Group items tagged

The report says every aspect of the U.S. education system--from pre-kindergarten to postsecondary and adult education, including after-school and teacher preparation programs--"must be aligned to prepare citizens with the 21st-century skills they need to compete." It encourages U.S. schools to do a better job of teaching and measuring advanced, 21st-century skills beyond simply assessing science, reading, and math. In addition, it outlines several actions at the national, state, and local levels that U.S. leaders must undertake to improve economic results and better prepare citizens to participate in the 21st-century economy. "All Americans, not just an elite few, need 21st-century skills that will increase their marketability, employability, and readiness for citizenship," the report says.  These skills include critical thinking and judgment, complex problem solving, creative thinking, and communication and collaboration.

I heard a vice-president of IBM tell an audience of people assembled to redesign the process of teacher certification that in his opinion this country became computer-literate by self-teaching, not through any action of schools. He said 45 million people were comfortable with computers who had learned through dozens of non-systematic strategies, none of them very formal; if schools had pre-empted the right to teach computer use we would be in a horrible mess right now instead of leading the world in this literacy.

In modern society, said Dewey, people would be defined by their associations--not by their own individual accomplishments. It such a world people who read too well or too early are dangerous because they become privately empowered, they know too much, and know how to find out what they don't know by themselves, without consulting experts

Dewey said the great mistake of traditional pedagogy was to make reading and writing constitute the bulk of early schoolwork.