COLOMBIAN EDUCATION: OLD NEW MODELS TO LEARN?

Thinking about Colombian education isn't an easy thing to me, maybe because I was formed under one common pedagogic schema, popular some years ago, and my vision will be strange in these topics. Thus, I could be blind on my mind, but apparently always there are new tendences in education area.

In general, along the time-line of education in Colombia, I can´t see one real interest, particularly in methodologies that teach how to think, and how to give techniques to explore and create a self-interpretation of the world. It is no easy to construct a model of the reality with historical perspective, but maybe our production -in terms of healthy people, secure live, and communities grow up- could be better than today.

Thus, the sensation about that in some areas we are experimental knowledge subjet is clear to me; maybe never our propouses are these to our children, and by some incredible other ways they can learn to think by himselves, discover a world of personal an social values, and can apply these in the university and so on: the learn and think by himselves help to appreciate the live in the universe and the others in my home.

In some topics, our education in fact will pretend oriented our minds to help us in the "new world developing", but how to do that? How explain us that we can participate actively in these continue construction? And, better, how understand that my individual motivation interfer or add to the community goal?

I´m a simple physician, not a pedagogist, and my interest is now motivated by my own childrens. I believe that if we can learn to think, by himselves, the expected world is biggest than the traditional seeing.

Really, some years ago, I was scared by the critical results of the new bachelor grade people. I really think that this people was bad in some critical aspects and we know, they will be our future!

Searching about the matter, I read about somethig like a "philantropy scheme" named antroposophie ["antroposofia", in spanish]. It was created by 1900's like an educative experiment and grow free in Waldorf, an european city, with particular success. But by some misterious reasons to me, that kind of tendences and these model in particular, were lost.

For me, perhaps it is a interesting model because it unified areas around the people and its communities -across the families-, and has a particular visualization about the human mind, human body, human spirit, and environmental things, each one integrated in concepts like movement, participation, leadership, respect, hability, creativity, familiar entropy, and mental flexibility. With this vision, I think, the individual is the center and is centered in the real world, and the education model has a really goal with the poeple; for these reason, now the objetive of our formation could be to search the human integration with and within the enviro and the human bean.

By these time, some special schools want to be a new thing in education model. I dont know if this is the correct way, but it is clear that is not the general rule. Today we import comercial models, fall down in tendences -not alwas etically correct or well oriented-, and always want to be recognized by the establishment with scales that really not reflect the organization it self, and don't has the methology to see how the people are formed in that colleges.

Then, in our country, including the urban and farmer schools, colleges and universities, our childs and youngest people was lost the time, and lost her mind without certain goals. And the goverment allways ignore all about these, and frecuently is in themes like presupuestal goals, and other similar, but nothing of substance. Maybe the people with the chair hasn't the interest, or the universal goals are in another way, I don't know. Or it is the poor vision that results when we reduce the people to numbers and statistics terms, in an economic production field...

Otto Jurado-Blanco, 2009