The World Has Changed

Marion Brady

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Copplestone,Devon,England

Farmer

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Copplestone,Devon,England

Farmwife

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John and Mary’s major problems:

Keeping wellMaintaining tools and buildingsMaking the land produceCaring for animals

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John and Mary had children. They taught the children their solutions to these problems.

The solutions worked because the world the children inherited was the same as their parent’s world.

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And so it went, generation after generation.

Same problems, so same solutions.

This made educating very simple: just a matter of transferring information—“facts”—from one generation to the next.

Piece of cake!

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But one day John and Mary’s great-great-great-great-great-great- (etc.) grandson faced a problem.

The world had changed. Somebody had invented a machine for harvesting grain.

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Should he borrow money to buy the new machine?

His father, who knew all about horses (his father had taught him) didn’t know what to tell his son; didn’t know how the machine worked, how long it would last, how to fix it if it broke, how much would have to be harvested to make the machine pay for itself.

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The world had changed. Old solutions, old answers, old facts, were no longer enough.

New solutions, new answers, new facts were needed.

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Educating, once a simple matter of transferring facts, needed to change, needed to switch from—

TRANSFERRING OLD INFORMATION

TO

DISCOVERING NEW INFORMATION

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That’s a very big

paradigm shift,

an absolutely essential shift if we’re to survive.

And it hasn’t happened.

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For proof that it hasn’t happened, look at the thousands of standards for school subjects the fifty states have adopted, and the tests keyed to those standards.

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The standards and tests have one main concern: What can kids remember?

What they SHOULD care about is how successful kids are in dreaming up new knowledge when old knowledge doesn’t work.

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This outdated, simplistic idea—

Education: Dumping information into learner memory

…creates education’s biggest problems.

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dy

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Real understanding grows only when learners identify relationships BETWEEN facts:

lead paint exposure behavioral problems

political corruption economic decline excessive antibiotic use resistant bacteria

earth’s axial tilt seasons

predation insect forms

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Relationships, yes, but also links between relationships, to form networks of understanding:

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If you think current education reforms are equipping the young to cope with change and the future—

that they’ve made the big PARADIGM SHIFT—

think again.

The proposed new national standards actually REINFORCE the old paradigm.

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Caught up in efforts to make the old paradigm work,* we’re generations past due to shift to a new one.

*More math, more science, more rigor, more AP courses, more IB programs, more days in school, more hours in class, more testing, more penalties for poor performance, more, more, more…

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If we continue on our present course,

catastrophe is inevitable.

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An example of a curriculum that recognizes the need to shift from transmitting content to creating and processing it:

Connections:Investigating Reality

It’s available without cost.

Slideshows in this series:The World Has Changed

Information OverloadPassive or Active Learning?

The Invisible ElephantAll Aboard the Standards Express!

http://www.marionbrady.com

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To encourage dialog, this presentation is offered free of charge, and may be used, duplicated and distributed in its original form without permission of the author. Excerpts must follow fair use rules, with proper credits.

Copyright © 2009 by Marion Brady and Howard Brady.

Marion Brady4285 North Indian River DriveCocoa, Florida 32927Email: mbrady22@cfl.rr.com