Enrichment Programmes
This phrase has been rattling around in my head more frequently than usual over the last few days. There have been three main contexts in my mind.
The first context is school activities. Someone asked me how to choose a good enrichment programme for the sprouts. I replied that it's always good to ask yourself what you mean by enrichment.
What I mean by enrichment in an educational context is some process by which the mental soil becomes more fertile and the potential depth and breadth of future education become greater. In that sense, limited 'enrichment programmes' which are focused on specific activities (e.g. 'Math Olympiad') are less enriching than those which have broader or more fundamental application (e.g. 'How to Understand a Language Which You Have Never Seen Before').
The second context is nuclear proliferation. It has been amusing and yet frightening to see how the Stuxnet virus targeted and discombobulated the Iranian nuclear facilities over the last few months. In order to concentrate useful nuclear isotopes such as uranium-235, finely-calibrated centrifuges are used to separate raw material by mass.
The Stuxnet virus sabotaged the centrifuges, thus knocking the Iranian enrichment programme off its stride. This is one danger of having over-specialised enrichment programmes, I suppose: you become too dependent on a specific mechanism.
The third context is charity funding. Over the last few years, we've seen quite a lot of what I call 'enrichment programmes' — that is, programmes in which a constituency (a congregation or a support population that gives to a particular charity) put lots of funds into building something rather than doing something.
Wealth is thereby concentrated in one place but not released to do good. For example, if a charity buys a piece of property at $8m as an investment to be sold at a higher future price, then $8m in contributions go stagnant until the property is sold. If the property develops negative equity, then the contributions are provisionally wasted.
It has been an enriching experience to see all these kinds of enrichment programmes and to think about how education can indeed be enriched. I think that it's a good thing to have a sort of pyramid model for enrichment programmes, with strong basic modules at the base and a bunch of interesting but not so broad-based modules further up. If you build a base on modules that are not foundational, then the pyramid tends to crumble and enrichment is uneven, erratic and perhaps dangerous.
The first context is school activities. Someone asked me how to choose a good enrichment programme for the sprouts. I replied that it's always good to ask yourself what you mean by enrichment.
What I mean by enrichment in an educational context is some process by which the mental soil becomes more fertile and the potential depth and breadth of future education become greater. In that sense, limited 'enrichment programmes' which are focused on specific activities (e.g. 'Math Olympiad') are less enriching than those which have broader or more fundamental application (e.g. 'How to Understand a Language Which You Have Never Seen Before').
The second context is nuclear proliferation. It has been amusing and yet frightening to see how the Stuxnet virus targeted and discombobulated the Iranian nuclear facilities over the last few months. In order to concentrate useful nuclear isotopes such as uranium-235, finely-calibrated centrifuges are used to separate raw material by mass.
The Stuxnet virus sabotaged the centrifuges, thus knocking the Iranian enrichment programme off its stride. This is one danger of having over-specialised enrichment programmes, I suppose: you become too dependent on a specific mechanism.
The third context is charity funding. Over the last few years, we've seen quite a lot of what I call 'enrichment programmes' — that is, programmes in which a constituency (a congregation or a support population that gives to a particular charity) put lots of funds into building something rather than doing something.
Wealth is thereby concentrated in one place but not released to do good. For example, if a charity buys a piece of property at $8m as an investment to be sold at a higher future price, then $8m in contributions go stagnant until the property is sold. If the property develops negative equity, then the contributions are provisionally wasted.
It has been an enriching experience to see all these kinds of enrichment programmes and to think about how education can indeed be enriched. I think that it's a good thing to have a sort of pyramid model for enrichment programmes, with strong basic modules at the base and a bunch of interesting but not so broad-based modules further up. If you build a base on modules that are not foundational, then the pyramid tends to crumble and enrichment is uneven, erratic and perhaps dangerous.
Labels: Curriculum Development, Education
etched with acid at 11:37:00 am
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