The other night on 7.30 report Kerry O’Brien did a short interview with a Brazialian innovator called Ricardo Semler who is one of the main people behind the company Semco. O’Brien’s introduction:

Brazilian entrepreneur Ricardo Semler turned business convention on its head when he took over the relatively small family engineering term Semco, introducing a radical form of participative management giving the workers a rather extraordinary say in the running of the company.

The principles being developed as part of the business model behind the Semco company as Ricardo discussed in the interview are being applied to education at a school called Lumiar in Brazil. He made some interesting points that have correlations, I argue with process-based learning methods:

And if you make it interesting - for example, our courses are not geometry or physics. Our course is setting up a bicycle, it’s a three month course and you start from scratch and you design a bicycle. To design a bicycle you need pi, and pi is 3.1416, but if I tell you pi is very important you think it’s an apple pie. Now if you want to do your own bicycle the only thing to make a perfect circle so the thing doesn’t unbalance is to learn pi. So we set up these courses, we have chemistry in the kitchen. We found a different way of saying, this is very interesting stuff. It’s just that we’ve made it so boring, we’ve divided it into disciplines and made your life so terrible that you hate it, but you shouldn’t hate it. It’s wonderful to know how our life works.

The education design involves an engagement with practice and the boxes placed around fields of study are made permeable or are removed altogether. He also pointed out a philosophical approach towards learning that within conventional education would be seen as being quite controversial:

What we’re saying is, when you look at your past and my past and anybody’s past and say, when did we actually learn something, it was when you were very interested at that exact moment and there was somebody who was passionate on the other side. Never in any other situation. And so our answer is the following, do I want a kid who is told to sit down and shut up? Do I want him there? What is the chance he’s going to retain any knowledge? It’s very small. We say, show up when you want to and when you want to you will learn enough for all that time when you would have rather been surfing or playing soccer. It’s very difficult for people to accept.

I couldn’t help thinking whether there are aspects of the process-based model that could be pushed further in regards to connections with pre-established models. Sometimes there is still that tension, with the teacher who strives to achieve attendance, participation and understanding, along with some of the curriculum design being set even more around real-life projects.