First, I am going to be talking about giving the children power to control their own learning process. And if they're controlling their own learning process, this is in radical contradiction with the idea of the set curriculum, the linear order and the arrangement of learning by age-segregated grades. I am also going to use the term child power to refer to another aspect, and that is to the political power of children as a major force in producing educational change.
I opened by referring to what looked like a pessimistic sense of what is happening in educational policy-making. I anticipate megachange in the way children learn. When we look around us we see not only an absence of megachange, we see a number of ways in which policy seems to be designed to prevent the megachange.
The attitude expressed in the Research Machines ad that I quoted shows this in a general way. You see it in many specific aspects of current educational discussion. I'll mention two. In our country, as I believe in yours, there has recently been a mounting pressure for standardized tests to be applied to students. The reason given for wanting these tests is couched in terms like we need to impose standards; education is deteriorating; children are emerging from school illiterate, ignorant, bereft of moral values. And in many ways people look around and see that the school system, at least for many members of society, seems not to be working. What to do about this?
I think what we do about it depends on your answer to the question about whether the problem is that school is changing too much or school is changing too little. I think we live in a society in which a rapid and accelerating change in social life and the economy and the kind of work that people do is transforming the need for knowledge. And I think this is pretty widely accepted that knowledge in the twenty-first century is going to be very different. The need for knowledge is going to be very different. You can capture this by noting that even today a very substantial proportion of people are engaged in work in jobs that did not exist when they were born, and that number is increasing.
So the model that says learn while you're at school, while you're young, the skills that you will apply during your lifetime is no longer tenable. The skills that you can learn when you're at school will not be applicable. They will be obsolete by the time you get into the workplace and need them, except for one skill. The one really competitive skill is the skill of being able to learn. It is the skill of being able not to give the right answer to questions about what you were taught in school, but to make the right response to situations that are outside the scope of what you were taught in school. We need to produce people who know how to act when they're faced with situations for which they were not specifically prepared.
Cached
"First, I am going to be talking about giving the children power to control their own learning process. And if they're controlling their own learning process, this is in radical contradiction with the idea of the set curriculum, the linear order and the arrangement of learning by age-segregated grades. I am also going to use the term child power to refer to another aspect, and that is to the political power of children as a major force in producing educational change.