The role of content knowledge in the classroom, especially in the social studies, has been changing for many years now. As technology continues to develop, we are shown more and more definitively that the “who, what, where, and when” are far less important than the “why and how.” In my own teaching philosophy, even in 2011, I do not plan to put much of any emphasis on the names and dates side of history. Rather, I want to delve into why and how events in history happened, and what that means for the present day. Unfortunately, the Virginia Standards of Learning have not quite caught up to my futuristic way of thinking, so I will need to slip in the names and dates somewhere along the way. Hopefully, however, by 2025 the Standards of Learning will have been brought up to speed and no longer require basic factual knowledge. Instead they can focus on evaluating an understanding of trends and historical ideas.
The year 2025 is not as far in the future as it sounds. In the last fourteen years, a lot of advances have been made in technology, but life, as we live it day to day, is relatively the same. There is a phenomenon unfolding among the people of my own generation, Generation Y, and it is inevitable in the generations to come. We are not impressed by new developments in technology. Technology changes and advances so much, so often, that it has become a normal part of life. There is a general sense of, “if it can be done, they’ll do it.” The idea of learning how to use the latest gadget is half the fun of buying it.
All of this is to say that the students of 2025 will not need to learn any skills technologically. They will be even more adaptive to new technology than my generation is, and it will likely faze them even less than it does ours. What they will need from teachers, however, are the skills endangered by this growing wealth of information. They need to learn to think critically for themselves. There will be so much information available from so many reputable sources, that the temptation is going to be very great for students to just use someone else’s thought process. We as educators need to teach them how to draw their own conclusions and how to approach a situation with historical trends in mind. If we do not, we are robbing our students, and future generations, of the opportunity for creative thought, and setting them up to believe whatever they’re fed through Google.
