In modern societies at large, students and learners are increasingly acting like customers and consumers. As in the rest of their (and our) lives they demand service that meets their needs and they assume (rightly or wrongly) that their wishes are paramount. The contrast between this “modern” attitude and the unquestioning loyalty of the average traditional students is striking.“Active learning”, “learning-by-doing”, “the discovery method” lie at the very heart of modern learning theory. Active learning has been shown to have a positive impact on students’ development. Active learning is certainly not a new idea. Charles Gragg ( of the Harvard Business School ) wrote, fifty years ago, that, “No one can learn in any basic sense from another except by subjecting what that other has to offer to a process of creative thinking; that is unless the learner is actively and imaginatively receptive, he will emerge from the experience with nothing more than a catalog of facts and other people’s notions.”

Because knowledge is changing so rapidly today, learning a “catalogue of facts” is quickly outdated. What students know when they finish school or university is not nearly as important as their capacity to find out, to research and to do.. That is why there is so much emphasis today on critical thinking, problem solving, analysis, and other learning skills that enable people to keep on learning throughout their professional lives.

Yet , lecturing at university level and whole-class teaching at school level remain the teaching method of choice throughout, often with discouraging results as to what students have really learnt after a standard class. (This does not mean that all lecturing is bad. There are lectures that encourage people to think, to see relationships that they had not seen before, to test their knowledge against that being presented – in short, to become actively engaged in thinking. The criticism of chalk-and-talk (or it’s modern equivalent the “power-point presentation”) is primarily that it’s devoid of full learner’s participation.

I think that the most fundamental contribution of educational research on learning over the past thirty years is the simple fact that students must be mentally and physically engaged in order to learn.

Industrial Age Learning :

memorization and recall

inear and concrete intellectual development

conformity & uniformity

content learning

departmentalized learning

isolated teachers; whole-class lecturing

technology as an isolated tool (pen, paper, books, equipment)

experimentation &open curricula total human (ethical, intellectual, and physical) development

diversity & creativity

process learning, concept driven interdisciplinary learning

collaborative teaching ;self& self-paced learning

technology as an integral tool(CD-rom, net-search & other ICT tools)

If all this is well known, one may ask WHY, in Mauritius and elsewhere, school and universities are so far from modernizing the teaching-learning process they offer? Are the reasons financial or political? to do with ignorance or apathy? or the fear of change? At this stage of our analysis it appears that it’s probably a mixture of all these reasons.