This chapter starts with about a page and a half of text that I couldn't agree with more. It explains that the most conservative system in our world today is our education system, especially at the high school and college levels. The way high school and college are taught are to pass on the knowledge of the previous generation in order to make sure someone knows everything that was known by that generation and all of the ones that came before it. The issue with this is that it leads to memorization of facts that will help students pass meaningless tests, but no one actually knows the reasoning behind the the facts. The information that students have to learn increases every year, just like the amount of information in known to the world, but instead of altering teaching styles, most educators continue to march through the material, just hoping to get through it all before exams. Kids graduate from college having "learned the facts, but [not understanding] the ideas behind them." Increasingly in the twenty-first century, what you know is far less important than what you can do with what you know. We have to be able to create new knowledge and new ways of solving problems, but our education system has not caught up with us.
The chapter goes on in a bit of a predictable way, two case studies: one with a teacher and a class of "at risk youth," and another with a teacher and a class of highly motivated science students. Each teacher has a new style of teaching that is very out of the box, and both classes do much better than they would have if they had been taught with the "normal" teaching style seen in schools today. This book was published in 2012. Honestly, I don't really remember what was going on in the world in 2012 because I was more interested in how exciting it was to be a freshman in high school. I think that the ideas in this book may have been innovative at the time it was published, but that now it's kind of like common knowledge (or at least in schools like Brookline High School). It seems like so many people have written books about these innovative ideas about the future, and how we need to change the way we teach and raise children, that it is no longer a novelty idea. That said, all of the ideas touched upon in the book are good ones.
Thanks for reading,
Zank
Interesting. I often fail to see the innovative nature of BHS, but you're right: some changes are happening. The pace of innovation is certainly slow around here, but, in many respects, we're light years ahead of other schools...but, I fear, still behind where we need to be to keep kids engaged in learning and successful in the outside world.
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