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5 Rarely Considered Obstacles To 21st Century Education

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What are the biggest obstacles to changing education? Some are economic. Others are infrastructural. Few are technological. The most significant challenges are philosophical. We are wedded to particular ways of thinking about school and learning and life that are limiting our ability to best serve our children.

The way we live in the world is changing. Therefore, education also needs to change. Don’t believe the popular rhetoric, our schools are not “failing.” But they are also not preparing kids to be adults (in the world we are rapidly creating) as effectively as they could. Mostly this is because we are struggling to untangle fashionable thought paradigms from essentially human ones.

Some of our ideas are specific to the times in which they appear, others are enduring. Good education involves framing persistent knowledge within current structures. When we can't untangle the timeless from the contemporary, we mask our confusion with easy arguments about technology or content delivery. But the efficacy of distribution is irrelevant if we're not clear about what we want to teach.

Here are five tangled ways of thinking that are in the way of educating today’s children.

1. We have an information fetish that causes us to confuse education with media. Better digital ‘interactive learning content’ is great, but anyone who says it’s a fix-all is trying to sell you something.

There is “interactive learning content” everywhere you look. But we generally don’t use the word “learning” to describe the information we discover, experience, and comprehend while browsing Facebook, or buying jelly donuts, or walking down the street. Instead, we call it learning when we’re talking about the process of incorporating and understanding intentionally structured data sets—data sets that have transitioned from being raw sensory experience into being “information.”

First there’s data. And data, once it’s defined and organized and categorized, it becomes information. And then, after that, it becomes meaningful knowledge. Think, for instance, about the random light from the setting sun reflecting and refracting. Blue wavelengths scatter away as the red ones are filtered through the thickest part of the atmosphere. This phenomenon inspires all the romantic poetry and the beauty and the emotion that we associate with sunrise and sunset. Data becomes information. And then information, once it gets incorporated into our collective meaning systems—described scientifically in terms of light and refraction—it becomes “knowledge”

And this is a process that seems, at least historically speaking, to happen organically. It’s unconscious. Knowledge emerges. First, individuals consciously take raw data and they intentionally frame it into information. That’s what writers, and scientists, and philosophers, and historians, and mathematicians do. They take raw data and they frame it into information. Then, to make that move from information to knowledge, to take it to that place where information becomes meaningful to a community or to a civilization—where it becomes adopted, where it becomes truth, where it has a kind of cultural currency—exactly how it moves to that place remains a bit of a mystery. There are lots of theories. But mostly, we’re still puzzled.

Here’s what we know for sure: We know that knowledge which has come to have cultural currency, knowledge that has come to be part of a collectively adopted way of making meaning, needs to be transmitted between generations. These things need to be taught.

And therefore, this knowledge becomes the subject of “educational content.” This what our students need to “Learn.” It is not about skills, or facts, or content. It’s about knowledge.

2. We’re obsessively infatuated with our own technological creations. We forget that although our tools have gotten very sophisticated, our ways of thinking haven’t really changed so much.

Something very strange has happened to humanity. We had all this data, all this information, so much knowledge, so many different ways of making meaning that we needed to create memory tools—tools, not only to store this information and knowledge, but also to make it searchable and accessible.

Now, you probably think I’m referring to the internet. But I’m not. I’m talking about tools like scrolls and books and libraries. The internet is awesome, but it is still just a faster book, a faster library, a faster way of transmitting methods for making meaning, transmitting cultural currency.

When it comes to education, the internet only matters because it makes this memory and accessibility so fast and so easy that we now have no choice but to recognize the importance of understanding. We now have to recognize the importance of teaching young people the process through which things become meaningful: interpretation and classification and analysis; the kind of problem solving and critical thinking that empowers every individual to transform raw data into information and then transform information into knowledge.

That’s what we mean by learning these days. We don’t care about one’s ability to store facts anymore, to retain information, to be able to regurgitate the collective narratives. It has no value anymore. We have tools to do all that. So why are we still so confused?

3. We are really good at throwing away obsolete tech toys, but we stink at throwing away thought paradigms. This is the shadow side of our archival genius.

There are pre-literate tribal folk living in our psyches. Somewhere, deep inside all of us, we continue to abide by the conventions of our prehistoric ancestors. And I think that’s why we’re still fighting about standardized testing, and sage on the stage teaching, and all that stuff.

We’ve all got this carousel full of leftover baggage from before the printing press—when we still lived in tribes. There’s this part of our psyches that’s still living in villages with communal ovens. Back then, living in small vulnerable communities, people were united by only their shared stories.

Shared ways of organizing data ensured collective survival. In that world, you needed to know which plants to eat and which to avoid. You needed to know which trails are safe and which are dangerous. You needed to know which neighbors are friends and which are enemies. You needed the mythology, the knowledge, and the narratives. But you didn’t have tools to remember and recall this information.

Therefore, one’s ability to be a human library, an encyclopedia, a living database, a walking spreadsheet, was significant. Archival skills had high market value. Memory made a person a major societal asset. It gave a person purpose and utility and worth. And we all want our children to have purpose and utility and worth. For a very long time, increasing the quantity of knowledge available at one’s fingertips was a way to guarantee a child’s success…

Until we outsourced this role to machines! We created technologies to remember and to communicate and to maintain historical coherence. Now learning is no longer about memory and recall. It is no longer about mnemonic skills. It’s no longer about storage and research. It’s no longer about the content.

Sure, you can still sell content to people by appealing to their primitive fears, like a traveling snake oil salesman hocking wares in people’s unconscious tribal villages. But if you want it to be effective and impactful, education has to adapt. It doesn’t work like mainstream media. It’s not just a matter of content delivery and equitable accessibility anymore. We’ve got much bigger problems.

4. We’ve taught our kids that life is boring. And if they’re not excited and passionate about life, it really doesn’t matter how much ‘content’ they’ve memorized or how many ‘skills’ they’ve mastered.

Like most kids their age, my seven- and ten-year-old boys love to play Minecraft. They play it on tablets and smartphones. They play it on laptops and consoles. They study tutorials and they share tips with each other. They even play on international servers with people they’ve never met.

Minecraft is literally shaping my kids’ perspective on the world. In fact, I’m pretty sure is shaping an entire generation’s collective way of thinking. So about a year ago I decided I’d call all these kids: Generation Blockhead. I’d like to see this term go mainstream. I keep writing it but it hasn’t caught on yet. I think maybe because “Generation Blockhead” sounds too much like an insult. But I don’t mean it that way at all.

If anything, I think Minecraft is making kids smarter. But whenever I say that, the technophobes, the Waldorf parents, and a whole subset of very smart, compassionate, concerned parents and teachers get very curmudgeonly. They ask me about video game addiction. I shrug.

I too am a little concerned that my kids would choose to stare at a screen rather than playing outside. In fact, my son sometimes tries to skip family trips to the ice cream parlor so he can keep playing. And that’s just crazy to me because it’s ICE CREAM. Clearly his priorities are way out of whack.

But I don’t really think we can blame Minecraft for that. Instead, I think the obsessive way kids get absorbed in video games says more about the way we present the life-world to them than it does about the temptations of the game-world.

In other words, I think it says more about the way they learn to think about real life, the way we TRAIN them to think about the world they live in. We often forget that the purpose of education, first and foremost, is to make the life world more engaging, to make it more magical. We need to stop blaming the video games and start trying to make kids as passionate about the life-world as they are about the game-world. The trouble is that our own egos are in the way.

5. Grown-ups have an inferiority complex. We’re so scared of losing our authority that most schools are set up as big lies to trick kids into thinking adults are experts.

The great physicist Richard Feynman used to say that practicing science is like discovering a giant game of chess in midplay and trying to extrapolate the rules of the game based only on watching the few pieces we are able to see—maybe two pawns and a rook.

Think about that in terms of video games. Imagine you can only see Mario and Luigi jumping for a level’s final flag and from that you had to interpolate all of rules of the Mushroom Kingdom. Good luck! This is a cosmological problem. Actually, this is THE cosmological problem.

But it’s also a truly magical and engaging way of thinking about the world around you. Stop worrying about screen time for a moment and imagine what would happen if all these young gamers thought of data and information and knowledge in this way. Imagine if they understood that school is about learning the rules of a game, about seeing that there are forces much larger than us thumbing away at their gamepads, forces moving avatars and components around in a complex and confusing way.

It is hard for us to imagine because framing education in this way would mean we’d all have to own up to the truth. We’d have to acknowledge that whether its metrics, or neuroscience, or statistics, or computers, or engineering, or even theoretical physics, grown-ups aren’t authorities because our understanding of the world not only fallible, but also extremely limited. What knowledge we do have is really just cultural currency. Certainly, this knowledge is valuable, but never forget that we are really just furiously scribbling symbols on paper, hoping we get something right.

To present the world to our children in this game-like way, we’d have to let go of our adult egos. Then we would start school by reversing things. We would tell the children that WE need THEIR help. Our own mortality makes this a fact! We can’t play any further into the game without them. We need to be honest. Tell the students that the whole purpose of school is just to show them everything we’ve learned about the rules of the game before we turn over the joystick.

We need to make it clear to students that what we do, as humans, is we collect and organize data. We don’t acquire the skills that serve corporations, or economies, or governments. These institutions are all cultural technologies that are meant to serve us, not the other way around. We don’t serve them. They were meant to serve us so we can go about doing what we do best: looking for systematic ways to make sense of the raw data of experience, trying to make sense of this chaotic cosmic game of Super Mario Brothers.

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