A recent cover article in TIME magazine began this 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, or distinguish good information from bad."
Here is a summary of what TIME says needs to be done to bring our schools out of the 20th Century:
- Stop aiming so low. The requirements of No Child Left Behind are insufficient.
- Teach our kids to see patterns where others see only chaos.
- Teach them how to look across disciplines since that's where most breakthroughs are made (such as YouTube and MySpace).
- Teach them how to discern which information is reliable and which isn't, a skill especially important in an age when information is overflowing.
- Teach them how to see the core of people, so that they can communicate more effectively and be better team players.
- Teach our kids to have a global perspective.
In short, to make sure our kids don't get left behind in the 20th Century, our schools, our teachers and our kids need a whole new way of looking at the world.
We must spread a new revolution ... reshape the teaching force ... redeploy the dollars ... add new depth and rigor to our curriculums.
And we must start by changing our conversations on education.
