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New Lamps for Old
Today, an excerpt from Daisy Christodoulou's Seven Myths about Education. I have chosen for today's lesson the myth that "The Twenty-first Century Fundamentally Changes Everything".
"It is of course true that the skills often defined as being twenty-first century are very important. Problem-solving, creative thinking, critical thinking and relating to people are all incredibly important skills. There is not one skill listed above that I would cavil at. But there is nothing uniquely twenty-first century about them. Mycenaean Greek craftsmen had to work with others, adapt and innovate. It is quite patronising to suggest that no one before the year 2000 every needed to think critically, solve problems, communicate, collaborate, create, innovate or read. Human beings have been doing most of these things for quite a long time.....
"To the extent that [the concept of twenty-first century education] says that creativity and problem-solving are important, it is merely banal; to the extent that it says such skills are unique to the twenty-first century, it is false but harmless; to the extent that it proposes certain ways of achieving these aims, it is actually pernicious. That is because, very often, the movement for twenty-first century skills is a codeword for removing knowledge from the curriculum, and removing knowledge from the curriculum will ensure that pupils do not develop twenty-first century skills.
"Of course, one way the twenty-first century really is different from other eras is in the incredible power of technology. But this difference, while real, tends to lead on to two more education fallacies. First, it tells us that advances in technology remove the need for pupils to memorise anything: that is, you can always just Google it. I show why this is false in Chapter 4. Second, it is used to support the idea that traditional bodies of knowledge are outmoded.
"There is just so much knowledge nowadays, and it is changing all the time, so there is no point learning any of it to begin with....The video Shift Happens tells us that 1.5 exabytes of unique new information are generated each year, and that the amount of new technical information is doubling each year. It then concludes that this flow of new information means that for students starting a four-year college or technical degree, half of what they learn in their first year will be outdated by their third year of study. This is simply not true. Of course people make new discoveries all the time, but a lot of those new discoveries do not disprove or supersede previous ones; in fact, they are more likely to build on previous discoveries and require intimate knowledge of them. The fundamental foundations of most disciplines are rarely, if ever, completely disapproved....
"The scientific and technological innovators who make the headlines tend to be quite young. But behind the headlines, the median age for the first scientific discovery has been increasing steadily over the decades. That is because to make a scientific breakthrough, first of all you have to reach the frontiers of knowledge in your discipline. As scientific knowledge has advanced over the decades, that frontier has got further and further away, which means that it takes researchers more and more time to reach it. What this should show us is that making a new scientific discovery requires an intimate understanding of what has gone before. In Newton's famous words, scientific giants are standing on the shoulders of others.....
"The guilty secret of the twenty-first century skills advocates is that it is their ideas which are rather old hat and outdated. Diane Ravitch notes how, at the beginning of the twentieth century, many educators wanted to throw away traditional knowledge and embrace twentieth century skills. There is little difference between what Martin Johnson calls a twenty-first century approach to teaching and what John Dewey was advocating at the dawn of the twentieth....
"The most depressing thing about all of this, therefore, is that old ideas that are thoroughly discredited are being warmed over and presented as being at the cutting edge. And it is particularly ironic that, as we will see in the next chapter, the actual cutting-edge science is telling us to do the complete opposite of what most of the twenty-first century skills advocates want."
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