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Radically Rethinking Education
Why Education?
Presumably, there are a lot of things that could stand radical rethinking.
Why choose education, and not world hunger or something else more pressing?
Well, to extend a highly overused metaphor, give a man a fish and he'll
eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime, teach a
man to think and he'll figure out a way for one man to catch enough fish to feed
a small army of hungry people. My point being that if we do education well,
we will raise a generation that is better equipped to solve the world's
problems than we are.
Why Rethink Education?
With the current status quo, children spend a huge fraction of their
lives being "educated". By virtue of this fact alone, how we do that educating
has a tremendous impact on our society.
It is therefore worth rethinking simply because of the implications of
doing something so important without ever considering whether it should be
done differently, could be improved, etc. But aside from that basic truth,
there are also some rather disturbing symptoms which, presumably, could be
indications of failure in the effort to educate all children. Notable
among these is a more or less accepted standard of mathematics aversion,
a shortage of workers qualified for even entry-level positions in an
increasingly technical workplace, and the remarkable ability of mass marketing
to influence public behavior and opinions. These are not trends you would expect to find in a
society that was doing a good job of educating its people.
Why Radically?
The above-mentioned problems have not escaped the occasional (sometimes even
frequent) notice of various groups and agencies, and consequently there
are no small number of reform "efforts", "movements", and "programs" out there.
In fact, there are enough of them that there are counter-reform "efforts",
"movements", and "programs", both sides having enough sets of commercially
published textbooks, software, and other materials to consume any available
fraction of a given state's budget.
Unfortunately, few if any of these programs get very far out of the
proverbial box, and many of the ones that do are so focused on changing the
method that it is unclear what has happened to the content. And even these
"radical" ones still cling to traditional classroom models, accepting high
student to teacher ratios, rehashes of the same tired, old curricula (except
this time with an exciting, constructivist twist!), and other models that
seem simply to have not been questioned hard enough.
In something as steeped in traditional culture as education is, minor
incremental changes are much more likely to be overtaken and obliterated
by growing and changing social needs than they are to contribute to real progress. Once
we see what is possible, and how far we are from what is possible, we will quite possibly
realize that radical rethinking of our curriculum and processes is the only
hope we have of getting there.
How radically?
If you're interested in looking at some examples of where we hope the future
of education will go, look at http://fulcrum.org/about.html to see some of our current, past, and future projects,
or check out the less organized http://fulcrum.org/math_thoughts (some thoughts about mathematics education).
For more on the question of "but what's so wrong with the current system?",
find out if you're a prute.
For more information, please mail
msouth@fulcrum.org or call 919 465 9074.
Our server space is on a machine custom-built by Simon Karpen, with an
AMD K6 cpu running S.u.S.E Linux. The Shodor Education
Foundation, Inc. graciously makes this web site possible.
This is the high-graphics version!