Google Can Have It

There's a sentiment in educational reform that makes me uncomfortably twitchy every time I hear it or any of its subtle variations in the edu-chatter.  It goes something like this:

"Knowledge is expanding so rapidly, we can't possibly know what kids will need to know in the future, so we're better off teaching them HOW to learn, and not what to learn."

I'm all for taking a few healthy quaffs of the educational reform Kool Aid, but I find myself compelled to spit this particular mouthful back.  Or at the very least, wanting it to be something a little more palatable.  One of the reasons that I reject this sentiment is that it is painfully old.  John Dewey made similar remarks before the turn of the century (the twentieth century that is) when he said that it is "impossible to foretell definitely just what civilization will be twenty years from now" in advocating for education of character and the general qualities of intellect over knowledge sets that continuously evolve ("My Pedagogic Creed," 1897).

The notion that knowledge outpaces our ability to acquire it should be completely self evident.  More will be discovered about the mating habits of South American reptiles next week than I will ever learn (or want to learn) in a lifetime, to say nothing of the rest of the infinitesimally large body of disciplines in which facts accumulate daily on this planet.  That there will be more to learn than can ever be known is patently obvious and has been for as long as there have been people.

You know what hasn't changed very much in the last hundred years?  The starting points of knowledge that are necessary in order to one day actually live on the leading edge of knowledge generation.  Physics and astronomy, for instance, have seen some pretty amazing advances in the last few years, and the folks at the forefront of that work are getting to see and do some pretty amazing things.  But no matter how well I impart the HOW of knowledge acquisition to my students, none of them is going to get to do cutting edge particle physics without first knowing what a neutron is.  There is still some intellectual capital out there that some of our kids are going to want to acquire if figuring out how the universe is put together happens to be something that they want to do.  That's just as true now as it was 50 or 100 years ago, and the speed of new information creation doesn't make the old information obsolete.  One is dependent on the other.

Something significant, however, has changed in the last 20 years or so that we should be acknowledging as far more significant than the pace of present day academic endeavors: accessibility of the knowledge.  Growing up in the 80s, there were generally three sources I could go to in order to find stuff out that I wanted to know: school, the library, or to someone who already happened to know what I wanted to know.  Regardless, finding things out was generally more of a hassle than it was worth if you didn't have one of those sources readily available.  You just had to be content with not knowing.

Oh how times have changed.  I often say to people that I live in "the future."  I mean the kind of future I watched or read about in science fiction.  No we don't have flying cars or hoverboards, but I can take out a device small enough to fit in my pocket anywhere, any time and find out just about any discreet fact I want with the swipe of a finger.  The segment of my psyche that still exists back in 1985 is absolutely blown away by this.

So what does any of this have to do with teaching?  It tells us that, effectively, everyone already has access to the intellectual capital we've been peddling for the last hundred years.  Our position as knowledge gatekeepers has been utterly usurped by Google.  Knowing should theoretically be ubiquitous.  We are commodity traders of a commodity that just saw its supply go through the roof.  Worse, many of us still haven't recognized that the crash in our market has already happened and we're still trying to shlep a product that few need and even fewer want.

What makes this the essential era for progressive reform is that the information that has always been outstripping our ability to access it has now actually become completely accessible.  Our kids have more information available to them than any generation in history.  Making them mentally store some of it from time to time does have a few practical uses, but what they really need is more opportunities to navigate and use it in meaningful ways.  By "meaningful," I mean at the very least "meaningful to the students" and ideally also "meaningful to the society in which our students exist."

Like many teachers, I will certainly add my voice to the call on curriculum developers who have not already done so to revisit their works while considering that the intellectual capital we were meant to impart to our students in the last decade is now free and more readily available than ever.  The knowledge transmission portion of our jobs has been outsourced.

In the absence of sweeping curricular changes, however, we teachers need to find ways to allow students to do the things we are meant to teach them instead of to merely find out about those things.  If there exists knowledge worth possessing, let's make sure our students can experience the real value of that knowledge, and not just its ability to generate a particular grade on a report card.  To do that, we will need to shift our practices away from just planning (a purposeful ordering of a sequence of events, typically with a clear destination in mind) and move toward designing (a complex and creative process that combines thoughtful choices with a purpose that often doesn't have a clear destination at its end).  And to do this effectively will require not only a shift in thinking about how we're doing things, but a team effort to make it happen.  How will you find your team?  Or to ask the question more formally...

In what ways can collaborative design practices be generated in departments/schools where the practice is not already built in to the culture of the department/school by teachers? by admin?

TL;DR: The rate of new discoveries is not the reason we need to change teaching; the rate of information transmission is.  If Google can transmit knowledge, then teachers need to switch from "Knowledge Dispenser" to one of "Knowledge Navigator."  That's not going to be super easy, so we should really try to do it together.

Vive la revolution!!
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