Bring Our Schools out of the 20th Century
There’s a dark little joke exchanged by educators with an opposing trace: Rip Van Winkle awakens in the 21 century after a hundred-year sleep and is, of course, utterly bewildered by what he sees. Men and women dash about, talking to small metal devices attached to their ears. Young people sit at home on sofas, moving miniature athletes around on electronic screens. Older folk defy death and disability with devices in their chests and with hips made of metal and plastic. Airports, hospitals, shopping walls—every place Rip goes just baffles him. But when he finally walks into a schoolroom, the old man knows exactly where he is. "This is a school," he declares. "We used to have these back in 1906. Only now the blackboards are green."
American schools aren’t exactly frozen in time, but considering the pace of change in other areas of life, our public schools tend to feel like throwbacks. Kids spend much of the day as their grandparents once did. sitting in rows, listening to teachers’ lecture, scribbling notes by hand, reading from textbooks that are out of date by the time they are printed. A yawning gap separates the world inside the schoolhouse from the world outside.
For the past five years, the national conversation on education has focused on reading scores, math tests and closing the "achievement gap" between social classes. This is not a story about that conversation. This is a story about the big public conversation the nation is not having about education, the one that will ultimately determine not merely whether some fraction of our children get "left behind" but also whether an entire generation of kids will fail to make the grade in the global economy because they can’t think their way through abstract problems, work in teams, distinguish good information from bad or speak a language other than English.
Right now we’re aiming too low. Competency in reading and math is just the minimum. Scientific and technical skills are, likewise, utterly necessary but insufficient. Today’s economy demands not only a high-level competence in the traditional academic disciplines but also what might be called 21st century skills. Here’s what they are:
Knowing more about the world.
Thinking outside the box.
Becoming smarter about new sources of information.
Developing good people skills.
Real Knowledge in the Google Era
Learn the names of all the rivers in South America. That was the assignment given to Deborah Stipek’s daughter Meredith in school, and her mom, who’s dean of the Stanford University School of Education, was not impressed. "That’s silly," Stipek told her daughter. "Tell your teacher that if you need to know anything besides the Amazon, you can look it up on Google." Any number of old-school assignment—memorizing the battles of the Civil War or the periodic table of the elements—now seem faintly absurd. That kind of information, which is poorly retained unless you routinely use it, is available at a keystroke. Still, few would argue that an American child shouldn’t learn the causes of the Civil War or understand how the periodic table reflects the atomic structure and properties of the elements. As school critic E. D. Hirsch Jr. points out in his book, The Knowledge Deficit, kids need a substantial fund of information just to make sense of reading materials beyond the grade-school level. Without ing the fundamental building blocks of math, science or history, complex concepts are impossible.
Many ysts believe that to achieve the right balance between such core knowledge and what educators call "portable skills"—critical thinking, connections between ideas and knowing how to keep on learning—the US curriculum needs to become more like that of Singapore, Belgium and Sweden, whose students outperform American students on math and science tests. Classes in these countries dwell on key concepts that are taught in depth and in careful sequence, as opposed to a succession of forgettable details so often served in U.S. classrooms. Textbooks and tests support this approach. "Countries from Germany to Singapore have extremely small textbooks that focus on the most powerful and generative ideas," says Roy Pea, co-director of the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning. These might be the key rules in math," the laws in science or the relationship between supply and demand in economics. America’s thick textbooks, by contrast, tend to go through a mind-numbing stream of topics and subtopics in an attempt to address a vast range of educational standards.
Depth over breadth and the ability to leap across disciplines are exactly what teachers aim for at the Henry Ford Academy, a public school in Dearborn, Michigan. Last fall, 10th-graders in Charles Dershimer’s science class began a project that combines concepts from earth science, chemistry, business and design. After .reading about Nike’s effort to develop a more environmentally friendly sneakers, students had to choose a consumer product, yze and explain its environmental impact and then develop a plan for reengineering it to reduce pollution costs without sacrificing its commercial appeal. Says Dershimers. "It’s a challenge for them and for me."
A New Kind of Literacy
The Juniors in Bill Stroud’s class are bound by a documentary called Loose Change playing on a small TV screen at the Baccalaureate School for Global Education, in Astoria, N. Y. The film uses 9/11 films and interviews with building engineers and Twin Towers survivors to make an oddly compelling case that interior explosions unrelated to the impact of the airplanes brought down the World Trade Center on that fateful day. Afterward, the students—an ethnic mix of New Yorkers with their own 9/11 memories—dive into a discussion about the nature of truth.
Throughout the year, the class will examine news reports, websites, history books, blogs, even pop songs. The goal is to teach kids to be sharp consumers of information and to research, form and defend their own views, says Str0ud, who is the founder and principal of the four-year-old public school.
Classes like these, which teach key aspects of information literacy, remain rare in public education, but more and mort universities and employers say they are needed as the world grows ever more flooded with information of variable quality. Last year, in response to demand from colleges, the Educational Testing Service unveiled a new, computer-based exam designed to measure information-and-communication-technology literacy. A study of the test with 6 200 high school seniors and college freshmen found that only half could correctly judge the objectivity of a website. "Kids tend to go to Google and cut and paste a research report together," says Terry Egan, who let the team that developed the new test. "We kind of assumed this generation was so comfortable with technology that they know how to use it for research and deeper thinking," says Egan. "But if they’re not taught these skills, they don’t necessarily pick them up."
A Dose of Reality
Teachers need not fear that they will be made outdated. They will, however, feel increasing pressure to bring their methods—along with the curriculum—in line with the way the modern world works. That means putting a greater emphasis on teaching kids to collaborate and solve problems in small groups and apply what they’ve learned in the real world. Besides, research shows that kids learn better in that way than with the old chalk-and-talk approach.
At sub Farmington High School in Michigan, the engineering-technology department functions like an engineering firm, with teachers as project managers, a Ford Motor Co. engineer as a consultant and students working in teams. The principles of physics, chemistry and engineering are taught through activities that fill the hallways with the noise of nailing, sawing and chattering. The result: the kids learn to apply academic principles to the real world, think strategically and solve problems.
Such lessons also teach students to show respect for others as well as to be punctual, responsible and work well in teams. Those skills were badly missing in recently hired high school graduates, according to a survey of over 400 human-resource professionals conducted by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. "Kids don’t know how to shake your hand at graduation," says Rudolph Crew, superintendent of the Miami-Dade school system. Deportment(举止风度), he notes, used to be on the report card. Some of the nation’s more forward-thinking schools are bringing it back. It’s one part of 21st century education that sleepy old Rip would recognize.
Deborah Stipek thought her daughter’s assignment of learning the names of all the rivers in South America ______ .