Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Not that this is a truly radical idea, Einstein understood this and stated ‘Education is not the learning of facts, it’s rather the training of a mind to think’.

If our goal is to teach students to swim we would not do so by pushing them into the sea, but we would also not expect them to learn to swim without ever getting into the water.

go back to trying to understand how we may best support our students achieve their potential and prepare for a world beyond our classrooms

You hear two opinions from experts on the topic of what happens when kids are perpetually exposed to technology. One: Constant multitasking makes teens work harder, reduces their focus, and screws up their sleep. Two: Using technology as a youth helps students adapt to a changing world in a way that will benefit them when they eventually have to live and work in it. Either of these might be true. More likely, they both are. But it is certainly the case that these kids are different—fundamentally and permanently different—from previous generations in ways that are sometimes surreal, as if you'd walked into a room where everyone is eating with his feet.

It's as if Beatlemania junkies in 1966 had had the ability to demand "Rain" be given as much radio time as "Paperback Writer," and John Lennon thought to tell everyone what a good idea that was. The fan–celebrity relationship has been so radically transformed that even sending reams of obsessive fan mail seems impersonal.

The teens' brains move just as quickly as teenage brains have always moved, constructing real human personalities, managing them, reaching out to meet others who might feel the same way or want the same things. Only, and here's the part that starts to seem very strange—they do all this virtually. Sitting next to friends, staring at screens, waiting for the return on investment. Everyone so together that they're actually all apart.

So perhaps the answer is to prepare our students for a world that will require them to learn continuously, to find and solve problems, to act with empathy so as to bring hope and equity to many and strive to live a life full of a passionate pursuit of beauty and wonderment, to live and learn today as da Vinci might have done.

We cannot continue on the current path of education if we want to prepare our children for their future. Our children will not live in the world that we grew up in. We need to prepare them to be flexible, critical thinking, problem solvers.

The answer is that we are not only living in the most peaceful time in history, but also the best reported time in history.