Issue 1.3. Psychological Development: Conceptual and methodological framework.

THE ROLE OF EDUCATION AND SCHOOLING IN DEVELOPMENT PROCESS.

In our everyday life we find two types of activities, the educative activities and the school educative activities, the first ones can be described as, basically, all the actions in which a kid achieve some knowledge, this goes from conversation with the family during dinner time, trough watching the television or travelling abroad. Whatever, the school educative activities, has some characteristic traits.  

First of all, these activities are designed, planned, and executed with a clear educative intention, this means that there are not random activities, but they have a long process of study and selection that is done in order to know, certainly, that those activities are the more appropriate to make students achieve some valuable knowledge. 

Secondly, they take place in institutions which are specifically created for that aim, which means that they will be specified in order to be competitive in that aspect. For example if we want to study the different elements of the farm and we bring our children into a farm, we first have to make sure that that farm is able to achieve all the goals we have want to achieve with that activity.

Thirdly, they are realized in a specific temporal-space, and have the aim to reach some objectives, which means that we don't do activities without a reason, and that we have to organize them in a certain timetable. 

Fourth, there are some figures in charge of the specific role of educating the pupils: the teachers, what means that the knowledge is not been carrying without supervision, but it's being absolutely under control, by a teacher with the right tools to do it. 

Finally the relation of these activities with other systems of parallel or superior hierarchical order has to be taken into account, in order to use the activities to make our children acquire the needed knowledge and not to contradict the knowledge previously acquired.

So consequently we can sum up those school activities in four points:

Ideas	Explanation
The essential traits of school activities are: the intentionality, the planning and the systematic actuation.	All the activities done by school have a clear goal to achieve, are planned with time do be done in a certain place and in a certain moment, and everything is clearly guided, the content we want to develop and the way we want to develop it.
Schooling should offer relevant instruction for the development.	As we all know the best way to make students learn things are by experiences. Rather than copying, memorizing or even understanding, learn by experiences will give to the kids useful knowledge with what they will feel comfortable.
Teachers should have the opportunities to act like change agents	Teacher is the element that can help students develop their knowledge by experiences, as it is the only person with the correct tools to achieve that process correctly.
The school contents are not focused on the pupils’ interests but on a curriculum that has been designed by the experts whom are not familiarized with the pupils that will be instructed.	The freedom that the school have to plan educative activities is very limited as they have to follow the curriculum. This is a fact that may be bad for some situations, as the teacher cannot adapt it to any kind of need, and if he wants, for example, to spend more time in a certain area, he may found that he cannot do it, as the curriculum has to be followed.

To end up this first block, we found interesting to analyze all the studied things that appear in the video of Ken Robinson Changing Paradigms: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkYvt-ltXWk, which summarize the main points to take into account in the future, which are:

1. We need to pay more attention to the "Curriculum Vitae" and less attention to the School Curriculum, as fighting to follow it, most of the times we lose experiences, we cannot help students to develop their own critical thinking to become better people in the tomorrow, we just can make them learn what curriculum says they have to learn, and that's not enough.

2. To develop school as a space of creativity, because we don't want all our students to be the same, we need to promote the differences between them, the cultures, the traditions, everything enrich the kids into a more open-mind, and we need that for tomorrow day, we they will be the citizens, and the equality of the world depends on that.

3. It's important not just to achieve the objectives of the curriculum but to understand the school as the process in which we can enrich students. We don't have to pass knowledge but make the develop their own mind.