These two articles bring up some interesting ideas. The first article would seem to be a counterargument to the growing trope of 21st century learning (actually 21st century anything related to education). To summarize some of the points, some which I see some agreement with, is the notion that there is a strange sort of panacea surrounding these sorts of initiatives. I’ve certainly read my share of breathless prose covering the vague wonders of collaborate student centered learning…and to be honest, I think some of it sounds pretty good. BUT I don’t understand the rush to throw the baby out with the bathwater…
The Case Against 21st-Century Schools
http://www.dialogueonline.ca/article.php?id=237
A “21st Century Skills” movement seems to be emerging as the latest panacea in the peculiar world of public education. Since the appearance of Tony Wagner’s The Global Achievement Gap (2008), the movement has been in full flight. From his perch at Harvard, Wagner wields enormous influence, particularly in the corporate world. The school system does not need “merely reform, according to Wagner, because it is “completely obsolete.” We need a completely new system committed to teaching “21st century skills” preparing students for lives in this century.
“The future,” H.G. Wells once said, “is a race between education and catastrophe.” In his future world, change was the only constant and our educational system is always in danger of falling behind or becoming irrelevant. That is a truly frightening prospect, but it seems to have generated a rather ominous world-wide 21st century education movement. It is driven by educational futurists, media personalities, and technology providers, all promoting so-called “21st Century Schools.”
Yet worshipping at the altar of technology poses its own dangers. In the hands of education’s 21st century zealots, educational change might even threaten the fundamental principles and foundations of our educational tradition. Most ironic of all, making way for the “knowledge-based economy” now seems to thrive on collective amnesia and a complete disregard for the wisdom bequeathed to us by past generations.
A few courageous voices have emerged to challenge the retooled “21st century skills” orthodoxy. American education critic Jay P. Greene was way out front on this file. Since 2008, he’s been calling the movement “21st century nonsense.” It is nonsense because it denies the past and threatens much that is good about our educational tradition. In the recent past, the “skills-mania” almost destroyed history and social studies in the 1980s, before it was vanquished. To say that critical thinking is a “21st century skill” is surely a joke unless you only inhabit the present and have lost any sense of historical memory.
This link (and associated quote) seems to tie together this notion of reevaluating the 21st century student initiatives premises and ideas with some of my interests in reevaluating curriculum (i.e. what is important to teach). This post considers this idea from what may be an opposing perspective to mine (I am perfectly happy with adding in more, and keeping everything! But cooler heads may prevail…).
The Elephant in the Room of 21st Century learning
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/futures_of_reform/2011/04/the_elephant_in_the_room_of_21st_century_learning.html
Today’s educators face a small world paradox: the smaller our common world gets, the larger and more complicated our personal worlds become. Globalization, digital technologies, and cheap and fast modern transportation make the common world we and our children occupy ‘smaller’, thereby putting more places and jobs and products and channels and websites and cultures and friends, and, yes, responsibilities at everyone’s fingertips. An average person in 14th century France inhabited a relatively simple personal world with maybe three sides: farm, village, and the church. Today ordinary individuals construct amazingly complex personal worlds with many facets. The game has truly changed.
There is an "elephant in the room," a big conspicuous but largely undiscussed problem: What should we do with tired content? Many traditional curricular topics, even when reasonably well learned in a schoolish way, do not speak powerfully to the lives today’s students are likely to live. After the exams are over, mountains of information and understanding erode in the acid rain of time and multimedia and general business. Much of what learners happen to remember plays no intellectual or practical role in life. What great insights or pivotal decisions have most of us drawn lately from let’s say quadratic equations, the steps of mitosis or meiosis, Boyle’s law, the wives of Henry VIII, or the contrast between Italian and Elizabethan sonnets?
What do you think should be jettisoned from a high school curriculum?
