Life Education

The beliefs, methodologies and practices of Self-Directed Education have been shared and discussed quite extensively, if not with the general public, at least within the SDE communities. Of course, a lot more work still need to be done to publicize these beliefs, methodologies and practices, especially to reach to the general public, to make the general public more aware of these great treasures of education practices. Things like tracking graduates and alumnus of SDE communities and doing academic research on the effects of SDE are all very important for us to keep working on. However, for myself, although I personally will engage very happily and actively in the above work, I also assign myself to some work that probably not many people in the SDE communities have paid attention to but these kinds of work I feel should be very vital for our next steps and we shall get started and prepared for them now. The works are mainly three tasks: First, to summarize the beliefs, methodologies and practices with one word “Life”. More elaborated, to apply Christopher Alexander’s concept of Life Center to education, and understand SDE beliefs, methodologies and practices as what is more aligned with Christ’s system that is highly of life and capable of generating life. Further, education should be Life Education, in which one finds out about one’s life and finds out what life is about. So it is not just the methodologies and practices of SDE that can be summarized as Life. The purpose of SDE is also about Life. Second, to apply the same concept, Life Center, to knowledge. What are the life centers of knowledge and how we can learn effectively when we can identify life centers in knowledge and can apply them freely in the education context or in any context that is related to knowledge. Thirdly, with the above two steps done successfully , the true power of Internet for education can thus be finally tapped into. With the identified life centers of knowledge, the right digitization of knowledge and learning process can happen, the right learning software that truly solves problems of learning and education and truly break down the barriers, can be produced. The methodologies and practices of SDE communities can thus be applied online centered around those life centers of knowledge, namely Significant Experiences and Abstract Knowledge Models, if you cannot wait and have to know them now. I share with you here these works that I am going to be engaged in, in the hope some of you may recognize the importance of these works and join my efforts to tackle them together. Education is the root problems of today’s all crisis, including the current coronavirus pandemic. However, it takes time to change education and we hope we can make it in time before stupidity blows up our precious home, the earth. Behind all these is an effort to look at everything through life centers, since whatever we human beings can recognize are life centers. It is about how we can create a system that has more life, and it unites science with literature and arts, with our feelings. The problems and crisis we face today have a lot to do our gradually increased alienation from life. Many constructs of modern society caused that alienation. So emphasis on Life and feel/sense of life is very important in reversing that trend. Technology is great and it brought deep change to our life. However, we have to be intimate with what life is, we have to recognize life in everything we are doing, so we don’t lose ourselves to the technology and make best use of technology for our very own happiness of life. And life or life center is all about space. So we can reach to a deeper understanding of what is learning and what is knowledge, how children play with space, how people build up abstract knowledge models. It is all about space! And it is space of life! Computer Science is the science studying those life centers and how they interact. I am re-interpreting the entire Computer Science /Software Programming using Life Centers. https://github.com/beyondliu/lfcs/wiki/Life-Framework-applied-to-Computer-Science