Seth Godin
Stop Stealing Dreams (Part Four)
Posted by Mar 15, 2012 1 comment
Seth Godin
All week, we will be sharing (numbered) points from Seth Godin’s new education manifesto, Stop Stealing Dreams (what is school for?). You can download a free copy of the full 100-page manifesto at Squidoo.com.
17. Reinventing school
If the new goal of school is to create something different from what we have now, and if new technologies and new connections are changing the way school can deliver its lessons, it’s time for a change.
Here are a dozen ways school can be rethought:
Homework during the day, lectures at night
Open book, open note, all the time
Access to any course, anywhere in the world
Precise, focused instruction instead of mass, generalized instruction
The end of multiple-choice exams
Experience instead of test scores as a measure of achievement
The end of compliance as an outcome
Cooperation instead of isolation
Amplification of outlying students, teachers, and ideas
Transformation of the role of the teacher
Lifelong learning, earlier work
Death of the nearly famous college
It’s easier than ever to open a school, to bring new technology into school, and to change how we teach. But if all we do with these tools is teach compliance and consumption, that’s all we’re going to get. School can and must do more than train the factory workers of tomorrow.
64. Connecting the dots vs. collecting the dots
The industrial model of school is organized around exposing students to ever increasing amounts of stuff and then testing them on it. Collecting dots.
Almost none of it is spent in teaching them the skills necessary to connect dots.
The magic of connecting dots is that once you learn the techniques, the dots can change but you’ll still be good at connecting them.
Comments
Wow, collecting the dots, staying nimble and eager for innovation. Thank you for your succinct plausible solutions. We are listening! Arts teaching, learning and assessment practices are real-time third-space hands-on moments which are literally calibrating creativity, discipline and beauty, a vision towards regeneration. How does one liberate from structures, strictures, and scriptures embedded in generations of blood and mortar?