Which education

Most of our learning comes out of experience. In all daily life events we learn and help other people to learn, however, too often education programmes put their focus in their content as if learning was just a matter of courses and lectures. I have been involved in many programmes in the field of development and in the business one and with few exceptions they do not practice what they preach. Solidarity, democracy, participation, collaboration and other nice concepts are part of the portfolio they offer but at home this is not part of their daily life. Students go there to learn about better future for their home countries and what they experience is often a highly individualistic and market oriented paradigm. So, when they go back to their real life tasks they will apply nice theories in the same way they experienced. What if education programmes put equal or even higher emphasis in designing the practices and experiences that surround learning. For instance promoting more knowledge sharing, collaborative projects to support their daily lives, open source software or a shared use of goods?
This current paradigm has shown that we move more and more to a close-end road. The planet is being destroyed in many ways, poverty keeps growing, wars are on the scene… So we need to move out of the box and develop new ones. I believe that sharing and collaboration would be at the core of the emerging paths

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