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i.e. I remember it only until I've finished the test) transforms to internalized (and useful) memorization only when the information is RELEVANT to my life! That's why kids can remember Pokemon points and Blues Clues songs yet struggle with their times tables or history dates! Yes, we need to agree on what content is foundational - AND we need to learn to teach it to (or learn it with) our children in ways that are meaningful to THEM, not just to us!

I used to teach in an urban alternative school where many of my students were gang members.  These students were not successful in school though they did get an education.  I am sorry to say that the majority of their education did not come from school teachers nor was it an education sanctioned by the school district.  I also through the years have been involved in many online communities of interest.  Learning occurs there all the time.  Not all members of these communities were successful in school but within these communities were successful in becoming educated about certain things.  There is high quality education occurring in many places that we don't consider school:  boy and girl scouts, workplaces, church youth groups, 4H, Little League, gangs, internet chat rooms, YouTube, blogs, libraries, family interaction, etc.  In fact, the most relevant learnin for most people happens in one of hese other places of education and not in schools. 

If the goal for schools is to become the most relevant and useful place for education we need to harness the rhetorical draw of the gang, the personal significance of the family, the intrinsic nature of clubs and organizations like the Scouts and 4H, the relevance and applicability of the work place, and the openness of social media.  The only way to do this is to personalize the learning experience for each student.  This means that content will be as different from person to person as is the approach to teaching that content.

Students who behave, and learn, most like their teachers do the best in classrooms. Teachers see this reflection as proof of their own competence - "The best students are just like me." And thus all who are "different" in any way - race, class, ability, temperament, preferences - are left out of the success story.

Mobile phones, computers everywhere, hypertext, social networking, collaborative cognition (from Wikipedia on up), Google, text-messaging, Twitter, audiobooks, digital texts, text-to-speech, speech recognition, flexible formatting - these are not "add ons" to the world of education, they are the world of education. This is how humans in this century talk, read, communicate, learn. And learning to use these technologies effectively, efficiently, and intelligently must be at the heart of our educational strategies. These technologies do something else - by creating a flexibility and set of choices unprecedented in human communication - they "enable" a vast part of the population which earlier media forms disabled.

Back in Socrates' time it was all about the information you could remember. With this system very, very few could become "educated." In the ‘Gutenberg era' it was all about how many books you could read and how fast you could decode alphabetical text; this let a few more reach that ‘educated' status - about 35% if you trust all those standardized tests to measure "proficiency." But now it is all about how you learn to find information, how you build your professional and personal networks, how you learn, how to learn - because learning must be continuous. None of this eliminates the need for a base of knowledge - the ability to search, to ask questions, requires a knowledge base, but it dramatically alters both how that knowledge base is developed, and what you need to do with it. This paradigm opens up the ranks of the "educated" in ways inconceivable previously.

We must abandon the one-way classroom communication system, be it the lecture or use of the "clicker," and teach with conversation and through modeling learning itself. We must lose the idea that "attention" means students staring at a teacher, or that "attendance" means being in the room, and understand all the differing ways humans learn best. We must stop separating subjects rigidly and adopt the contemporary notion of following knowledge where it leads us.

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