Will

After five years here at Tumblr, I'm moving my blog once again. Seems I tend to make these moves on my big blogversaries...it's 15 years this month that I started writing online, and in that time, I've posted 3,658 posts at the Blogger, WordPress, and Tumblr sites that I've had along the way. How do I know the exact number? Because this week I'll be transferring over to a new WordPress site that will bring together all of the posts from those blogs in one place. Pretty cool, for me at least, to have all those tidbits of thinking and learning at one searchable domain that I can control, hopefully, forever.

This transfer is not without it's complications, however, and try as I might (and with the help of some knowledgable friends) I've been unable to find a relatively easy way of getting the comments from these various sites to port over into the new one. I was able to get 16,000+ comments from my Weblogg-ed.com WordPress site, and to be honest, they are part of the heyday of my blogging and have great meaning to me. Unfortunately, my Disqus comments on my Tumblr site may be lost, which saddens me. (Still working on this if anyone has ideas...) But at this point, it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make in order to get my house in order. And of course, lots of links from around the web will also break (I think.) Such is Web life, I guess.

Whenever I think about the way most schools are structured today, I always come back to the same question: Do we do the things we do because they’re better for kids or because they are easier for us? For instance: separating kids by age in school. Is that something we do because kids learn better that way? Or do we do it because it’s just an easier way organizing our work? I think all of us know the answer to that. And there are quite a few other comparisons like those that are worth thinking about:

Do kids learn better when we separate out the content into different subjects, or is it just easier for us?

Do kids learn better when we have every one of them pretty much go through the same curriculum in the same way, or is it just easier for us?

Do kids learn better when we have them turn off all of their technology in school, or is it just easier for us?

Do kids learn better when we we assess them all the same way, or is it just easier for us?

Do kids learn better when we decide what they should learn and how they should learn it, or is it just easier for us?

Do kids learn better in 50 or 90 minute blocks, or is it just easier for us?

To be sure, these are not new questions, nor are they unique to my thinking. Many of us in the edu online community have been writing about these things for years. As with much of the “we need to change schools” conversation, it’s another part of the repeatedly articulated argument that appeals to common sense but hasn’t much moved the needle when it comes do doing things any differently in schools.

So why bring it up yet again? Well, for me at least, two words: Russell Ackoff.

A couple of weeks ago, thanks to some serendipitous surfing online, I came across this 10-minute snip of an interview with Ackoff, a pioneer in the field of systems thinking who was a professor at the Wharton School prior to his death in 2009. I was staggered a bit after watching it because he was able to articulate something I have been feeling for a while now but had been unable to find the words for:

“Peter Drucker said ‘There’s a difference between doing things right and doing the right thing.’ Doing the right thing is wisdom, and effectiveness. Doing things right is efficiency. The curious thing is the righter you do the wrong thing the wronger you become. If you’re doing the wrong thing and you make a mistake and correct it you become wronger. So it’s better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right. Almost every major social problem that confronts us today is a consequence of trying to do the wrong things righter.”

Here’s the video.

I’ve been thinking about Ackoff pretty much consistently since I watched it, and the application of that lens to our current practice in schools is profound. Can there be a more apt example of trying to “do the wrong thing right” than in schools? Look again at that list above. Are we in search of efficiency, or effectiveness?

I think the answer is obvious. If you watch the clip, you’ll hear Ackoff dive into the education issue head on. He says, and I agree, that the system is not about learning (effectiveness). It’s about teaching (efficiency). And believe me, I understand why we have that focus. Given our devotion to an overstuffed curriculum, standardized tests, “college and career readiness” and more, about the only way we can see our students navigating the school experience is to “teach” it, to organize it, pace it, and assess it in some way that allows us to confer the adjective “educated” to each student. This despite the obvious truth that the vast majority of what we “learn” in school is quickly forgotten, and the truest “education” for our life’s work comes on the job, not in school.

Sadly, “doing the right thing” for our kids in schools is difficult. In education, our structures, our histories, our nostalgia for trying to do the “wrong thing right” runs deep. Regardless of how we got here (and the story is complex,) we are profoundly wedded to what now constitutes this “education system” that dominates our learning world. The roles and expectations of students and teachers and administrators and parents are so clearly reinforced by our own experience, our cultural representations, and by those who have millions of dollars invested in the status quo that any serious suggestion that we might be doing the “wrong thing” is simply layered over by a new initiative, a new technology, a new curriculum, or a new success story to avoid having to grapple with the more fundamental question.

But that will not work for much longer. The contexts for learning and education have changed. As Ackoff says in his book Turning Learning Right Side Up:

There is no way that the vast majority of teachers, whatever their training, can ever hope to match in their classrooms what students can receive at will from sources of their own choosing (14).

Unfortunately, the vast majority of schools I’ve visited continue to try to do the “wrong thing right.” While few teachers or administrators really believe that learning happens best when kids are grouped by age, or when they are all forced to learn the same things on the same day in the same way, or when we chop up what we’ve chosen for the content into 50-minute periods and different subjects, we do that stuff anyway. And, if you look at the recent Gallup survey of engagement of almost 1 million students across the US, trying to do the “wrong thing right” is having devastating consequences. Of high school juniors, just 32% say they are “involved and enthusiastic” in school, 17% say they have fun at school, 17% say they “get to do what they do best,” and 16% say they “will invent something that changes the world.”

Read those numbers again, and ask yourself can we possibly be doing the right thing? Can we possibly label our current practices as “effective?”

As with most addictions, the first step to changing this is to admit we have a problem. The signs that we are reaching “peak education” in the traditional system are becoming more and more apparent by the day. (More about that in a later post.) And while I’m not naive enough to suggest that policy makers and vendors and many educators are at all ready to begin the process of moving away from a focus on efficiency toward a focus on effectiveness, that shouldn’t stop individual teachers or school systems from starting down that path.

Doing the right thing in schools starts with one fairly straightforward question: What do you believe about how kids learn most powerfully and deeply in their lives? Once you’ve answered that as an individual and as a school community, the question that follows is does your practice in classrooms with kids honor those beliefs? In other words, if you believe that kids learn best when they have authentic reasons for learning, when their work lives in the world in some real way, when they are pursuing answers to questions that they themselves find interesting, when they’re not constrained by a schedule or a curriculum, when they are having fun, and when they can learn with other students and teachers, then are you giving priority to those conditions in the classroom? Are you acting on your beliefs?

I’m working with districts where this is the root question, and where the answer is the fundamental driver for every decision made within the system. It’s a recognition that the roles and responsibilities of the system have irrevocably changed due to the shifts in the world we’ve seen over the last two decades. And it’s also a recognition that we have to approach our work with children from an entirely different angle than what we are accustomed to. But make no mistake, it’s a long, difficult process of change to endure.

This is not the first time in our history that we’ve faced such a seismic shift in our needs regarding schools and education. As Ackoff writes:

Here, a culture declaring itself to be the protector of individual liberty, and affording seemingly boundless opportunities for the expression of personal freedom, the challenge of creating a large, docile population that would accept the dominance of the factory system in their lives was enormous. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, it became clear that the only way to succeed with industrializing (and hence modernizing) this country was to find a way to break the inherently free human spirit during childhood (Kindle 177.)

Too often when we talk about “innovation” in education, we point to that new set of Chromebooks or those shiny new Smartboards as examples of our efforts to change what we do in the classroom. That is, after all, what “innovation” is all about, to “make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products.” Over the last few years, many schools in the developed world have done a pretty good job on the new products front, earning billions of dollars for vendors who sell their gadgets or code under the guise of “innovation” of some degree or another. We’ve definitely got more stuff. And it’s arguable that our methods are changing, even if just a bit; the Maker Movement in schools, when fully embraced, is one such example of shifting roles in the classroom.

But on balance, is all of this “innovation” really changing us?

Not so much. Our efforts at innovating, regardless of method, idea, or product, have been focused far too much on incrementally improving the centuries old structures and practices we employ in schools, not on fundamentally rethinking them. And the vast majority of “innovation” I’ve seen in my visits to schools around the world doesn’t amount to much change at all in the area where we need it most: using those new methods, ideas, or products to shift agency for learning to the learner. To put it simply, innovation in schools today is far too focused on improving teaching, not amplifying learning.

That needs to stop, especially now when the ability to learn at a moment’s notice is increasingly more important than the knowledge we carry around in our heads. As we approach 4 billion people in the world with Internet access, there’s little question any longer that those who are learners will have more opportunities for growth and success than those who are learned. And if our work in schools does not have a laser focus on developing our kids as powerful, passionate, persistent learners, we’re not preparing them for their futures.

But innovating through the lens of the learner means fundamentally changing the way we think about schools and classrooms, not just layering on technology. Ironically, it means setting aside the new and, instead, getting back to the old, to what author and educator Seymour Papert calls our “stock of intuitive, empathic, commonsense knowledge about learning.” As learners ourselves, we know that real, learning that sticks with us over time occurs when it’s built on passion, when it has an authentic purpose and audience, when it’s relevant to our lives in the moment and beyond, when it’s not constrained by time, and more. This isn’t rocket science. Yet generally in schools, we provide few if any of those conditions that we know are required for that type of deep learning to take place. We don’t let students pursue the questions most in their minds. More often than not, the sole audience for the work students do is the teacher, and it serves no real world, authentic purpose. Our kids passions and interests are ignored in favor of compliance to the curriculum.

The real innovation that we need in schools has little to do with technologies or tools or products designed to improve our teaching. The real innovation, instead, is in relearning why we want kids in schools in the first place. As author Seymour Sarason says, the overarching purpose of school ought to be that children should want to keep learning more about themselves, others, and the world when they leave us. Yet, Sarason writes, that purpose is mostly ignored. I’ve yet to find a school that has created an assessment to see if, in fact, students leave at least as interested in learning as when they entered. In all likelihood, they don’t want to know the answer.

Innovation in schools of any type needs to start with the idea that the goal is not to force kids to abandon their passions and interests for our curriculum when they come to school, which is what we currently do. Instead, as Sarason says, we must start with their questions and curiosities, and bring our world to them. If we are to develop and sustain the types of learner-citizens that we need in the future, we need to meld the worlds of school and of children, but we start with the children. In Letters to a Serious Education President, he writes:

“We have to change our schools, but if that is not preceded or accompanied by a change in our thinking, in our preconceptions, in how we regard what and where children are, in our imaginativeness and boldness — absent these changes we will again confirm the maxim that the more things change, the more they stay the same (123).”

Which is why despite the shiny new tools or the seemingly unending string of new learning approaches (flipped, blended, collaborative, personalized, project-based and on and on), nothing has really changed. Kids are still bored in school. We still assess the stuff that’s easy to measure at the expense of attending to the more important stuff that isn’t, things like creativity and curiosity and determination. Our cultures focus on teaching, not learning, and very little “innovation” as it’s currently constituted has impacted that at all.

What does it say when the leading candidate for president in one of the two main political parties in the United States says "I love the undereducated"? Further, what does it say when everyone just sees that as a laugh line?

I'm not laughing.

There's an uncomfortable truth to what Donald Trump articulated the other night, and that is that perhaps the biggest reason for his rise to precipice of the presidency is because the vast majority of people in this country are "undereducated." But as Rick Shenkman points out in this piece at the Bill Moyers' blog, it's not about being stupid. "Voters aren't dumb. They are ignorant."

Why is that? I think it's arguable that the ignorant masses are the result of a less than effective education system that is cranking out kids with relatively useless knowledge about calculus and the Louisiana Purchase at the expense of the skills and dispositions needed to not become ignorant. Count among those things curiosity, which kids bring with them to school in truckloads when they are young but which quickly fades when forced to hew to the scripted curriculum. Creativity, which again is in large supply in pre-schoolers but gets pressed out of them by sitting quietly in rows and loud, class-ending bells that shut down whatever juices may be boiling at the time. And empathy, which gets ignored in the race for better grades, more bullet points on the college application, and the ranking and sorting of standardized tests.

We've trained our kids to wait. They wait to be told what they should learn, how they should learn it, and how to show that they've learned it. We've stripped them of the agency over learning that is required to avoid the ignorance we now find ourselves confronted with. Is anyone shocked that Shenkman comes to this conclusion about the American populace:

Ignorant voters lack knowledge, but their problem is not that they have trouble learning. The problem is that on their own they don’t try, relying instead on biases of one sort or another to guide their thinking.

Why don't they try? I know that's a complex answer, and if you read the Shenkman essay, it goes beyond the education system, obviously. But I would still argue, as John Taylor Gatto did over two decades ago, that we are dumbing down our kids. This may not be new; people have argued forever that the goal of education was to create an ignorant society so that those in charge could get away with whatever their self-serving interests demanded. But regardless of when it started, it's untenable for this democracy today. (Did anyone else turn that debate last night off in embarrassment?)

And let's be clear, the Web has added to the problem. For as much as social media has been a boon to learning, it's also been a totally different boon to the creation of even more biased, echo-filled spaces where people can easily confirm their own worldview without thinking critically or engaging in civil discourse with those that disagree. The Internet can no doubt make us smarter and more educated. But there is a complex literacy around that (and around information in general) that is sorely lacking in our classrooms today. And I’m talking about the adults here, not just the kids.

Our ignorance, not just of the issues of concern to this country but of the larger world around us, can be cured, I think, at least to some extent. But it's not going to happen with more curriculum, more tests, more data, more homework, more school days, more rules and punishments, more rankings, and more pressure to achieve some crumbling vision of the American educational dream. It will happen by doing everything to make sure that kids have more of a desire to learn about themselves and the world around them when they leave us than when they met us, by giving kids the freedom to pursue their passions and interests, by helping them solve problems that matter, and by encouraging them to do work that matters in the world, not just in the classroom.

I’m not giving up on networks, but this is such an interesting articulation of the problems inherent in social media. 

Zygmunt Bauman:

Doug Sosnik:

The country is undergoing the most significant economic, technological, and demographic changes since the Industrial Revolution. Such change in any one of these areas would test our ability to adapt. But the fact that we are experiencing all of these shifts at the same time has exacerbated Americans’ fears and fundamental distrust of those in power. The public has concluded that our 20th century institutions are incapable of dealing with 21st century challenges.

The accompanying chart is pretty staggering. Eight percent of people have confidence in Congress today. Only 31 percent have confidence in public schools. 

31%. 

Here’s my question: Why are we so concerned with being “future ready” when we’re not even “present ready?” 

I mean, do we really think that our students (and we ourselves) are truly literate in the current Web-centric information environment? Are we using the technologies we have right now to even a quarter of their power or potential? Do we fully understand the implications or privacy and security on our online interactions as they exist today? Are we well enough informed about the motivations of those who want us to buy their products, or the motivations of those who want our kids to continue to take high-stakes standardized tests? Can we say that we’re all good when it comes to the environmental, cultural, and ethical implications around the choices we make around technology and learning and schooling today? (Feel free to add yours below.)

Aside from never being fully able to get anyone to define what exactly is meant by “future ready,” my biggest frustration with initiatives such as these is that they shift focus away from what our bigger issues are right now. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff that we should be talking about before we start trying to figure out what our future needs are. (And by the way, how can you really have a clue about the future if you're not living in the present?) 

While I don’t agree with the whole thing, the summation that Jordan Shapiro gives in his latest post at Forbes resonates:

The point is that our children don’t need 21st century skills. Skills are easy to come by and simple to teach. Besides, those skills necessary to operate the current technologies and to participate in the current economy are certain to be obsolete by the time our children need them. What we need instead is a new kind of normalization—new classroom rules, new district wide administrative systems, new school designs and new educational customs that will break the cycle of winners and losers, haves and have nots, believers and heathens.   

We need to teach our children that the goal is not self-empowerment for the sake of the individual, but rather for the collective. They must learn not only how to identify and discover their unique gifts, but also how to offer them up in service to the rest of us.

There’s a lot to digest in the recent report Making Caring Common which has a slew of suggestions for bringing some much needed sanity to the college admissions process. The short version: stop putting so much emphasis on AP classes and SAT scores and, instead, encourage kids to do meaningful, sustained good work in their communities and families. In other words, stop stressing over the ACT and focus on acts instead.

No question much of this is in response to a flood of stories of late of rising levels of anxiety and stress in kids thrown into a fierce competition for academic recognition that businesses like the College Board and magazines like US News have been more than happy to promote. (Let’s never forget that the whole AP narrative has been pushed by those with a vested financial interest in the test. Always a good reason for a test.) And it’s about time. One of my favorite college presidents Leon Botstein at Bard has been railing about this for years. 

Anyway, read the report, and make sure you send it to everyone you know who is on the “high achievement” bandwagon. And when you do, make sure you share this quote as well:

Even the most advanced students may benefit from avoiding course "overload" and devoting more time for scholarly work that allows unstructured reflection and encourages the development of intellectual curiosity.

“The one really competitive skill is the skill of being able to learn.” ~Seymour Papert

I use that quote often in my presentations, because even though Papert said that 18 years ago, the environment we now find ourselves in today makes it even more relevant. And it’s not just the skills needed to learn, but it’s the dispositions as well. I’m not saying humans aren’t learners by their very nature, but there’s no question some end up being much more voracious than others when it comes to learning more about the world around them and their place in it.

But we don’t focus on being able to learn that much in schools, do we? Instead we put most of our attention on making sure kids are able to be taught. That’s what the systems and structures and policies support. To be able to be taught, students must learn to follow rules. To be able to be taught, they must conform to certain expectations. They must be grouped in certain ways, for specific amounts of time. They must get into certain routines, all of which develop them as “students” who depend on the institution to teach them what they need to know. This is our easiest path, to dictate and organize the entire experience. 

In the process, we basically ignore the skill of being able to learn. In fact, we may damage what learning skills and dispositions kids already bring to us when they start school. But the vast majority of kids end up right where we want them, being teachable. 

The irony is we’ve known this forever. We knew it when we were students. We perpetuate it as adults, as parents, as teachers, and as policy makers. 

I had the opportunity recently to spend a couple of days with teachers and leaders at a pretty sizable, well regarded, “high performing” district in the US. Today, one of those in attendance sent me the thoughts below that her son had written after a she had a discussion with him about the ideas and themes of my presentations. Apparently they resonated. He gave me permission to share it anonymously as he felt these ideas were more a compilation of he and his peers rather than his alone. Have a look:

We are the lost generation.  Many teachers think standardized tests, endless worksheets, and piles of homework are the answer. The other half don’t believe in homework, think standardized tests are moronic, and believe in activities that make us enjoy the lesson. But it’s too harsh a mix for either side to get its point across. So we end up with this generation who doesn’t care about education or can’t find a motivation to continue it.

The thing is we don’t care. It’s not because we don’t want to care, but it feels like we can’t care. One year you have a drill sergeant for an English teacher who jams vocabulary down your throat to the point you can’t think anymore, who constantly prepares you (not adequately enough) for the never ending flow of standardized tests that seem to be as common as the rising tide. Then next year you get a teacher who wants to teach, who loves to teach, who’s “untraditional”.  And you want to learn, you really do!  But all you can think when you raise your hand is “will this be on the test”. That’s all that seems to matter.

First period will take your phone on sight if it simply falls out of your backpack, while third period encourages the use of all devices. We feel lost. Half of the kids don’t want to learn because learning to them means: classwork, grade, fail- homework, grade, fail- test, grade, fail. It’s an endless cycle they can’t win. The other half of kids desperately wants to learn, but can’t find the motivation because their teacher could be so out of tune with how to correctly teach nowadays, that it sucks the passion from them.  

We’ve become divided. It becomes cool to hate school. To hate learning and education. I separate these by sentences because I believe they are no longer synonymous with each other. Kids love to learn. They hate school. School has become a life draining institution that takes passionate, longing kids and leaves them hollowed husks, begging for a passing grade so they have a slightly better chance to move to the next year. Too many have simply given up. Too many, students and teachers alike, have given up on each other, and the system designed to enlighten us, when in reality all is does is throw us into uneducated darkness.

A couple of quick reactions. 

First, this pushed my own thinking about how kids find the school experience, not so much deadly and boring as inconsistent. Imagine being buffeted back and forth by changing expectations, regulations, levels of expertise and passion. How difficult must that be for kids who are trying to figure out what the best path forward is in their learning lives? (And there are pages and pages to write about why those inconsistencies exist...)

And second, I wonder, somewhat hopefully, if what this student is articulating is being caused in some way by an awakening on the part of teachers to the realities of the moment. Have we always been this inconsistent in schools, or are we moreso now because the traditional practices and systems are beginning to break because of our expanding, near ubiquitous access to knowledge, information, teachers, and technologies?

Newsflash: “Student engagement” now seems to be rising as an indicator of school effectiveness, along with “hope” and “graduation rates.” It’s interesting that only one of those is easy to accurately measure; the other two are much more fluid, based on the opinions of students. That in and of itself is an interesting shift, and perhaps, an important one. (It’s also interesting to note that the percentage of kids who go to college really isn’t valued that much as an indicator.) 

But it depends on how you define “engagement,” right?  I wrote more about this at EML, but does it surprise anyone that “engagement” can be raised when learning is gamified? When getting the right answer becomes a race? When we throw technologies like iPads and clickers at kids? It shouldn’t. Kids, especially young kids, are easily moved by such tools and pedagogies.

But here’s the not so subtle question we need to ask: By doing these things, are we trying to get kids more engaged in school? Or are we trying to get them more engaged in learning? And yes, there is a big difference. 

Too often, the educators I work with have bought new technologies or implemented new practices in an attempt to make school more palatable to kids. That may bump the numbers up in the next Gallup survey, but in the long run, it won’t do much to move a child’s desire to want to learn more about whatever they’re clicking answers to in class. That requires a much bigger shift in agency to the learner in ways that we all know (but for some reason are loathe to implement) lead to more powerful learning experiences for kids.

Eric Weinstein (@ericrweinstein), managing director of Thiel Capital, a Ph.D in mathematical physics from Harvard, and a research fellow at the Mathematical Institute of Oxford University, during a podcast interview with Tim Ferris:

What you're always looking for is an education which makes students unteachable by standard methods. This is where we get into the trouble which is, we don't talk about "teaching disabilities," we talk about “learning disabilities.” And a lot of the kids that I want are kids who have been labeled learning disabled but they are actually super learners. Learners on steroids who have some deficits to pay for their superpower. And when teachers can't deal with this, we label those kids "learning disabled" to cover up the fact that the economics of teaching require that one central actor, the teacher, be able to lead a room of 20 or more  people in lock step. Well, that's not a good model. (Around the 1:06 mark.) 

One of the biggest roadblocks to change in any institution is a lack of “constancy of purpose” to borrow a phrase from W.E. Deming. This is especially true in schools. The average superintendent of a public school in the US has a 3.5 year tenure, and more often than not, newly hired leaders bring in their own agendas, their own beliefs, their own measures of “success.” In most schools, there is no “North Star,” no articulated destination that serves as the benchmark for who gets hired next. We go from innovators and dreamers to managers and data collectors and then back again depending on the political or societal currents of the moment. 

The effects of this are harsh. Teachers and other leaders are less inclined to engage in any efforts to change, wondering if their work to do so will sustain over time. Frustrations rise as practices become even more fragments and misaligned. Money gets wasted, and students are caught in the middle.

What if the measure for buying or using technologies in schools was whether or not it improved our students’ actual lives, not just improved their “education?” Would we spend our treasure to buy Promethian boards? Clicker systems? Closed content or learning management systems? Robo assessment programs? Extensive filtering and blocking programs? Most of the stuff being peddled on the vendor floor?

I know “improve” is a relative term, but what if we saw it as giving students the ability to learn more about whatever they want to learn about? The ability to solve problems that are meaningful to them? The ability to explore and interact with the world as they need or desire? What rewards would we and our kids reap if that was our priority?

This weekend, we held an impromptu paint party at my house, about 20 people putting a sunset and purple flowers to canvas via the instructions of a YouTube artist. It was kinda crazy, not just because paint was flying all over the place, but because of who was in the room. We had friends and in-laws and the more standard crew. But we also had nine Rwandans, aged 10 to 75, some of whom had emigrated to the US and Canada, one who is living with us short term, and some of whom are heading back to Africa in the next few days. Imagine trying to engage in a conversation mixing English and French and Kinyarwandan. Imagine when some of that conversation turns to Burundi, where the threat of genocide is hanging over some relatives of those at our party. Imagine 15-minutes of hugs when everyone is leaving. 

Over the years, we’ve had three sets of eight Tibetan Buddhist monks stay with us for 10-day stretches. We’ve had an old friend who is a lesbian live with us for a year when she was in the midst of some difficult changes in her life. I suspect we’ve had more diversity in our home than most, certainly more than my kids engage with in their schools. And in many ways, I think my kids have learned more about real life from paint parties and monk visits and our various boarders than almost anything they’ve done in school. We’re not perfect parents, by any stretch, but I do think the efforts we’ve put into “real world” learning have made our kids (and ourselves) much more ready for what’s to come in their lives. 

What if teachers looked at their students as apprentices? I mean, before schools, most of learning was hands on, at the foot of a master, at least for the masses. What if we tried harder to capture that in classrooms?

But what if the master/apprentice relationship was not focused on subject first, but on learning? That kids in schools were at the foot not of those who know the most about, let’s say, science, but of those who are masters at learning science. That the emphasis of our assessment would be on a student’s ability to learn science. Or Shakespeare. Or history. That they would learn to learn like scientists or historians or mathematicians. 

Digital literacy doesn’t start with tools. It starts with an understanding of how technology is changing the world, and a richer context of how those changes will impact the way we learn, communicate, create, co-operate, and collaborate down the road. In other words, literacy is something we constantly have to unlearn and relearn. As Harold Jarche would say, literacy is now in “perpetual beta.”