Many of the questions I have regarding the state of the education industry in this country revolves around epistemology. What is it to know something? The reason for my interest is that there are quite obviously some big changes needed in what we teach our children; at least that is if they are supposed to function in the future. Since there have been so many ongoing changes (pretty big ones too!) with what we do, how we deal with information, and how we interact (many of these changes relate to the internet in various ways…). It looks like a reasonable approach would be to re-evaluate everything…
As far as a broad overview of what is important to know goes, I can see that it might be worthwhile to try to encompass (in as broad a manner as possible) what the current ‘state of the art’ is as well as what many of the changes and upgrades presented mean.
The current situation is rather fractured, from state to state, from city to city; school to school…there are even some describable differences from different classes taught by the same teacher! I have been in some schools which still deal with rote memorization and test for the student’s ability to regurgitate facts. Other schools I have been to focus upon lots of collaborative work and the creation of ‘portfolio’s’.
I said I needed a rather broad brush, since there variation is so wide (even from my small, cursory experience!). This is why I see the need to look at this fundamentally, and thus the question is posed: “have the things (and methods) which are important to learn changed in the last century?” “Are there new skills which should be taught? And should some older less relevant skills be given shorter shrift?”
As an example so show that some of these questions are already being answered, just look at how much less importance has been placed upon cursive writing (I see huge differences when compared to when I was a student!). The same goes for the multiplication table… this used to be universally a requirement for all students to master. Now, there are schools which place almost no emphasis upon mastery of some of these fundamentals. I worry about this, in that many modern students have fewer deep mastery skills (such as having an immediate grasp upon basic arithmetic); it calls to mind whether having a similar deep mastery of the alphabet is soon to be ‘discussed’.
As you could imagine, there is a lot to consider here. Things are in flux, and babies are being thrown out with the bath water (to put it colloquially…). I should mention that about the only thing I see online regarding this topic usually alludes to 21st century skills™ (ahem…). I think that there should be some real effort put into this topic, but so far I have heard little of any real substance.
So, I decided to start working on my own, to see if I could come up with a few things of value…
As an adult living in the USA…today, I can see that there is a need to spend more time focusing on critical reasoning skills (whether in high school or in college). There is so much ‘spin’ and manipulation that you can see in almost every aspect of human interaction that there is a real need (more than even 10 years ago!) to have the skills to parse the speech of an: op-ed piece, and for that matter, almost all political speech (from everyone!). There is so much access to information, to the degree that it has almost become ubiquitous, that there is a real need for students to learn how to wade through the glut of data, versus when I was a student, where information was comparatively harder to find, and needed to be conserved and used parsimoniously.
In any case, I have quite a number of views on this topic, and for the first time (in this blog, that is), I would like to see any reader’s comments regarding what YOU think is important to know, and which skills should be focused upon.
