Monday, January 14, 2013
What is the purpose of education?
Dropout rates are increasing and American kids simply aren't keeping up with kids in education. I wonder if the towns you live in and their boards of education have any level of understanding that kids might be bored of education?
As a parent of two school-aged children, I sometimes wonder if I am alone in observing the increasing mismatch between traditional curricular standards of content-based instruction and the new forms of thinking required by our digital, distributed workplace?
We are no longer in the industrial age where routine thinking skills were a core requirement. Henry Ford was a proponent of education primarily to create a steady supplier of workers for his factories and to ultimately turn them into customers. Today, those routine thinking skills are increasingly performed by machines or outsourced to countries with lower standards of living and freedom than the United States.
Regardless of whether you have children of your own, taking an interest in how the board of education either fulfills or fails in educating children should be of interest to you. If you have a pension, a 401K or any type of investment, the ability for it to provide a return in your retirement is directly correlated to the success or lack of the ability for the board of education to make education less boring...
| | View blog reactionsAs a parent of two school-aged children, I sometimes wonder if I am alone in observing the increasing mismatch between traditional curricular standards of content-based instruction and the new forms of thinking required by our digital, distributed workplace?
We are no longer in the industrial age where routine thinking skills were a core requirement. Henry Ford was a proponent of education primarily to create a steady supplier of workers for his factories and to ultimately turn them into customers. Today, those routine thinking skills are increasingly performed by machines or outsourced to countries with lower standards of living and freedom than the United States.
Regardless of whether you have children of your own, taking an interest in how the board of education either fulfills or fails in educating children should be of interest to you. If you have a pension, a 401K or any type of investment, the ability for it to provide a return in your retirement is directly correlated to the success or lack of the ability for the board of education to make education less boring...
