Our story about education has gone basically unrevised for 150 years. Time’s up. Location 53
This new story requires us to ask the difficult yet crucial question: why school? I’m not suggesting we consider scrapping school altogether. I’m suggesting that this moment requires us to think deeply about why we need school. Or to ask, more specifically, what’s the value of school now that opportunities for learning without it are exploding all around us? There is an important, compelling answer to that question. It is most definitely not the same one we’ve been giving for the last 150 years. Location 60
Sooner or later, that upheaval will force us to tackle the “why school?” question head-on. Every one of us has a stake in the answer. It’s not only parents of school-age kids, or the teachers in their classrooms, who need to grapple with this. Schools play an important role in our communities, and not just because they help determine property values. They are part of the fabric of who we are. Moreover, they remain the places where every one of our kids can go (in theory, at least) to get equal access to an education. Between that and the ancillary child care functions they provide, schools as places where children come together to learn will not be going away anytime soon. But what happens inside of schools is going to change, now that the Web connects us the way it does. It has to. Location 77
More than two billion people are connected online, reaching five billion by 2020. There are more than 600,000 iPhone apps. A trillion webpages. Eight years’ worth of YouTube videos uploaded every day. Four million Wikipedia articles, in English alone. And so on. While many adults may not be swimming in this huge and quickly expanding sea of digital content and connections, most of our children are. According to the latest Pew Internet survey, 95 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds in the U.S. go online on a regular basis. Ninety-five percent! Seventy-six percent use social networks, and 77 percent have cell phones. (Kindle Locations 89-93).
It means, as Canadian education researcher Stephen Downes says, that “we have to stop thinking of an education as something that is delivered to us and instead see it as something we create for ourselves.” That’s how Tucker sees it — when he’s not in school, at least. I look at how he’s learned Minecraft and totally understand why school is becoming more of a struggle. First, he has a passion for learning the game. That’s crucial. He creates his own, constantly updated curriculum based on what he knows and needs to know next. He cobbles together his own multimedia texts using YouTube videos. He finds his own teachers, both local (his friends who tutor him via ooVoo) and global (the other players he interacts with on the Massively Minecraft server, hosted in Australia). (Kindle Locations 129-135)
A recent IBM survey of CEOs asked them to name the most crucial factor for future success, and their answers had nothing to do with state assessments, SAT scores, or even Advanced Placement tests. Instead, they cited creativity and “managing the growing complexity of the world.” I can’t find one state or local test currently in use that captures our kids’ mastery in those two areas. You? (Kindle Locations 144-146).
A popular quote paraphrased from psychologist Herbert Gerjuoy predicts that “the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write. The illiterate will be those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” Consider this: Do you have a physician who isn’t engaged in unlearning and relearning on a regular basis? If so, it might be time to think about getting a new physician. According to the latest research, about 50 percent of all medical knowledge becomes obsolete in five years. So, if your doctor is working from a 2007 knowledge base, you’ve got a one-in-two shot at getting the right treatment. Not good odds. Why should this be any different for educators? (Kindle Locations 366-371).
“We have to stop delivering the curriculum to kids. We have to start discovering it with them.” Larry Rosenstock is the founder of High Tech High in San Diego, (Kindle Location 415).
You get the idea. At a time when content and teachers were scarce, it made sense to want our kids to be “learned.” If all they had was limited access to a relatively small stockpile of knowledge and information, we’d need to cram all that stuff in, just in case they might need it one day. And we’d better have adults who could “teach” that material and test for its mastery. But we increasingly have access. And the knowledge we have access to is constantly changing and being updated, unlearned, and relearned. As Eric Hoffer suggests, much of what we “learn” in school quickly becomes irrelevant or outdated (if it’s not irrelevant or outdated to begin with). Tony Wagner recently said, “ There’s no competitive advantage today in knowing more than the person next to you. The world doesn’t care what you know. What the world cares about is what you can do with what you know.” (Kindle Locations 463-469)
From Will Richardson’s website and WSJ article
A local Internet school sounds like a contradiction in terms: the Internet lets you discard geography and forget “local.” But the idea is simple. A one-classroom school, with 20 or so children of all ages between 6th and 12th grade, each sitting at a computer and wearing headsets. They all come from nearby. A one-room Internet school might serve a few blocks in a suburb, or a single urban apartment building.
In front sits any reliable adult whom the neighbors vouch for—often, no doubt, some student’s father or mother, taking his turn. He leads the Pledge of Allegiance, announces regular short recesses to clear everyone’s head, proclaims lunchtime. He hands out batteries and Band-Aids and sends sick children home or to a doctor. He reloads the printers and futzes with malfunctioning scanners, no doubt making any problem worse. But these machines are cheap, and each classroom can deploy several.
Each child does a whole curriculum’s worth of learning online, at the computer. Most of the time he follows canned courses on-screen. But for an hour every day, he deals directly, one-to-one over phone or videophone with a tutor. Ideally there’s a teaching assistant on an open phone line throughout the day, each assistant dealing with a few dozen students. In early years, parents will need to help here too. And each child needs a mentor who advises parents on courses and keeps track of the student’s progress. The wealthy conservative foundation, think tank or consortium that spends liberally to get this idea off the ground will probably provide mentors, in early years, from its own staff.
The online courses—some exist already but not enough—are produced by teaching maestros. As these new schools gather momentum, they will make use, as tutors or assistants, of the huge number of people who are willing and able to help children in some topic for a few hours a week but can’t or won’t teach full time: college and graduate students and retirees, lawyers, accountants, housewives, professors.
Parents must be far more involved in children’s educations than most are today. They must choose—with online help and advice from mentors and friends—a set of courses for each child every year. They must talk to their children about school every day, to make sure things are moving forward. They might need to take turns supervising the class. A few will have taken the hugely time-consuming step of organizing the school to begin with.
Obviously these schools aren’t for everyone. But for many thousands of students, they are likely to work well—and better every year, as the pool of courseware, tutors and assistants grows.