Schools (and Richard Scary books) for the 21st century
CNN.com this morning has a preview of an article appearing this week in Time magazine: How to bring schools into 21st century. The thesis:
Right now we’re aiming too low. Competency in reading and math — the focus of so much No Child Left Behind testing — is the meager minimum. Scientific and technical skills are, likewise, utterly necessary but insufficient. Today’s economy demands not only a high-level competence in the traditional academic disciplines but also what might be called 21st century skills.
One skill the article mentions, labeled with the cliché “thinking outside the box,” points to the need for students to develop the ability to think and work across disciplines. Or, “seeing patterns where other people see only chaos,” as stated by one of the experts cited by Time.
My take is that as a society we still raise and educate our kids to prepare them for a 20th century job market- rigidly defined professions, with life-long career paths clearly delineated. Discussions of improvements to our education system need to acknowledge this dynamic, and remember that we don’t know what the jobs will be in our kids’ futures.
For a great commentary on the need to grasp the realities of today’s (and tomorrow’s) job market, check out this podcast from Merlin Mann (warning: contains some coarse language, not suitable for kids) over at the productivity site 43Folders. To make his point, Merlin asks us to remember back to the Richard Scary books of our past such as “What Do People Do All Day.” GenX’ers like me spent hours with them, pouring over their pages of anthropomorphic animals and their professions (remember the cat who was the police chief?), while you boomers may remember turning their pages for your little ones.
What would the Richard Scary books of today feature? Lawyers, doctors and fire fighters would still be there, but what about “knowledge workers?” Which animal would play the venture capital investment analyst, sitting at her desk typing away at her computer, sending emails to people across the planet and monitoring weblogs for news on a given industry segment? What about the software technical writer, who blends his knowledge of computer application programming with writing skills learned while a journalism student, and who also spends his day typing away at a computer?
If we insist on maintaining our “Richard Scary” view of the world as we strive to better our education system, we may well meet the all-coveted “adequate yearly progress” under No Child Left Behind. But we will have failed to prepare them for the jobs of tomorrow.
December 14th, 2006 at 7:23 pm
Hi David…it’s Tracy’s Mom…congratulations and it’s good to see that you are working so hard for the people of Nevada. This concern for the schools is right on…NCLB has dissected a dimension right out of our children - the creative and higher level thinker parts of their brain and experience. NCLB
is demanding districts to “highly qualify” teachers who might do a good job of teaching children how to read test questions and narrow down the choices of answers. We sure see the results of that recently, with our seniors in high school. Electives, labs, projects are going, going, gone. It almost seems that the elevators can’t get to the top - sad. Maybe that’s why there are so many boomerang kids.