Lots of people seem to be blogging about the latest education article in Time magazine, titled “How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century.” (You can’t get to the full article without a subscription, but your public library has access to tons of online databases … it’s worth the few minutes of searching.)

Will Richardson bullets a list of main points, and Dave Warlick pulls what’s probably the strongest quote in the article. I also like this quote:

American schools aren’t exactly frozen in time, but considering the pace of change in other areas of life, our public schools tend to feel like throwbacks. … A yawning chasm (with an emphasis on yawning) separates the world inside the school house from the world outside.

The important question, of course, is this one:

Can our public schools, originally designed to educate workers for agrarian life and industrial-age factories, make the necessary shifts?

At last, others are starting to realize that the memorization of facts in a world where information is growing exponentially is no longer the best way to spend a student’s time (which, incidentally, invalidates testing that concerns itself mainly with these types of facts), that depth of understanding is more important than breadth of accumulated facts, that interdisciplinary learning (read: convergence and collaboration) is more powerful than isolated study.

I agree with Warlick when he says that the article …

… validates what most of us have been saying for years. [The article] simply says it more loudly and to more people — and probably more eloquently.

What worries me, though, is that this article is one more example of “what we already know.” We “already know” so much about learning that no one seems to be listening to: we know the teenage brain has a sleeping pattern public schools don’t respect, we know the brain doesn’t like to learn anything it doesn’t understand as immediately necessary for survival or pleasure, we know that the affective influences are just as powerful as any other on whether or not students learn, and we know that the world is changing. But schools aren’t listening, it seems.

I hope that those standing in the way of technology’s work in the classroom will realize how many of the issues raised by this article can be addressed by the reflective use of technology. I hope those in support of bubble-filled standardized tests will realize how irrelevant their results are to our current and coming world.

In short, I hope people will listen.

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