Tomorrow's lessons

I have just finished reading Seth Godin’s manifesto on schools. It is a provocative, piece that causes one to not only reevaluate our education system, but to refocus on our own civic and cultural goals as well.

His premise is simple.  Schools, as we know them today, are designed on a late 19^th century, early 20^th century agri/industrial model. Our needs have changed; yet schools, for the most part have not.

We need less of what we are teaching today.

We need more creativity.

After much consideration I have come to agree with much of what Mr. Godin has said. You can find his at Stop Stealing Dreams essay at www.squidoo.com. If we are to think critically about our education two main issues arise.

1.   Schooling today (and it has for as long as I can remember) stifles creativity. It is more important to be tested by common denominator, leave-no-child-behind placement tests than it is to instill the forward-thinking attitude of “invent something new.” Create something fresh and exciting. Do it your way. Instead, what we get is a whole bank of data that our children must memorize and spew back in certain order, so as to be graded by the state and evaluated as passing or not and at what level.  In that way, legislators can feel that they have done a good job being good stewards of the public’s money when it comes to educating the little bastards.

2.  If schooling is in deed sucking the creativity out of students, what then, is it replacing it with? Conformity. And that is maybe even more dangerous as a filler for the vacuum left by the absence of creativity than noting at all. The “me-too” society is becoming so dissected, compartmentalized and packaged that statisticians can tell who you are and what you do and how you think by knowing what fast food you eat. And it is all because you conform to certain prescribed values that are tested and retested and repackaged on a daily basis. Direct marketers have been using this for years. We have become a nation of white mice all waiting on the next code – the next stimulus to follow the way that has been laid out for us.

America, in its needs today, yearns for the opposite.  We need less conformity and more people who (to steal a line form Apple Computers) think different. I, like the late Steve Jobs, see the second word in that phrase not as an adverb but as a noun.  An object to the verb think. And it is those two words we need most in our country today:

Think.

Different.

If we can foster anything in our education system we should push with every ounce of determination as an educated culture that we can to teach thinking. Not rote memory. Not playing back prescribed lessons.  No. We need a generation of thinkers.

And we need those thinkers to rise up and make a difference.  To be different. To foster the notion of different. To challenge us who locked in the way of the old order. To push us aside if necessary. To make new paths for America to travel.

A million years ago Bob Dylan saw it and penned the phrase “the times, they are a- changing.” Now it is time for education to catch up. It is time for education to change.

It will not be easy. It never is.  It is so simple just to sit and do as we have always done.

Now repeat after me…