I’ve been reading the article pictured below (hat-tip to George Couros for tweeting it out) and it’s really been causing me to reflect quite a bit. When you read the headline, as an educator, you can’t help but feel indicted. After all, you pour your blood, sweat, and tears into your profession day in and day out in the name of helping young people maximize their own potential. The headline is slightly misleading though. It’s not an indictment of those in the profession, it’s a piece that really challenges the notions of what school should be and a little bit of an indictment on how the system is implemented. I would encourage any and everyone to read this article, I’ve linked to it HERE!! It’s a challenging read. The first point that really jumped out at me, though not first in the article, is the idea that school is an “unsuitable learning environment for many careers.” Unsuitable is a little too harsh for my tastes but I understand the idea. When I first read that subtitle I instantly had flashbacks to my own middle school years. I remember taking a class on typing.
I remember being told that typing was a skill that would make or break a grown-ups professional life during my lifetime. The fastest, most accurate typer would win the day. I’ve never forgotten the moment I was told that. I reflect on it often as I currently sit here and orally dictate everything to my computer for this blog post. The whole reason that typing story stuck with me is that I was being taught a skill of the world right now with the reason why being at least 5-10 years off in my future. This is one area that schools and educators must get away from. We have to stop answering the “why do I have to learn this” question with answers like such as “so you can grow up to be successful” Educators don’t need to turn into Nostradamus. It’s not about predicting the future at all. It is about designing learning experiences that generate the same number of questions as answers. To tell someone that they need to learn something so that they can become productive down the road based on the world of today will stagnate progress, limit creativity, and keep us stuck right where we are. Remember, we don’t even know how the world we are preparing them for will even look. The article advocates apprenticeships as a model for replacing traditional college. I think there is great merit here too for K-12 educators too, particularly with regard to lesson design. One of the questions I had for myself after reading was “how can we design learning experiences with an apprentice-like format?” When you consider the characteristics of an apprenticeship, you can see the value and power in this type of learning. It also makes us really think about things like can you read critically outside of traditional literary works? Could a skill like coding be considered critical writing or even the equivalent of learning a foreign language? The other point that really stood out to me was “grades distort our perception of reality.” The opening sentence of you can get straight A’s in school but nobody gets straight A’s in life seems highly erroneous to me. First of all, every school I am aware of calculates grades based on the system of averages. “Major” grades typically carry a little more weight than “daily” grades but overall it’s a system of averages. You can do very well on the vast majority of grades, fail one and still easily make an “A” on a report card. Several other erroneous arguments follow including citing how many times Colonel Sanders got his famous chicken recipe turned down and the number of businesses a successful entrepreneur has had fail. If anything, this is not an argument as to how school trains us to fail in life, but rather a great justification for how schools of the 21st century continually ask students to come in and make corrections or improvements to work that didn’t quite make it the first time around. Schools certainly don’t train us to fail. That would be counterintuitive. I don’t know any educator that got into this industry due to their love of failure. Do schools need to improve? Yes, everyone in every industry does or they will become obsolete.
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