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| Factory Work |
American education has been based on the factory model. Students would enter school around the age of 5 and would be grouped together simply by age. Throughout their educational journey, these students would learn basic reading, writing, and mathematical skills that would best suit them to work along a factory line. The raising of standards in public education has seen an increase in standardized testing. Simply put, standardized testing is creating a module that evaluates all students on the same level. This assists students in the Henry Ford model of education because they learn how to properly bubble in the "best answer" to a basic question. Let me be very clear before continuing with this line of thought, in no way shape, shape or form am I stating that there is not a need for factories or the men and women that work within them. I am simply stating that in today's fast paced world students need to be able to think more individually within the collective versus thinking only as a collective.
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| Factory Prep |
Enter 21st Century Education
The 21st education movement has been touted since the late 1990's and now it is 2012 and we are still trying to grasp what 21st education looks like. One constant all the research agrees on is that it must focus on ingenuity, collaboration and critical thinking. Dr. Tony Wagner a professor in education at Harvard University recently wrote about the gap between America and the rest of the world when it came to education. His book is entitled The Global Achievement Gap. Dr. Wagner has 7 skills that he has developed through extensive research and discussions with cooperate CEOs. 
Wagner discovered that student do need a base of knowledge, but CEOs are looking for his "7 Survival Skills".
The 7 Survival Skills
- Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
- Collaboration across networks and Leading by Influence
- Agility and Adaptability
- Initiative and Ingenuity
- Effective Oral and Written Communication
- Accessing and Analyzing Information
- Curiosity and Imagination
The challenge to educators is how will we move from teaching in a standardized model towards a collaborative, creative model. Today's world has not become "how much do you know?" but rather "what can you do with the information you find?". There are several new modules and modalities being created in the classroom that are attempting to tackle the challenges of the 21st Century student and workforce, they work towards helping students better utilize the 7 Survival Skills, but currently education is play catch up with the ever changing world.
Without the 7 “basic” survival skills, most of us would be completely lost in our professional lives. Understanding the gap between the students’ need for these skills and the level at which they are actually learning them is scary. I like the link to the article about “flipping the classroom”- this explains how the classroom experience of our generation and those before has been replaced with an evolving technological platform which virtually enables students to have an immediate wealth of knowledge at their fingertips and, better yet, a media for teachers to track and understand the steps their students took during the learning process. Nice read!
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