The Future of Education

The idea of this endeavour came from the experience of “home-working” with kids. I was (and still am) surprised by the huge gap between the pupils’ needs and the offer of the educational system. At a first glance, this gap was the consequence of the politics we were forced to accept, as a communist country (promotion of equity / equality / uniformity), but a deeper insight showed me that education is in a crisis in many countries, not necessary under the same political system. My conclusion, after a years-long research, is that the main problem of the school, as an institution, consists in keeping the pace with the always changing mental frame of the human being. Pupils have acquired already the information, and this is the result of the so-called revolution of technology, which made possible the free access to the open-sources and to the social networks all around the world.

The main goal of this study is to formulate the ideas that could allow the development of an educational system that addresses humans as whole beings – artists and scientists, poets and mathematicians as well; this education system should sustain the growth of the human being on all its dimensions, leaving behind the Cartesian classifications like “humanists” versus “scientists”. In my opinion, the science of education should be more connected with the research in the fields that could offer the basis for understanding the processes that undergo learning. There are theories and methods in the science of education built on the so-called neuro-myths – debunking them and involving neurosciences in the theory and practice of education could mean a leap forward to keeping the pace with the real world.

In this paper, the practical aspects of data collection, analysis, interpretation, and the management of large data sets are considered, in order to adopting of fMR imaging into a new science of education. This could be entitled the “neuroscience of education”, based on some of the current issues associated with bioinformatics or neuroinformatics and fMR imaging. In order to get an accurate representation of cortical activation, it is essential to follow an activation protocol. During an fMR imaging session, thousands of images are usually acquired, images that are then interactively postprocessed offline to produce an activation map. This map may be viewed and interpreted by a neurosurgeon and / or other clinicians. The fMR method could be a valuable tool in the process of understanding the cortical processes that undergo learning.