwhelming penetration of higher education is the condition for the emergence of a cognitive class.
To understand which model of education is needed, one needs to accept the changes that have occurred around adhoc. The “fast world requires fast learning” model has already become a common place; we read about the “fast world” from Pereslegin. Obvious and success in this.
What else has changed in the technologies of the last decades to greatly affect education? Of course, this is a transparent hint of the Internet, more precisely WorldWideWeb. Already, the Network / Internet / WWW is a hypermedia environment in which access to a huge amount of multimedia information is carried out in seconds. It is reasonable to assume that education in the hypermedia environment will go in other ways than in the library. The first and most obvious way is that since data is accessed almost in real time, there is no need to learn.
Forty years have passed since the requirements for the skills of a quick count have disappeared since the calculators have become an accessible tool. Already twenty years, as it is not necessary to keep in mind the tables of logarithms and trigonometric functions - engineering calculators, and then personal computers also took these calculations on themselves. The emergence of the Internet / WWW, hypermedia, allows not to learn and arrays of facts of all types of sciences: abstract, natural, humanitarian - they are available in Wikipedia and then - by reference, in seconds. That is, it is already possible to use Internet hypermedia as an “external memory”, “loading” the necessary theoretical and factual material out of necessity, without cluttering the memory with “redundant” data, retaining only the necessary information patterns-structures. Now every thinker: researcher, engineer, lawyer — can use the technology of Sherlock Holmes’s “empty attic” —to remember, to keep only the necessary tools in his head, since all additional tools are available on the Internet in a few clicks. The scale of the revolution that has occurred is so great that it can be compared, perhaps, with the invention of writing, when for the first time the opportunity arose to separate the storage of knowledge from their bearer. Indeed, the productivity of researchers of past centuries was largely determined by the amount of information stored by them, because any request to external sources of knowledge took from several hours (search in the university library) to several weeks (correspondence with libraries, colleagues in other cities). Now these terms have been reduced by tens and hundreds of times - to minutes and hours respectively.
')
Thus, a new education must operate with the possibilities of ultrafast access to information in the Internet hypermedia environment. Where to put so much freed up time and a brain of pupils? In the conditions of the exponential growth of the flow of information, the de facto new Information Singularity, the emphasis of training should obviously shift towards accelerating the processing of information. From the unnecessary learning of a set of facts and technologies to learning cognitive methods: search, systematization, analysis, comparison, synthesis and synthesis of new knowledge. That is, for the transition to a knowledge society, we must create an education system where those cognitive skills that previously were owned only by professional researchers will be taught en masse. It can be said that education should become widespread, when every educated person possesses techniques, techniques and skills - research, analysis, synthesis. This is a quality transition. For example, if in the existing industrial education model “assembly point”, this or that discipline is taught axiomatically, a priori (and not always and not in all universities), then in a new education, the average specialist should be able to find, create this assembly point in the area in which he is currently working.
It turns out that in the new education a training methodology should be created that will allow massively, at the level of 20-25% of the population, to prepare cognitarians - specialists with research skills, at least at the level of the modern candidate of science (PhD, doctor of science). Now the share of such specialists is 2-3% of the population. The growth of the share of “candidates of science” 10 times now may seem utopian to someone, but we need to recall that a hundred years ago, in 1914, only 27% of the population in Russia were literate, and now almost 100% and 35% of the population are literate possess higher professional education diplomas.
In conclusion, it can be said that the presence in the society of a significant number of people with cognitive skills - the cognitive system is a condition for solving the problem of information singularity, an exponential growth of the information flow that we are currently seeing. It is specialists with cognitive skills that will be able to process, classify, synthesize and create new knowledge from a large flow of disparate facts.
Apparently, this problem is best realized in the United States, Japan, and the PRC, where discussions are already under way about universal higher education. Apparently, as in the XX century, universal literacy, so in the XXI century the overwhelming penetration of higher education is the condition for the emergence of a cognitive class.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/155791/
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