[Original context]

It could be alleged that education is not democratic in our country. The base of social injustice is based in this problem, and it has everyone's ears tired of hearing again and again the same assertions about the source of this problem. It looks to me of an infinite importance, and as a personal mission, to uncover this conflict stream to read it from other areas. I maintain that education nowadays is a matter of design, and us, designers hold the burden of taking part on it.

I am clear that education is not democratic (in the sense of being equally open to everyone), but now a days, it is possible to see a landscape of instances in which education have attained potential to become democratic.

Education is increasingly the issue of this time. This because in the first place, we are living in an artificial habitat that becomes as -or more- hostile than the natural habitat for those who don?t go through the educational process. In the second place, we have a generation that is more open-minded, that won?t need unique truths, and that has born in a world that is conscious that that people don?t have control over themselves and their lives. This group of people had to go through a scholar system that doesn?t fit since long ago, and today is stinking from expiry; and with this, they are inventing new ways to learn. Maybe with less childhood amnesia than prior generations. Because of this, currently lots of new ways to learn are being invented. It can be seen that through internet, today anything can be learnt. If some years ago, a lot of effort was needed to read hard and obscure texts in order to learn, and mostly in english, today the learning is even offered, and packaged in a didactic envelope; and no longer as a mere provision of information. The oldest evidences of this, that I had the opportunity to know personally, were GameMaker and Fruity Loops, with which learning to program and to make music -respectively-, were presented cost-free and even emphasizing their usage learning curve. The science of how to design games, exploded with the appearance of the computer; and through books such as Rules of play, we discover that actually, to learn and to play, are one thing. In internet, we currently have available very valuable learning tools such as Scratch, Duolingo, Processing, Arduino, Wikipedia, Khan academy, Codecademy, etcetera. New institutions in this line such as the Tinkering Schools (or the TinkerTrak, here in Chile), or the Innova schools, in Peru, between many, have been appearing in the last time. And yet better, anyone can obtain help from a particular doubt in the forums, or any collaborative space or social platform. Anyone that has the will to learn something, will be able as long as he has internet access; or better to say: would be able, if us, the designers had made our jobs soon enough.

And here is that I propose the educational problem more as a design problem than as a political problem. Our reality offers many options to democratize the education: the most primitive digital machinery has the potential to generate more effective learning experiences if they are designed in the correct way; opening the possibility to have a better education to anyone.Why the education keeps on being so exclusive? And why it still doesn?t integrate correctly technologic objects and the design experience research? A well designed learning experience is more efficient in time and costs, and more effective in education performance. Learning is happening out of the school?s bounds; and these have become even enemies of learn. Just because they are lacking the design of the experience; the experience of learning.