Learning about Today for Tomorrow (Andrew Pass)
Science and technology knowledge doubles every four years, if not faster. This means that any facts a freshman in college learns has a high chance of becoming obsolete by the time they graduate. Who can guess what the world will like look when today’s kindergarteners enter the work force? Will anybody work in an office setting? Will people still carry cash? Will marketers still be able to purchase commercials or even website ads?
Nobody can answer these questions or hundreds more like them. Yet, many educators see their job as preparing children for the future. How can we possibly prepare students for an unknown future?
The answer is simple: We can’t. Nor should we even try to do so. Instead, we should help our students develop the capacity to understand and influence the world in which they live. Our students don’t yet live in the world of the future. They live in today’s world. Therefore, as educators we must help our students think about today. If we do this, they’ll also develop the capacity to succeed tomorrow.
So, how should educators help students think about today?
Using and Developing Disciplinary Knowledge
Our students must learn to consider the fundamental questions of various academic disciplines through a lens of today. For example, when studying math, questions and problems should relate to current events. Sports games provide wonderful venues through which to consider arithmetic. Local, and well known national and international construction efforts provide venues through which to grapple with higher level math.
Consider the science questions that students can grappled with when they consider current events. How and why does today technology work? How can we advance today’s technological devices to develop more useful tools? What is it about our physical world that enables technology to work as it does? Consider the biological and ethical questions that cloning raises.
Great literature should not be ignored. But great literature is great because it contains eternal messages. Students should contemplate the ways in which literary ideas connect to their own lives and the world in which they live.
Regardless of the lesson at hand, educators must encourage their students to consider the importance of what they are learning. We should ask students how they can use what they are learning. How might this knowledge benefit them in the future?
Textbooks
Traditional textbooks don’t work anymore. They become obsolete before they reach the classroom. Fortunately, a curriculum focused on current events has a ready made textbook, the newspaper. Local, regional, national and even international newspapers contain important ideas, related to every sphere of life and society. These are the ideas of our time.
Sure, newspapers are not ideal textbooks. However, every competent teacher knows that they can’t completely rely on the textbook. Teachers must help students interact with the information contained in the text. We need to ask questions that require students to consider the text and encourage them to ask their own questions. We need to develop lessons that enable our students to consider the fundamental ideas of various disciplines through a lens of today.
When students learn to think knowledgeably and critically about today’s world they will develop the ability to approach tomorrow and the preparation of tomorrow with knowledge, insight and curiosity. As educators, these are the greatest gifts that we can offer our students.
Andrew Pass is an educational consultant, based in West Bloomfield, MI. He is the publisher of a Current Events Living-Textbook located at http://www.pass-ed.com/Living-Textbook.html You can contact him at ap at pass-ed dot com.
Comments
Join the conversation
“Traditional textbooks don’t work anymore. They become obsolete before they reach the classroom.”
This is an overstatement, and not true. Math textbooks that are “traditional” (i.e., not “reform-based” “standards-based” “brain-based” “research-based” or any of the other trendy descriptors used by eduationists who proliferate the blog bandwiths these days) are, like many things, good and bad. There are traditional math textbooks that do a great job, and those that don’t. If you happened to have a traditional math book that didn’t do the job, please don’t lump all traditional math texts in with that one. Take a look at the Singapore Math books which one can order via the internet. They follow a sequential order of topics and information is presented clearly, with good problems, and techniques as to how to solve such problems. That such problems may not meet the criteria of “real-world” (sports, politics, science) is a red-herring. The skills needed to solve the rather complex multi-step problems in Singapore’s texts are the very skills that must be mastered by students if they are to solve problems in science and engineering. They generalize to more complex problems. To say that students need “real world” connections in order for math to make sense, or to be interesting is the canard du jour generally given by those who don’t understand what mathematics is about or how it is used.
History textbooks obsolete? How so. Does the past change? Maybe what we have learned about the past does, but the basic facts of US and world history have remained the same for some time. Science textbooks obsolete? Again, there are general principles that students must master that have not been altered.
The essay above illustrates the point that E.D. Hirsch makes in “The Schools we Need and Why We Don’t Have Them”, in which educationists dismiss factual knowledge as “mere facts”. Because the world is a changing place, they argue, students must learn how to learn so they know how to find out what they need to know in this changing world. This argument is specious. Unfortunately it is taught in education schools and is believed by many who are in charge of how schools are run and what goes into their curricula.