Twenty-first century education: The Party's Over

About 100 years ago, the United States in particular experienced the high school movement in public education. It didn't begin 100 years ago, but was still a developing phenomenon. The idea at the time was to teach students the type of managerial skillsets one needed to perform as middle management type figures in the burgeoning industrial economy.

Students needed to know some algebra, maybe trig, in addition to basic physical and chemical science. And in addition these high schools as they were established also offered classes in bible study, history, arts, and literature as a way to inculcate the student in the progressive-elite mindset. All of the arts came with a decidedly pro-American and pro-Western bent.

High schooling back then as well was to regiment the student, preparing them for military service, but mostly preparing for the regimentation of the industrial workplace. Larger high schools likewise offered the college prep route for those 10% or so of students who wanted to study law, practice medicine, or get involved in government service.

Today, I believe schooling is not really updating its curriculum in the current digital-economic revolution. Rather, schooling at high school and community colleges is going mainly online. There's a tech revolution in America's system of education rather than a curricular revolution as indicated by the earlier high school movement. Most online offerings are old, traditional liberal arts courses placed onto a technological platform like the learning management systems (LMS).

The tech change in schooling, as ever gradual as it is, will eventually become schooling as we know it. AT some point in the next 15-25 years, the brick and mortar schools will disappear if not sooner. By that time I believe the curricular change will come. Reading will not longer be required since the tech already will read to the user.

And that's my fear about the changes to education. If reading is obsolete in the next decade as is the trend (even college students expect zero reading while in college courses), then how will our high school and college grads ever think? How will they ever be able to be creative, either in terms of making art or a nifty new tech device or video game that's all the rage? And if people of the future do completely give up reading, then how will people experience and think about their various emotional states like love, anger, sadness. If people of the future are creative sans literacy, then will their creations just serve demands on commercial markets? Or will these creations be things to make life better like polio vaccines and air conditioning?

Since I've been teaching, I'm quite alarmed at all of the tech change in education. It's come to a point where I teach the tech more than I do content. From an administration's standpoint, it's nifty, new, and high tech and therefore good, beneficial, and progressive (forward thinking). But if all the LMS's and reading apps (apps that read websites and documents to students) do all the work, when will the student ever to learn to think, or have original, and creative ideas?

Submitted January 28, 2020 at 04:27PM by NotTheKevinSmith https://ift.tt/2RzfrRE