Perhaps the most difficult challenge facing our educational system is deciding what young people should be learning today. We can’t really advance too far on the redesign of the functions in our education system until we have the clearest vision on the current and best aims of the system. (Form follows Function!). It will not be as simple as determining how much emphasis to place on phonics or determining the best time to introduce certain concepts in Mathematics. While it is laudable to attempt to have all children succeed at higher levels with the existing expectations, I believe that we need to alter our thinking on what young people need to learn to a much greater degree than has recently been considered. Young people will face a future that will change by many more degrees of magnitude than our current efforts. I appreciate the stellar efforts such as the New Standards Project or the Common Core work sponsored by Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association. We can learn much from those efforts. But the world that the next generation of young people will enter is vastly different than the worlds of prior generations and requires new thinking on the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that must be acquired if today’s students are to thrive as families, if they are to contribute in tomorrow’s communities and if they are to find success and satisfaction in workforce of the future. While there have been efforts to improve the depth of what children learn and improvements in how those expectations are acquired and assessed, there has been comparatively little change in overall content of what children learn in the United States over the last 80 years. The subjects listed on high school transcripts of today’s students resemble those of those of their grandparents (and often great grandparents) while the rate of social, economic, scientific, and technological change in recent generations has been geometric in comparison.
Today more than ever, we assume that greater education success will mean greater economic success. However, the increase in artificial intelligence and other technology means that 40-50% of the jobs that exist today will be gone by the time today’s preschoolers graduate high school or college. Add to that the dramatic cultural and social changes that will escalate even more rapidly in the next two decades and one can certainly conclude that major changes in education are needed. But what should they be?
I propose two principals to guide the re-design of learning content that I will mention here and in posts to follow. I will detail more specific changes in subsequent posts.
- Streamline and combine current strands of content so that integration, interaction, and application of content can be achieved more easily. This resembles how we use what we have learned in the real world. It would also reduce the fragmentation of content that is the legacy of a century old content design proposed by academics in higher education.
- Make room for experiences that develop young people physically, socially and culturally. Future citizens need to be able to solve problems in collaboration with others. They need to appreciate their own values and the values of others. If we equip young people with the exact science skills and communication skills, they will need to be grounded in the humanties to make sense of the deluge of information and issues that they will face.
I would suggest three themes around which the needed content and experiences can be assembled for learners, from young children through high school age.
- Communication Skills – the development of speaking, listening, writing, reading, understanding, and related skills needed to be part of a family, community and the larger community of learners.
- Exact Science Skills – the use of mathematics and all sciences to understand the natural and developed world. This includes the analytic and logic skills to competently and objectively digest information flows of all kinds.
- Development Skills – an expanded commitment to human development that includes physical development and health, fine arts and understanding of various cultures, and, with the active involvement of families and their communities of support, the development of character and values needed to navigate an unknown future.
Hopefully, this very brief sketch raises more questions and considerable skepticism. It certainly needs much more detail and a stronger rationale for the themes mentioned, but I believe I must start somewhere on a much larger conversation. I welcome your reactions as I offer more details in future posts.
Unless we face the need for changes in content of what children learn, we are failing to prepare them for the future. While none of us can predict the future, we must also be prepared to discuss dramatically changing content much more often than once every 80 years.
I believe we have placed the focus on learning of content – which is important, BUT we need to think about the content being used to get to the deeper learning that is needed. Whether you use Fullan’s Deepening Learning (critical thinking, collaboration, creativity, character, citizenship) or focus on Iowa’s Universal Constructs (critical thinking, complex communication, creativity, collaboration, flexibility and adaptability, productivity and accountability), or others, these are the work/skills in our students’ future. Let’s be brave and work on integrated learning that allows our kids to use knowledge and skills from the content to master the deeper learning and deal with real problems and real solutions.