Learning

Our life is dominated by imagery. We are constantly bombarded by visuals, television, the internet, advertisement, printed matter … etc., and we, most of the time, are helpless recipients and consumers. Yet we’re all aware that the visual experience is a primary form of cognition since childhood, and it is by far the most direct and closest to reality. It’s not surprising that we always seek an image, a picture as proof for something, someone, or some happening, over written descriptions and accounts. Our imagination, our dreams, our subconscious are all about thinking in pictures and imagery. The great minds, the prophets … are portrayed as visionaries.
Yet visual literacy lacks the set structure, syntax, verb and grammar that verbal literacy has developed, justifying why the education system favors the latter over the former, which allows educators a more simpler approach to gauging “right from wrong” and dealing with the grading system. Many-a-time, students are provided with visual aids – pictures, audio-visual presentations, films – yet these aids reinforce the students’ passive experience as consumers of images and visual presentations. Visual material being produced and used for educational purposes are presented with few criteria, if any, for evaluation and understanding the effects they produce. “The consumer of most of the educational media production would not, to make the verbal literacy analogy, recognize or know what was a misspelling, an incorrectly phrased sentence, a badly organized theme.” 
If we are not able to see, understand and create a picture, we are at great loss in this age, for we are, not only, not in control of our image in the world, but, more importantly, will never be able to catch up with the fast-moving progress and development sweeping the world.
Being able to speak a language is vastly different from achieving literacy through reading and writing. In 1935, Moholy-Nagy, the brilliant Bauhaus master said: “the illiterate of the future will be ignorant of pen and camera alike”.

Andreas Schleicher, who is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading educational thinkers, told a House of Commons inquiry: “I would say, in the fourth industrial revolution, arts may become more important than maths.”
“We talk about ‘soft skills’ often as social and emotional skills, and hard skills as about science and maths, but it might be the opposite,” he said, suggesting that science and maths may become ‘softer’ in future when the need for them decreases due to technology, and the ‘hard skills’ will be “your curiosity, your leadership, your persistence and your resilience” .

• Mapping Jerusalem – Jack Persekian
• Scientific Concepts, artistic perspective – Lour Oukal
• Jerusalem’s History through the eyes of Children – Hamada Maddah
• A Fragment of the Ecosystem – Benjamin Boyadgian