Beaten paths and byways

"Let him who claims that the soup is hot dip his fingers in it!"

This Moroccan proverb means that you only measure the difficulty of an action once you've experienced it. Certainly true when it comes to pedagogy, but a truth sometimes forgotten under our skies. Overloaded curricula, obsolete approaches and outdated concepts, teachers draw their methods from works that seem far removed from our students' current preoccupations.

So how can we encourage pedagogues to explore alternative ways of teaching better? And, following in their footsteps, how can we encourage distance learning scriptwriters to take the side roads, the winding, bumpy roads that can sometimes lead more surely than freeways, even digital ones? Here are just a few of the avenues we can explore.

Error and avoidance

Learning is sometimes limited to learning how to... avoid mistakes. It's as if learning had to be this long, tranquil river - which, fortunately, it isn't! As we now know, mistakes are an essential step in the learning process. They enable progress to be made when the educator succeeds in transforming them into challenges to be met.

But mistakes are not only excellent stimulants, they also tell us something about the learning we're doing.

So how can we identify those moments when assimilating a concept becomes less easy? In short, how do we put our finger where it hurts? One way of spotting these snags is to call in the educational inspectors, the very people who accompany teachers in their perpetual, and often not so easy, quest to pass on the best possible teaching.

But it has to be said that the role of error is not fully recognized. A whole body of thought on the typology of errorsremains somewhat marginal or, at the very least, insufficiently exploited. And yet, we learn that far from being a simple obstacle, error is also an opportunity for the learner to progress, but also - and we tend to forget this - for the teacher. So how can it help teachers change their approach? The question deserves some initial answers.

Teaching differently

The question can be posed in terms of alternatives, in other words, how to teach differently to achieve better learning. In Morocco, faced with a school in crisis, the debate on teaching methods is more than ever on the agenda. The challenge is not an easy one, since it involves both dealing with the most pressing problems and laying the foundations for a well-thought-out, sustainable system capable of keeping pace with Morocco's rapidly changing society. An emergency plan for better education, launched by the government in 2009 and running until 2012, aims to provide a response through numerous measures, some of which have a definite impact on "how to teach". In the field of ICT, this means encouraging innovation through a judicious forum for ideas and projects, now in its seventh year.

Another approach, one of the most original but also far more risky, is to... keep children at home, on the pretext that school instills too many bad reflexes in them. This position may seem extreme to some, and difficult to implement, but it sometimes reveals what " teaching shouldn't be "! And it begs the question: is school the best place to learn? Here's a brief but highly instructive historyof this universal institution.

This being the case, whatever the place or approach adopted, the essential thing is to define as precisely and lucidly as possible the purpose of education in the 21st century. Philosopher and epistemologist Michel Serres masterfully reminded us of this at the Institut de France on March 1, during an inter-academic session devoted to "The New Challenges of Education". Here's his talk, which begins with this simple, all too often overlooked, truism:

"Before you can teach anyone anything, you must at least know what it is. Who shows up, today, at school, college, high school, university?"