Intentions
/You can hardly turn over an iPad without finding a website or blog or forum talking about technology in the classroom, 21st century skills and/or 1-to-1 computing in the classroom. Many of these blogs are excellent - valuable resources to aid teaching and enhance student learning. I read Teach Paperless, Free Tech For Teachers, Magistra, For The Love Of Learning and Design For Education and find them a great help to my teaching practice. A reasonable person might take a jaundiced view to a writer launching another education blog talking about technology in the classroom.
It's a good thing that this isn't one of them.
In this blog I will argue the following points:
1. The state of the nation and the circumstances of our education system demand radical, urgent change.
2. Our conventional ways of organizing knowledge are at best counterproductive and at worst dangerously limiting.
3. Unless we create and cultivate learning practices that develop critical thinking, our young people will suffer and, as a result, so will the future.
4. At the time I am writing this post, the graduating class of 2020 is enrolled in the 2nd grade; the idea that what we are doing now will prepare them for that world is indefensible.
In many circles, these points are not especially radical. I hope that the solutions I will be proposing might be seen as both radical and doable.
The purpose of education is to provide children with the means to make dignifying choices about their life and work in adulthood and to sustain our democratic, American experiment by giving the young the capacity to meaningfully participate and critique power and injustice.
I look forward to the conversation.