L'actualisation de mon observation me permet de faire une rétrospection sur la connaissance de l'humanité et sur ma connaissance de la connaissance de l'humanité. Le cosmoscope permet à tout humain d'observer mon observation personnelle de ma connaissance de la connaissance de l'humanité. Ma vie ne me permettra pas de connaître toute la connaissance de l'humanité mais me permettra d'observer en partie la mienne.

Pour simplifier la complexité, je dois rédiger un texte décrivant mon observation de ma connaissance d'une partie de toute la connaissance pour tenter d'inférer la RECHERCHE des recherches, la CONNAISSANCE des connaissances... la THÈSE des thèses. Restons humble, l'observation de mon observation et la manière de vous le dire constituera mon enactivisme intégral.

(bas lat. muttum, grognement) Élément de la langue constitué d'un ou de plusieurs phonèmes et susceptibles d'une transcription graphique comprise entre deux blancs [ou noirs dans ma page WWW].

n.m. (gr. phônêma) LING. Son d'une langue défini par des propriétés distinctives (traits pertinents) qui l'opposent aux autres sons de cette langue.

Système de signes verbaux [ ou graphiques ] propres à une communauté d'individus qui l'utilisent pour s'exprimer et communiquer entre eux.

ondes sonores ou vibrations phonémique(s) ou graphe(s) distint(s) produit(s) par un ou des individus et structuré(s) en système propre à une communauté culturelle pour communiquer entre eux dans l'environnement terrestre et/ou avec/dans un Objet Volant Identifié (OVI) transportant une partie de l'environnement terrestre servant à voyager dans le cosmos....[ça élimine pour le moment les extra-terrestres]

Obviously, I believe that the school system is making a great many mistakes. Here are my ten favorites, favorite not because I like them but because eradicating them would go so far towards helping kids learn:

There really is no learning without doing. There is the appearance of learning without doing when we ask children to memorize stuff. But adults know that they learn best on the job, from experience, by trying things out. Children learn best that way, too. If there is nothing to actually do in a subject area we want to teach children it may be the case that there really isn't anything that children ought to learn in that subject area.

Assessment is not the job of the schools. Products ought to be assessed by the buyer of those products, not the producer of those products. Let the schools do the best job they can and then let the buyer beware. Schools must concentrate on learning and teaching, not testing and comparing.

Why should everyone know the same stuff? What a dull world it would be if everyone knew only the same material. Let children choose where they want to go, and with proper guidance they will choose well and create an alive and diverse society.

There isn't all that much that it is important to know. There is a lot that it is important to know how to do, however. Teachers should help students figure out how to do stuff the students actually want to do.

We really have to get over the idea that some stuff is just worth knowing even if you never do anything with it. Human memories happily erase stuff that has no purpose, so why try to fill up children's heads with such stuff? Concentrate on figuring out why someone would ever want to know something before you teach it, and teach the reason, in a way that can be believed, at the same time.

Practice is an important part of learning, not studying. Studying is a complete waste of time. No one ever remembers the stuff they cram into their heads the night before the exam, so why do it? Practice, on the other hand, makes perfect. But, you have to be practicing a skill that you actually want to know how to perform.

This is just a historical accident and it's a terrible idea. Age-grouped grades are one of the principal sources of terror for children in school, because they are always feeling they are not as good as someone else or better than someone else, and so on. Such comparisons and other social problems caused by age-similar grades cause many a child to have terrible confidence problems. Allowing students to help those who are younger, on the other hand, works well for both parties.

Grades serve as motivation for some children, but not for all. Some children get very frustrated by the arbitrary use of power represented by grades and simply give up.

Old people especially believe this, probably because schools were seriously rigid and uptight in their day. The threat of a ruler across the head makes children anxious and quiet. It does not make them learn. It makes them afraid to fail, which is a different thing altogether.

What kid would choose learning mathematics over learning about animals, trucks, sports, or whatever? Is there one? Good. Then, teach him mathematics. Leave the other children alone.

Shanck, Roger & Cleary, Chip. (1994) Engines for Education. http://www.ils.nwu.edu/~e_for_e/nodes/NODE-283-pg.html [pager consultée le 2000-10-15]

While much of this book is about the role that technology can play in revamping the schools, the ideas here do not depend on computers. The schools of tomorrow, with or without new technologies, can improve by following some simple suggestions this book brings out:

Today's schools are dominated by the need to assess student performance. Test scores and grades measure the wrong things and thus cause the wrong things to be taught. What is important is achievement. Good software should allow its users to achieve goals that are worth achieving. Eliminate test scores and grades, and the endless repetitive reviewing and cramming for tests that goes with it, and replace this with levels of achievement that are objective, relevant, and highly motivating. This can be done with good software, but it could also be done in today's classroom.

Today's schools, and the culture in which those schools live, are obsessed with the accumulation of facts. We have so many lists of what everyone should know that we have succeeded in convincing people they are ignorant, but to what end? Real measures of knowledge are not fact-based at all. Experts may not be able to recite facts, but they usually can do things that only experts do. Facts are only useful when they help one accomplish some goals; they should not be learned out of context. Knowledge should be taught when it is helpful for accomplishing some goal. There should be less emphasis on right answers and more discussion of open questions, for which no answers are known.

Many parents and educators have confused instruction with discipline. Just because there is little discipline in today's schools, it does not follow that when there was discipline, there was also a great deal of learning. The two have little to do with each other. Learning is best accomplished by children when what they are learning interests them, relates to their goals and is fun.

There is no reason why we cannot make everything in school enjoyable. Discipline must be self-imposed to be of any real use, and it will be self-imposed by any child who cares about the goal he is trying to accomplish. Children are quite apt learners when they really want to know something. We must create environments in which children are curious.

Today's schools are organized by age groups in grades. Why? Because they always have been. This causes us to lose the use of some available teachers, namely the other, more experienced, children. Children can learn from each other and will do better if they were organized by similar interests instead of similar ages. We must eliminate the concept of first grade, etc., and replace it with achievements within interest-based groupings. We must learn to ask what children have learned to do, not what grade they are in.

Today's schools emphasize the production of good scores. We must abandon entirely the whole notion of scores, grades, exams, and all other competitive measures. Children need to feel a sense of accomplishment, to show others what they have produced. We must enable them to produce. What they produce ought to be visible, real accomplishments, skills or actual work products, that can be shown off, not as objects in a competition, but as a show of pride in what they can do.

Today's schools are essentially passive experiences. Teachers teach and children listen. Learning is better when it is active not passive. Instruction should only occur when children express the desire to know. Every time a teacher asks children to listen they ought to ask themselves if they believe the children genuinely want to hear what they are saying. If the students don't want to hear it, they won't hear it, no matter how much we threaten them.

Children are discouraged from pursuing their own interests in school. The job of a teacher is to expand the horizons of the student, to cause the student to have more interests not less. It is a good idea to allow teachers to advertise different possibilities and let teachers teach what they know best in response to the expressed interests of the children. Motivation is a terrible thing to waste. Everyone doesn't have to learn the same stuff. No more standard curricula!

Learning is fun and school isn't. Making school fun doesn't mean having the teacher dress up in a clown suit, or making teaching into Jeopardy. It does mean making learning fun in school in the same way that it is fun out of school.

This list does not detail everything that could be done to fix education. Nevertheless, it gives an idea of where to begin. High-quality software could help make these changes possible

Shanck, Roger & Cleary, Chip. (1994) Engines for Education. http://www.ils.nwu.edu/~e_for_e/nodes/NODE-284-pg.html [pager consultée le 2000-10-15]

School should not be a place where teachers and administrators make students jump through arbitrary hoops, memorizing things that could not possibly matter in real life. How does a student tell the real things to be worked on, the stuff that matters, from the junk, the stuff that is part of the curriculum because no one ever thought about it much, or the stuff that is part of the curriculum to help make teachers' lives simpler?

One way to improve matters is to allow students to have some say in their own education. I do not mean by this that students should be part of curriculum committees. Students are not prepared to determine what other kids should know any more than teachers, administrators, book publishers or cultural literacy advocates. But students can determine what interests them, and they should have the right to complain when outmoded teaching methods are in use.

For the use of students and teachers everywhere, and by way of summing up the real issues in education, I present the Student's Bill of Rights:

2. Real-Life Skills: No student should be have to learn something that fails to relate to a skill that is likely to be required in life after school.

4. Clarity of Goals: No student should be required to take a course, the results of which are not directly related to a goal held by the student, nor to engage in an activity without knowing what he can expect to gain from that activity.

5. Passivity: No student should be required to spend time passively watching or listening to anything unless there is a longer period of time devoted to allowing the student to participate in a corresponding active activity.

6. Arbitrary Standards: No student should be required to prepare his work in ways that are arbitrary or to jump through arbitrary hoops defined only by a particular teacher and not by the society at large.

8. Discovery: No student should be asked to learn anything unless there is the possibility of his being able to experiment in school with what he has learned.

9. Defined Curriculum: No student should be barred from engaging in activities that interest him within the framework of school because of breadth requirements imposed by the curriculum.

10. Freedom Of Thought: No student should be placed in a position of having to air his views on a subject if the opposing point of view is not presented and equally represented.

Shanck, Roger & Cleary, Chip. (1994) Engines for Education. http://www.ils.nwu.edu/~e_for_e/nodes/NODE-285-pg.html [pager consultée le 2000-10-15]

1 MATURANA, Humberto R., et VARELA, Francisco J.(1987).The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, Boston: Shambhala.

3 DESCARTES, René. Le discours de la méthode ??? L'erreur de Descartes, non pas celle soulevée par Damascio dans son livre Descartes' Error en réunifiant l'esprit et le corps mais dans l' observation de son être.. en utilisant les mots pour s'observer et le dire, on aurait dû plutôt s'attendre à ... "Je pense, donc nous sommes" ...parce que la première partie de son observation _je pense_ comprends déjè deux mots qui lui proviennent du milieu environnemental culturel proximal.

4 FOERSTER, Heinz von. (1991) Ethics and Second-order Cybernetics. in: "Système, éthique et perspectives en thérapie familiale", sous la direction de Yveline Rey et Bernard Prieur, ESF éditeur, Paris, Octobre 91. 41-54

5 WITTGENSTEIN, Ludwig. (1922)Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Rem. "When a person says something what he or she means depends not only on what is said but also on the context in which it is said. Importance, point, meaning are given by the surroundings. Words, gestures, expressions come alive, as it were, only within a language game, a culture, a form of life. If a picture, say, means something then it means so to somebody. Its meaning is not an objective property of the picture in the way that its size and shape are. The same goes of any mental picture." http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/w/wittgens.htm