Blog Software Livre na Educação
Four kinds of freedom of the free students
| Original formulation of Paulo Francisco Slomp | Contributed by Viviane Ferreira |
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What is Free Education? “Free Education” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech of pupils/students/users”, not as in “gratuity”. Free Education is a matter of the pupils/students freedom to study, appropriate the knowledge built by their colleagues, share with other colleagues the knowledge acquired and change and improve the knowledge. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the pupils/students in the school and elsewhere: - The freedom to apply the knowledge acquired, for any purpose (freedom 0). - The freedom to study how the schooling works, and seek to adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to different conceptions of school education is a precondition for this. - The freedom to redistribute knowledge to colleagues so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2). - The freedom to seek to improve school education, and share your ideas with colleagues, so that the whole school community benefits (freedom 3). Access to different conceptions of school education is a precondition for this. [After writing this, I thought that perhaps what was in my head was the Escola da Ponte, Portugal: http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escola_da_Ponte, http://www.escoladaponte.com.pt, http://moodle.escoladaponte.com.pt, http://sites.google.com/site/escolaponte, http://jornal-dia-a-dia.blogspot.com. And certainly, I thought the ideas of Paulo Freire and of Jean Piaget. Please, do you think would be possible to develop minimum guidelines of the Free Education? Leave a reply below. Hugs.] Original portuguese version: http://listas.sleducacional.org/pipermail/geral-sleducacional.org/2012-April/008634.html Blog post: http://www.ufrgs.br/soft-livre-edu/quatro-liberdades. Spanish version: http://www.ufrgs.br/soft-livre-edu/las-cuatro-libertades. ——– What is Free Software? Source: http://www.gnu.org/home.en.html “Free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech”, not as in “free beer”. Free software is a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software: - The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0). |
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. . . . . . . . . - The freedom to study how knowledge of the world works, and seek to adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to different conceptions of knowledge is a precondition for this. - The freedom to redistribute knowledge to colleagues so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2). The freedom to seek to improve the knowledge, and share your ideas with colleagues, so that the whole school community to benefit (freedom 3). Access to different conceptions of knowledge is a precondition for this. —- Original portuguese version: http://listas.sleducacional.org/pipermail/geral-sleducacional.org/2012-April/008636.html. |
When it comes to children I think “Freedom” is a limited concept. The
older the child, of course, the more “freedom” you can allow them.
Choice in education is good, but it should be limited choices. Math is
not a favorite subject for many, but it is necessary. To be able to
communicate is necessary. To know something about history, so we will
not repeat the mistakes (or at least not on as grand a scale or as many
times as we might) is necessary.
Likewise some methods of teaching have been measured to be more
effective than others. Should we give the children the Freedom to
choose ineffective methods, knowing that it will be wasting their time
(and perhaps the teachers)?
A child direct from the womb has no experience or knowledge to draw on
for making good choices. They might choose the education path that is
the most “fun”, but least effective.
Your “freedom 1″ says the students can adapt the education to their
needs. Do you think a child in the first grade has a knowledge of what
education they will need in life?
Obviously the dynamic I am discussing changes with age. By the time of
university a student should have been exposed to many topics and many
styles of learning. Likewise this change is not a “step-function”. The
student is not incapable of making good decisions in the last year of
grade school and automatically capable of these good decisions in the
first year of university. Some students are very good at understanding
the issues at a very young age, and some people go all the way through
university without ever learning it. But it is generally considered
that “the age of majority” is the time when people can make “adult”
decisions about things like getting married without a guardian’s
permission, drinking, going to war and voting.
Certainly we should allow children to share knowledge, but what if we
find them sharing knowledge of hate? Do we sit back and allow that to
foster?
There are a lot of issues here.
Comment by Jon "maddog" Hall — 01/05/2012 @ 10:50 am