Pretty much every hand went up. He asked how many people remember, basically, what it is. About half went up. He then asked how many have used their knowledge of mitosis in the last 10 years. One hand went up.
Just as educators are pushing students to build a huge reservoir of knowledge, they are also focused on having students master material, sometimes at the expense of relevance. This happens, for example, with the achievement gap. The achievement gap asks if students are achieving X. Instead, it might be more useful to look at the relevance gap, which asks if X is going to matter to the lives students are likely to lead.
That knowledge goes somewhere. Mastering quadratic equations is challenging, but those equations are not so lifeworthy. The typical math curriculum is a good example of how we want learners to move toward expertise in a subject, with little regard for usefulness.
In fact, expert amateurism works great, he says, in most of what we do in our lives — raising children, filing taxes, appreciating art, understanding insurance rates, or dealing with our own health care. Perkins is very clear that expertise in a specific field is not bad; in fact, he encourages it and assumes it will happen at the college or university level. So we come back to the question: What is worth learning? In his book, Perkins promises that he is not going to answer that question, at least not in a tidy way.
Perkins says there would be no way to create a definitive list because there are lots of things worth learning at any given time or for a specialized career or even simply because we enjoy learning. However, wagering that tomorrow will be pretty much like yesterday does not seem to be a very good bet today. Perhaps we need a different vision of education, a vision that foregrounds educating for the unknown as much as for the known.
This is a vote for a richer form of achievement. I sincerely believe this will be the next phase, if only because we are going to be very wary for some time of anybody with the slightest cough. If we think the present situation is an exception and that, after quarantine, everything will return to how it was before, I think we are wrong.
Education is one of the most important challenges, it will surely change after this episode with all that this entails in terms of opportunity for those who know how to deal with it properly , and it will be essential for institutions to be up to speed. This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here.
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