Nuance is not a Vice
Sunday, September 25, 2005
This blog is officially defunct, and will no longer have new posts. Please head to my new blog, updated on a regular basis -- edwahoo.com.
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Wednesday, August 17, 2005
I'm honestly a little confused
DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) -- More than 100 homemade bombs planted by suspected Islamic militants exploded nearly simultaneously across Bangladesh on Wednesday, killing two people, including a young boy, and wounding at least 125.
About 50 people were arrested, a state-run news agency reported. There was no claim of responsibility, but leaflets from a banned group seeking the imposition of Islamic law were found at many scenes.
Police said the bombs apparently were designed to cause limited damage. The blasts killed a bicycle rickshaw driver in the northern town of Chapainawabganj and a 10-year-old boy in the central town of Savar.
The explosions caused panic and massive traffic jams in a number of cities, as people fled for safety and rushed to schools to bring their children home.
Security was stepped up, with police deploying to major intersections to check vehicles and even frisking pedestrians for bombs.
At least 125 people were injured in more than 100 blasts, the state-run Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha reported.
This seems like significant, perhaps even major, news -- over 100 explosive devices in a coordinated attack involving at lesat 50 Islamic militants, 2 dead, scores wounded. As of 5:00pm EST on the 17th, this story is not a "top story" on: CNN.com, MSNBC.com, Washingtonpost.com, NYTimes.com (CNN.com, for the record, has top stories about Pierce Brosnan not playing James Bond anymore and researchers being rescued from polar bears). It is a top story, but not prominent, on Foxnews.com and BBC.com.
I am honestly perplexed by this. Am I missing something about the importance of this news? If over 100 small bombs went off in London, Paris, Los Angeles or, more aptly, New Delhi, would it have been so under-reported?
Yet I hesitate to jump to the standby conclusion of ethnocentricity; certainly we've seen the media cover terrorist attacks in non-Western countries, albiet with less fervor. That may be the most likely hypothesis, though. Perhaps this was a cascade effect where no outlet started carrying it prominently so none of them did, in a kind of groupthink marginalization of over 100 explosions? I'm really not sure: What do you all think?
-Elliot
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Monday, June 27, 2005
The "Or Else" Doctrine
The Bush administration has been called many things: aggressive, tyrannical, heavy-handed, brash, arrogant and just about every other synonym in the thesaurus for "doesn't play well with others." There is an ideological principle which seems explain much of the administration's tendency to muscle its way through problems, and it's not what you would expect. Problematically, the administration adheres to a sole method of motivation: consequence.
Public policies aimed at motivation (motivation here defined as causing someone to take an action you desire) fall into three categories: Catering to people's respect for a norm, offering an incentive and threatening a consequence. Thus, you shouldn't go through a red light even when no other cars are around because a) you respect the rule of law, b) a perfect driving record causes your insurance rates to decline and c) there might be a cop around to give you a ticket. Each part of the trinity affects different people to different degrees, but the end result is that the majority of folks don't run a red light even when there are no other cars around.
The Bush administration overwhelmingly, and often to the exclusion of the other means, utilizes consequence -- or, in other words, coercion by threat. Two items from Monday's Washington Post are instructive examples. One states that, "The Bush administration is planning new measures that would target the U.S. assets of anyone conducting business with a handful of Iranian, North Korean and Syrian companies believed by Washington to be involved in weapons programs, U.S. officials said yesterday." The other reports, "Under pressure from the Bush administration, Israel has agreed to cancel an arms deal with China and allow U.S. officials to review its future weapons transactions in an effort to resolve tension between Jerusalem and Washington...[prior to the cancellation,] the Pentagon ended cooperation with Israel on at least one joint weapons project and ceased contact with a senior official in the Israeli Defense Ministry."
In both of these examples, the administration's strategy is decidedly oriented in the negative. It is legalistic, legislative and punitive. There is no appeal to social regulation, no effort for compromise or compensation, and no incentives for compliance. These characteristics can be seen dominating both the administration's domestic and, even more noticeably, foreign policy. It's the Or Else theory of governance.
But why is consequence-based influence necessarily bad? After all, Israel did reverse their policy. And we all know from everyday experience that threatening people -- especially with force -- often causes them to capitulate. The answer is that consequence is not necessarily bad -- but consequence as the only motivator is terrible. Pyschology tells us that when you do something because you have to, not because you want to, it breeds resentment and does not imprint the lesson. Think about when you had to clean your room as a child. The room got clean, no doubt (who wanted to be grounded?), but it caused angst and the next time your room was dirty, you were no more likely to take the initiative to clean it. On the other hand, if there is positive incentive for cleaning, your household implicitly respects the fact that everyone has certain chores to do and the threat of grounding is looming far away just in case you're feeling particularly lazy, you accomplish the same result with far less pain.
Much of this may seem a roundabout way of demonstrating the value of the "carrot and stick" idea, but it runs deeper than that. Because the administration is so convinced they are correct (a result, at least partially, of a deeply religious President who holds a black-and-white Protestant wordview) that they do not see the value in wasting a perfectly good carrot. Utilizing the other, less invasive methods of motivation would seem to be compromising, and compromising requires the belief that you need to shift your footing. Everything the administration does shouts its conviction that the benefits of taking a nuanced approach to motivation is far outweighed by the cost of yielding the moral certitude of Or Else.
What was most striking about Karl Rove's recent inflammatory comments was not his suggestion that liberals were reluctant to lash back after 9/11, but rather his suggestion that saying "we must understand the enemy" is a deplorable sentiment. No matter that history is monolithic in its assertion that understanding the enemy is in fact a necessary step in defeating him -- consequence requires no understanding. Consequence laughs in the face of understanding. Think Jean val Jean and Javier, and the fundamental dichotomy they represent: You stole a loaf of bread from a rich man to feed your family, but you broke the law, so you have to face the consequences. That story didn't end so well for Javier, if you'll recall.
Aggressive, tyrannical, heavy-handed, brash, arrogant. They aren't qualities reflective of some sinister demeanor of the men and women behind them; they are qualities reflective of the blind adherence to a doctrine of coercive consequence. That doctrine needs to change -- or else.
-Elliot
Sunday, May 22, 2005
The first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one...
From a fluffy New York Times interview w/Margaret Spellings:
NYT: ...What do assessment tests really measure, other than an ability to memorize for tests?
Secretary of Education Spellings: You hear about that kind of thing. With respect to my own children, I do think people have to have a fluency with facts. You need to know what four times four is.
Facts are only useful insofar as you have a framework for relating and understanding them -- a framework that (by Spelling's own admission) assessment tests do not survey. When you know what four times four is and you can't figure out four times five because you don't understand conceptually what multiplication is other than a table to memorize, you're guaranteed to do great in life!
Four times four has about as much to do with education as correctly naming utensils has to do with eating.
Friday, May 13, 2005
How to not build a better high school
I have a lot of respect for Jay Mathews. Mathews, a well-known education reporter who regularly writes for The Washington Post and Newsweek, has boatloads of experience and often finds interesting angles and teases out stories that would not otherwise be told. His work is also instructive in that he tends to be the voice of the mainstream, and the majority of Americans likely believe what he writes. Thus, I think it is of critical importance to deconstruct Mathews' long feature article in this week's Newsweek, "How to Build a Better High School."
Mathews' thesis is that schools need more Advanced Placement (AP) and International baccalaureate (IB) programs, because these challenging and rigorous courses are the avenue to achievement and more specifically, college. I couldn't disagree more; if special AP and IB classes are needed to establish some modicum of rigorousness in our high schools, then reform efforts must focus on what has gone terribly wrong with the standard curriculum. Moreover, high school should not be simply a halfway house to college; all students need to be armed with the critical thinking skills to have the opportunity to succeed in whatever venture they choose (college included). Catering to multiple-choice standardized tests and inherently rote-learning methodologies simply to improve the quality of a college application is a disgrace of an education. Finally, AP and IB programs enjoy a self-selecting population; poor students who have had an inadequate education since day one aren't going to be in AP classes, they are going to be dropping out of high school. The high school crisis is directly tied to the elementary school crisis, and efforts to improve our high schools must understand the direct causality.
With these introductory remarks in mind, let's take the article paragraph-by-paragraph.
How to Build a Better High School
By Jay Mathews
May 16 issue - Morgan Wilbanks was in for a series of shocks when he transferred to the Jefferson County International Baccalaureate (IB) School in Alabama at the beginning of his sophomore year. The little-known school near Birmingham, which tops NEWSWEEK's list of America's Best High Schools, is on the leading edge of a growing movement to make secondary education much more rigorous. Wilbanks, then 16, found himself taking tough courses right from the start. In his Advanced Placement (AP) European-history class, teacher Jeffrey Clayton gave startled students this initial assignment: memorize the map of Europe and be able to draw every country, along with 10 capitals, 10 rivers and 10 bodies of water. And that was just a warm-up. Clayton and other teachers told Wilbanks that he would be tackling nearly a dozen similarly demanding courses before he received his diploma. A few of the school's 325 students fled, preferring a less strenuous life at a regular public school. But Wilbanks, looking back this month a few weeks before graduation, says it was a "great experience" that prepared him well for the University of Alabamawhere he'll major in chemistry and aim for medical school.
First thoughts: When your lead example of rigorous coursework is geographical memorization, that's worrisome. Most people probably think that is rigorous, of course, but it's not; it's difficult, perhaps, but dumb. It's dumb because in ten seconds on Google I can call up a map of Europe (I call this the Google Effect). More than that, the information is unimportant -- three, five, ten years from now, Jeffrey Clayton isn't going to remember a thing about the 10 major rivers of Europe (nor does he need to -- who cares about them on their own merit?). This is a perfect example of routinized learning, which contrasts starkly to my ideal of critical thinking learning, which would teach the geography through the lens of having Jeffrey understand why the 10 major rivers of Europe are important, and how they connect to events in world history, etc.
Parents and even some educators might cringe at the idea of turning adolescence into a forced march toward college. What about time for fun, football games and memories of life beyond test scores? But even the most relaxed among them agree that something needs to be done to reform the American public high school, a 184-year-old institution that has been as resistant to change as a teenager ordered to clean his room. U.S. high schools generally score low in international comparisons. Unlike elementary and middle schools, high schools haven't made significant gains in reading achievement and have been erratic in math. Almost a third of all studentsand half of blacks and Hispanicsfail to graduate. This dismal performance has captured everyone's attention. "There is a growing consensus behind high-school reform," said U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. "Never before have so many groupsgovernors, business leaders, children's advocatesbeen so united on the need to act."
I will readily grant Mathews' premise in this paragraph; the American high school is in disrepair. However, his vague defense of its "forced march toward college" purpose is important. There is a feeling that every student needs to go to college. This is not true -- every students needs the opportunity to go to college. What this means is that primary and secondary education must impart upon all students the "toolbox" of skills such that come 12th grade they can make what decision they want and be successful at it. For many, this will involve college; when 50% of black and hispanic students aren't graduating high school, the equality of opportunity clearly does not exist. But high school should be a self-contained education in and of itself -- allowing students the democratic ability to fulfill their potential, college or no college. When high school becomes simply a factory for college students -- which means in practice a factory for successful college applications -- the entire institution loses its focus. To quote John Dewey: "Education is a process of living...not a preparation for future living."
United on the need, perhaps, but not on a course of action. The Bush administration, as part of its No Child Left Behind program, wants more accountability from high schools by requiring them to give annual tests in core subjects and show regular improvement in their results. At the National Education Summit in February, governors and business leaders focused on aligning the high-school curriculum with the demands of college and work. One of the speakers at that summit was Microsoft's Bill Gates, who called high schools "obsolete." He has made another approach, smaller schools, a major target of his philanthropy, with $734 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation going to support 1,500 new high schools with more personal attention. It's a tough sell, Gates says, in part because breaking up big schools "really messes up the football team."
No comment needed; a good reporting of current positions.
As a college degree becomes ever more essential in the workplace, much of high-school reform centers on getting as many students as possible ready for higher education. That's what the NEWSWEEK List tries to measure by ranking schools based on participation in AP and IB tests written and graded by outside experts. In these courses, students prepare for the demands of college and can earn college credit if their scores are high enough. NEWSWEEK omitted schools with strict academic admission standards that exclude average students. Although there's much debate about the value of standardized tests and AP in particular, NEWSWEEK's List is based on the conviction that no other standard works as well to measure a high school's success at challenging all students to perform at a high level. AP is the better known of the two programs and is used all over the country. IB is less common. It's a series of college-level courses and tests, similar to AP, originally designed in Geneva for the children of diplomats and international business executives preparing for baccalaureate exams but now used in a range of U.S. schools to energize students.
Here's the intriguing, though flawed, thesis paragraph. The critical idea is that "standardized tests and AP...measure a high school's success at challenging all students to perform at a high level." The connection that must be unpacked is between tests and performance; more precisely, the idea that performance on a standardized test is reflective of learning. This clearly is not the case. Standardized tests -- even the vaunted APs -- are dominated by multiple choice, a form of question which is undeniably fact-based. Just look at these review notes for the AP History exam prepared by a student at Thomas Jefferson H.S. for Sci/Tech, one of the best high schools in the nation. There is little in there that actually has to do with history. There are plenty of facts, to be sure, people and places and events and laws and court cases, but history is about trends, about conceptualizing the ebb and flow of populations and societies and seeing how they inform and indeed explain ours today. This is not learning, this is cramming bits of information into kids' heads and asking them to regurgitate it for an external reward. Even though the APs often include essay sections, they are just as formulaic. We must constantly ask ourselves: What is the goal of education? Are our evaluation methods in sync with those goals? When we speak of "performance," do we mean learning, or arbitrary outcomes?
There should be rigor in our curriculum. It should challenge students every day. But the idea that we need special classes to push the intellectual envelope -- special classes which are disproportionately taken by those with higher incomes (PDF) -- is abhorrent to the entire concept of common schooling. You want to fix American high schools? Eliminate the need for APs as anything but their intended purpose as advanced college-prep courses for the truly extraordinary student -- because standard classes should be so good that they blow the current AP classes out of the water. How well schools do on their APs is a measure of many things, such as the relative wealth of their population, how good the students' primary education was and how well kids can remember factoids for a scantron, but it does not determine rigor, at least not the authentic rigor we should be demanding of our schools.
Some new small charter schools, like the BASIS school in Tucson, Ariz., and the Pacific Collegiate School in Santa Cruz, Calif., require all students to take AP courses. The Bard Early College High School in New York City and other similar schools enroll high- school juniors in full college programs. But even with energy and creativity behind high- school reform, it won't be easy to change things. The vast majority of high-school students are following a pretty leisurely path. One of the largest studies of teenage behavior, the 400,000-student survey of college freshmen by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, reported that only 34.3 percent of incoming college freshmen in 2004 said they did six or more hours of high-school homework a week, down from 47 percent in 1987.
Do you remember what high school homework was like? Worksheets, memorization, textbooks. I wouldn't so much call high school "leisurely" as "incompetent." We teach a curriculum which has no bearing to real life and one that students cannot relate to their own experiences (do you honestly have to wonder why an inner-city poor kid doesn't see the value in memorizing the Calvin Cycle?). We treat kids with no respect, offering them no input into their own education, instead dictating their education, regimenting their days and forcing them to take a pass just to go to the bathroom. We test them, and test them, and test them some more, implicitly telling those who don't do well (probably because they come from less-than-ideal circumstances) that they cannot and will not amount to anything. The institution of high school is fundamentally out of step with the recipients of its supposed fruits, and we scratch our heads dumbfounded as to why anyone would drop out and join a gang. For many students, high school isn't leisurely; it's hell.
And not everyone applauds efforts to raise those standards, especially the NEWSWEEK List's emphasis on AP. Critics say requiring advanced courses stresses kids, dilutes quality and doesn't always make them readier for college. Patrick Welsh, an author and AP English teacher at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., favors challenging students, but contends that taking AP tests is only one tiny measure of whether a school is stretching students. "You have image-conscious public-school officials so intimidated," he says, "that they're putting as many kids as possibleand I am not talking about average kids who are willing to do the workinto AP courses so that they can get a higher ranking on your index."
Again, there is the assumption that high school exists purely to get kids to college, not to give them critical thinking skills and the opportunities that affords. Lest you think the two are equivalent, consider the importance of SATs, GPA and APs to college admissions -- three things which are not significantly chained to authentic learning.
A few private high schools have discarded AP altogether. Bruce Hammond, director of college counseling at Sandia Preparatory School in Albuquerque, N.M., has found a dozen schools, including his own, that have rejected, or are about to reject, AP in favor of designing their own courses. Many teachers agree that instead of focusing on a standardized curriculum like AP, they should concentrate on making lessons exciting, well taught and linked to students' lives. "The troubles that arise in high schools are precisely an extension of the lack of intellectual vigorforget rigorin the elementary-school curriculum and pedagogy," says Deborah Meier, founder of a small East Harlem high school that succeeded in motivating low-income students by emphasizing discussion and writing.
Amen, Ms. Meier.
But superintendents, principals and many teachers in districts that have increased their commitment to college-level courses say even with their shortcomings, AP and IB are the most effective ways to take a demanding curriculum to the widest range of students. The tests have an incorruptible high standard, since a teacher cannot dumb down the final exams, and some AP and IB courses appear to be better than the college courses they substitute for. Luther Spoehr, lecturer in education and history at Brown University, says the AP American-history course "is one of the last places where students can get a survey course that really insists that they try to understand change over substantial periods of time." Jon Reider, guidance counselor at San Francisco University High School and a former Stanford admissions officer, believes that because of smaller classes, better student motivation and more-experienced instructors, "calculus is almost always better taught in high school than in college."
It is only useful to have an "incorruptible high standard" if the standard itself is legitimate. As previously discussed, this is simply not the case. I do not for an instant deny the potential usefulness of AP classes; in concept, getting exposure to college-level work in high school is a fine idea. But yet again, the point must be hammered home: If an AP course is the last bastion of rigor (and a poor one at that), energy must be centered on repairing the standard curriculum, not circumventing it. AP courses can then be truly advanced, instead of advanced memorization.
The message is getting out ... slowly. This month, 1,173,000 students are scheduled to take 2,050,000 AP tests. That's double the number of students and triple the number of tests since 1995. Still, the new total of AP test takers is only about 15 percent of high-school juniors and seniors, and some studies suggest that may be one reason that so many students who start college find they do not have the academic muscles to survive and get a degree. University of California researchers Saul Geiser and Veronica Santelices, for instance, reported last year that 54.9 percent of California students who took the SAT in 2002 had not taken advanced classes in high school, including AP, IB or honors courses.
I would submit that the reason so many students who start college find they do not have the academic muscles to survive is because of crippling, fundamental problems with pedagogy starting from elementary school onwards. Not because the kids aren't taking enough AP courses. When 30 percent of incoming college students take at least one remedial course, we need to be looking elsewhere for the cause. This is like suggesting that inhabitants of a leaking boat should take swimming lessons.
That's a major problem because some large studies, such as an analysis by the National Center for Educational Accountability of Texas state-college data, suggest that even students who do poorly on AP tests have significantly higher college-graduation rates than those who do not take AP tests at all. In public schools where average parental income is low and minority students are numerous, enthusiasm for AP and IB has never been greater. "Only 17 percent of our parents have attended college," says Brian Rodriguez, the AP coordinator at Encinal High School in Alameda, Calif., "but AP has had a tremendous impact here, as we regularly send kids to Stanford, Brown, Dartmouth, Harvard, Berkeley and UCLA who never would have had a chance to go there even six years ago."
What does it say about a system when you need special classes on top of normal ones in order to get to next level? And of course students who take APs are going to do better in college: They are receiving a better education on average. The archetype of a student who takes an AP class is one who is not low-income and generally had a decent schooling from the start. Is there any doubt that such an AP-taking student will do better on average than those who don't take the test, the ones who are more likely to be low-income and from a poor learning environment? While Mathews' example of Encinal H.S. is inspiring, it is certainly the exception rather than the rule.
Raising expectations clearly inspires many students. Sharon Alford, a junior at the Jefferson County IB School, looked at the regular high school in Cullman, Ala., when her father, a Methodist minister, was transferred there in 2003. Cullman High had no AP courses, and though it started AP chemistry the next year, and plans on adding more courses, that was too late for her. So at 6:30 a.m. each school day, Alford climbs into the family's white Ford Explorer, with her mother at the wheel. She finishes her homework while chewing on a Pop-Tart or cereal bar during the hourlong drive to Jefferson County IB. On the ride back in the afternoon, she tries to nap. Adults who hear of her two-hour commute to and from high school are astonished. Her friends make fun of her. But, she says, her response is always the same: "I really, really wanted to go there." It's just the first stop on a journey that she hopes will someday take her as far as she wants to go.
A wonderful anecdote, but Mathews himself is admitting Sharon Alford is extra-ordinary. Raising expectations does indeed inspire many students, but think many could be inspired by fixing the education system at its core. Think about if expectations were in line with a truly democratic ideal of opportunity, rather than institutional hoops one jumps through to acquire a piece of paper with a seal. Think about if we taught kids how to think, rather than what to think. How to learn, rather than what to learn. Allowed their education to mold around their interests. The journey should be open to every child, regardless of background, race, income level or anything else. AP classes are not the answer, Mr. Mathews, and neither is leaning on standardized tests. There's only one solution, and it's as daunting as it is urgent: giving our children a real education.
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Capitalist education
The birth of the modern American education system occurred around 1900, when a combination of industrialization, immigration and urbanization caused a fundamental reshaping of the institutions of learning. The system that emerged was one built on outcomes and statistics and standards (sound familiar?). This system was founded not by John Dewey, as popularly thought, but rather by a group of individuals backed by corporate magnates such as Carnegie, J.P. Morgan and Rockefeller. It should come as no surprise then, though it is often understated, that the contemporary education system has a decidedly capitalist flavor.
Much of the malaise that currently haunts our system -- e.g. an overemphasis on standardized tests and facts, an underemphasis on critical thinking and concepts, curricula that does not relate to the real world, teacher-dominated classrooms -- stems from America's particular capitalist nature. Our society is designed, in many cases to great advantage, around the basic ideals of capitalism: individualism, determination, self-reliance, etc. There is also the pervasive idea that Outcomes Matter. Profit margins drive the economy, and a fixation with acquiring more material possessions is an undeniable facet of the national character. It is not uncommon to hear someone remark matter-of-factly, "you don't get effort points in the real world." The importance of outcomes even shows up reflectively in America's popular culture, such as sports, as elaborated in an earlier post.
The No Child Left Behind act is, as a student recently remarked in a course I'm taking, a business plan. It's designed to optimize "profits," in this case schoolkid's test scores. Schools that don't perform are reconstituted -- reassigned, if you will. You even see schools applying literal business models to the classroom.
But our school are not businesses. Their job is not to churn out money, nor workers, nor even productive citizens. Our schools' job is to arm children with the tools to achieve their fullest potential. What the individuals do with that, well, that's up to them. I happen to be of the belief that intellectual, critically-thinking people tend to be good workers, productive citizens, innovators, democratically engaged, less prone to social degeneracy and more prone to social compassion, but those are side benefits. Our schools cannot be oriented around outcomes; there is a preponderance of evidence (only the tip of which I've covered on this blog) showing unequivocally that the outcome-based standards movement and indeed outcome-dominated education over the past century does not and has not produced these thinkers.
Education is a process of living, Dewey once wrote, not a preparation for future living. Education is about giving people the democratic equality of opportunity they deserve despite background or means. Instead, we have a system that gives people a schooling, and tries to get them to choose between A, B, C and D correctly.
Our capitalist tendencies are strong. They've controlled education for over 100 years. Until we start fighting the fundamental idea that outcomes matter more than process, real reform will be impossible. Ask yourself: What should be the goal of education? Then ask yourself: Is our system designed to meet that goal?
Challenge Everything.
-EMH
Sunday, March 27, 2005
The Google Effect: Facts at our Fingertips
*This essay is grounded in the inexorable movement toward universal access to computers and the internet in American public schools, though the author hopes for the completion of that process sooner rather than later.
At every juncture in history, new innovations have caused a rethinking and often a recasting of foundational ideas. In the realm of education, technology’s deeper impact remains underappreciated. While electronics, specifically computers and the Internet, have been steadily if stumblingly integrated into modern schooling, their fundamental implications continue to go ignored. Teaching has long revolved primarily around facts, and necessarily so – yet the new millennium heralds an age where facts are easily, instantly and constantly accessible. Put simply, Google renders obsolete a great deal of contemporary pedagogy.
The concept of a search engine – a world of knowledge at the click of a button – would have been utterly foreign to the designers of the American public school. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the halcyon years for the mass schooling movement, impersonal information was available solely from books. Thus, developing a paradigm around the fact-based knowledge made perfect sense, and indeed was the only reasonable conclusion. While this model is not entirely without merit, an evolution is long overdue.
A shift away from routinized learning requires profound changes in instruction and content. The popular Core Knowledge Curriculum is predicated on the notion that students need to leave each grade with certain information, whether it be about the circulatory system or ancient
Taking away the “drill-and-kill” portion of education opens the door to project-based learning, a method which nearly every study says is better at developing students’ abilities. By allowing students to do large, mostly self-directed projects that follow their interests, they will engage the conceptual material, encounter the key information (you cannot reckon with ancient
We have only begun to explore the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Google effect: Within a decade, a Tablet PC should be as much standard issue as a four-function calculator, allowing students to quite literally have access to a thousand encyclopedias at their desk. Still, our curriculum, methodologies and assessments are formed around an early 20th century model where the only search engine was in the mind. Now that facts are at our fingertips, it’s time to truly start teaching for understanding.
-E.H.
