ARTSblog

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.