A vision for the future of Public Secondary Schooling is not just a shift in emphasis or a couple new laptops. The future is happening now, and it is far different from anything schools have encountered before. Public Secondary Schools should be restructured for the future, for the developing present, by a complete overhaul of education, as we understand it. Students today have no problem accessing information or using technology. They can probably be more detailed in teaching us about the founding fathers using a fifteen-minute Google search, than we can in an hour of lecture. What our students need from us is the ability to think, to go outside of themselves, to recognize their place in the world around them and seize the opportunity to participate. Our current education structure does not teach these things.
Students have information, that much is clear. Without guidance, however, they will usually do essentially nothing with that knowledge. They know how to find out how to do things or teach themselves concepts, but without the motivation, without understanding why they should do it all, they’re more likely to continue playing X-Box or talking about their social lives. “The ability to knit together information from disparate sources into a coherent whole is vital today. The amount of accumulated knowledge is reportedly doubling every two or three years (wisdom presumably accrues more slowly!). Sources of information are vase and disparate, and individuals crave coherence and integration” (Gardner, p. 46). Schools need to be set up to draw students out of their comfort zones, and challenge them to use the wealth of information at their finger tips to think critically.
However, thinking critically on their own is only going to get them so far. This “new education” needs to point students toward collaboration. “A most important insight, due to psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is the realization that creativity is never simply the achievement of a lone individual or even a small group. Rather, creativity is the occasional emergent from the interaction of three autonomous elements: [the individual, the cultural domain in which the individual is working, and the social field – those individuals and institutions that provide access to relevant educational experiences as well as opportunities to perform]” (Gardner, pp. 80-81). If they can learn to bring together their ideas, they will be able to do with the resources of the future what has driven humanity up until the last century (Gardner, p. 79-80), build off of each other toward a progress that benefits more than just a small group of self-concerned individuals.
Sythesizing and creating are all well and good on their own, but it is the self-centered mindset of our society that is most in need of address. For that reason, the new education, more than anything else, needs to teach our students to work for the good of others; that is, to be “ethically minded.” Gardner puts it quite well, saying, “Educators can smooth the road to an ethical mind by drawing attention to the other connotations of goodness. Students need to understand why they are learning what they are learning and how this knowledge can be put to constructive uses. As disciplined learners, it is our job to understand the world. But if we are to be ethical human beings, it is equally our job to use that understanding to improve the quality of life and living and to bear witness when that understanding (or misunderstanding) is being used in destructive ways. This is a reason why community service and other forms of giving are – or should be – an important part of the curriculum of any school” (Gardner, p. 142). It is a lengthy explanation, but a necessarily comprehensive one; Gardner’s point is solid. Students need to understand that what they learn is always for larger application. Not only htat, but for the larger application to a “good” beyond themselves. Our students are smart, but their intelligence and natural talent needs to be channeled toward the good of society, so as to ensure the positive progress, rather than a selfish self-destruction.
No comments:
Post a Comment