Sunday February 14, 1999

Recently, there has been a widespread concern expressed about the quality of education. Parents, .teachers, business people and university professors have all voiced their dismay to the present declining educational standards(1) and yet no educational policy to address this problem has been . formulated by the government. The government lack of leadership in tackling the need to reform our educational system can be synthesized with their legislated permission to use corporal punishment against children(2).

I have written few articles addressing the need to change our educational system and I have introduced the philosophical background of the biological origin of cognition(3) and the pedagogical constructivism(4) (5) approach to educate our students. Last week, I promised myself to study a simulation program VENSIM(6) and in doing so I discovered another challenging and pedagogical approach to education: Systems Dynamics(7). There is nothing contradictory  about my articles, rather it is amazing to realize their underlying common themes to prepare our students to become the knowledge workers(8) of the future, to have a shared understanding of realities, to construct our own knowledge, use new technologies to enhance our learning capacities, in summary to learn by doing rather than by listening.

Everyday as we read or watch the news we come across many stories, stories of homelessness, prostitution, homicides, political corruption, business incompetence. Our world is convoluted, difficult to understand and our actions, all interdependent to one another, are the causes of such grim realities. We have a complex world and our political leaders and bureaucrats choose simple actions to find short term solutions to problems without realizing that the long term effects of  these actions create new problems or make these same problems more painful in the future. We have learned to see the world as a series of unrelated snapshots, and this is the way we have conceptualized knowledge in our schools, an accumulation of snapshots to be transferred in the minds of our children. The truth is that we all build our own knowledge, and if we want to have  responsible citizens, our students must learn how to think, understand relationships, increase their capacity to understand the consequences of their actions. In short, we require a system approach to education where all the fragmented subjects of the curriculum can be appreciated as interacting to one another and where their common underlying behaviour can be understood. Jay Forrester, Professor Emeritus at MIT(9), understood the capabilities of computers in addressing the shortcomings of our educational system and founded a new approach to education: Systems Dynamics, a set of techniques based on computer modelling.

Endnotes

1. . Thoughts on Education, Knowledge, Learning and the Internet, by Mario deSantis, January 24, 1999. Published in the North Central Internet News http://ftlcomm.com/ensign

2. Article: Report takes swipe at province: Serby prefers school divisions deal with use of force, by Jason Warick, The StarPhoenix, November 28, 1998, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

3. Need of Transformational Changes in Saskatchewan: The biological origin of cognition and implications for Education, by Mario deSantis, September 27, 1998. Published in the North Central Internet News http://ftlcomm.com/ensign

4. A Personal Experience: Knowledge Is Not Transferred, It is Constructed, by Mario deSantis, February 2, 1999. Published in the North Central Internet News http://ftlcomm.com/ensign

5. A New Approach In Learning Mathematics, by Mario deSantis, January 31, 1999. Published in the North Central Internet News http://ftlcomm.com/ensign

6. Ventana Systems, Inc is the publisher of Vensim PLE. This computer modelling software is available free of charge for educational institutions wanting to experiment with the pedagogical approach of Systems Dynamics. Email: vensim@vensim.com http://www.vensim.com

7. System Dynamics in Education, MIT related web site http://sysdyn.mit.edu/

8. The management expert and futurist Peter F. Drucker coined the term "Knowledge Worker" some twenty five years ago. Refer to the site Peter F. Drucker Foundation http://www.pfdf.org/

9. Jay W. Forrester is Germeshausen Professor Emeritus and Senior Lecturer at the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology-MIT. http://sysdyn.mit.edu/people/jay-forrester.html