I have bad news. I don't know about other countries in detail, but for Germany this description definitely applies to universities. "Will this be on the exam?", "Where can I get the sample solutions?", "Will I get a bonus for handing in homework?", "What are the exact requirements for getting credits?" are just a few examples of what you will hear these days from students, as the new semester is starting. And, no surprise, because what else would you expect from poor young people who have been trained to behave like this for over a decade? If this is the route to success, then you'll take it. Next thing that happens along this path is that universities adapt to their "customers", and make more and more lectures/exams/homework mandatory, and thereby explicitly continuing the schooling regime. The only "own choice" then - if anything! - was the choice of the study programme.
I was an elementary school student in the 1970s and we had much more freedom and autonomy in our education than kids today now have. Many projects where we had to make choices and decisions…. Free time built into the school day…. And far less evaluation pressure!
This approach is similar to how I taught in specialist SEMH settings. Setting up stations for children to come and learn at whenever they were ready. It worked really well! I'd love to see a few schools adopt this approach!
Schooling suffers from a lack of agency and authenticity. The library is a beautiful exemplar for the magic of choice, but it also highlights the need for authentic learning experiences. The library, and most self-directed educational situations, abstract information from the actual experiences of learning that information. The more abstracted the learning is the harder it is to actually apply what you've learned in the situations where you need to use it.
I have bad news. I don't know about other countries in detail, but for Germany this description definitely applies to universities. "Will this be on the exam?", "Where can I get the sample solutions?", "Will I get a bonus for handing in homework?", "What are the exact requirements for getting credits?" are just a few examples of what you will hear these days from students, as the new semester is starting. And, no surprise, because what else would you expect from poor young people who have been trained to behave like this for over a decade? If this is the route to success, then you'll take it. Next thing that happens along this path is that universities adapt to their "customers", and make more and more lectures/exams/homework mandatory, and thereby explicitly continuing the schooling regime. The only "own choice" then - if anything! - was the choice of the study programme.
For German-speaking readers, I have listed a few of the current issue of our university system in my blog post https://danielkarrasch.substack.com/p/begleitetes-studieren.
I was an elementary school student in the 1970s and we had much more freedom and autonomy in our education than kids today now have. Many projects where we had to make choices and decisions…. Free time built into the school day…. And far less evaluation pressure!
This approach is similar to how I taught in specialist SEMH settings. Setting up stations for children to come and learn at whenever they were ready. It worked really well! I'd love to see a few schools adopt this approach!
Schooling suffers from a lack of agency and authenticity. The library is a beautiful exemplar for the magic of choice, but it also highlights the need for authentic learning experiences. The library, and most self-directed educational situations, abstract information from the actual experiences of learning that information. The more abstracted the learning is the harder it is to actually apply what you've learned in the situations where you need to use it.