Teaching for the Future: Episode 46: Better schools or better priorities?

Like many fields education has been filled with new ideas and new techniques that offer success at reaching students and improving the learning experience. Some of these ideas have come and gone but many still exists in different forms. Often these ideas are championed by well meaning experts or politicians who are trying to enact real social change and reform our schools. This is not to say that these ideas are based on falsehoods, many of them are great ideas that just do not seem to reach certain kids.

David Truss pointed out something to David Warlick who then put it up on his blog. It's an article from TIME.com called How to Bring Our Schools out of the 20th Century. It uses the story of Rip VanWinkle to explain that our schools would be comfortable for old Rip because they have not changed in any fundamental way.

"For the past five years, the national conversation on education has focused on reading scores, math tests and closing the “achievement gap” between social classes. This is not a story about that conversation. This is a story about the big public conversation the nation is not having about education, the one that will ultimately determine not merely whether some fraction of our children get “left behind” but also whether an entire generation of kids will fail to make the grade in the global economy because they can’t think their way through abstract problems, work in teams, distinguish good information from bad or speak a language other than English."

Is the lack of change because schools are so great that we just need to bring the kids around, or are we stuck using the same battle plan to fight a completely different battle?

Thanks to Chris Brogan from Network2.tv for the great intro, thanks to Dan Flannery for the great music, thanks to Brian Conley from Alive in Mexico/Baghdad for opening the conversation, and thanks to Sonja Cole from BookWink.com for mentioning me in her interview.

If you have a podcast I'd love to hear about it, so feel free to email at teachingforthefuture@gmail.com or send me an audio message through Odeo

Tags:Dave LaMorte, teaching for the future, technology, education, podcast, teaching