Opinion: Schools should teach the way children learn
By Peter Halacsy
If you don’t mind a new San Franciscan’s point of view, what I see behind the faltering outcomes of American education is a failure to communicate.
American schools are using two-dimensional communication in a 3-D world. All one needs to do is view the YouTube video of a toddler quickly mastering an iPad to understand the problem, and the solution.
American education is linear, but the rest of a student’s world isn’t. Watch young people hunting knowledge at a computer, and you won’t see them moving along a straight line (as textbooks or slide presentations do). You’ll see them zooming in and out, leaping from hyperlink to hyperlink, remixing knowledge on the fly. This type of learning is brain candy to young people, and they don’t get enough in school. As one T-shirt recently seen in a New York City school says, “It’s Not ADD – I’m Just Not Listening.”
I learned the limits of linear education as a child growing up in Hungary as the Cold War waned. I came to America expecting to find a very different approach to education. Sadly, I did not.
Peter Halacsy, the former lead developer at Hungary’s largest Internet company and a co-founder of Kitchen Budapest, was an assistant professor of new media at Budapest University of Technology before co-founding Prezi Inc. in 2009 and moving to San Francisco.