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03 Dec 09

Just about anything one likes can be presented as a component of
"21st-century" schooling. It's like "new and improved" except that here we're selling books and conferences instead of dessert toppings and floor
waxes. The appropriate response to this use, I believe, is either to roll your eyes or to point out that this particular emperor is parading around
in his birthday suit.
Second, to invoke the current century is sometimes meant to suggest an economic justification (and direction) for schooling
rather than a focus on what kids need. Notice how often terms like "competitiveness" and "global economy" tend to accompany "21st century skills."
The appropriate response here is alarm and active resistance, for reasons I tried to explain in
this article.
5 more annotations...
- A fair number of educators are using "21st-century skills" to refer to relatively sophisticated intellectual activity -
  the sort that includes critical thinking, creativity, and learning about ideas "in a context and for a purpose" (as I like to say). Notice that
  this instructional agenda has two separate implications: It favors higher-order skills as opposed to low-level skills, and it emphasizes the importance
  of skills -- ways of learning and thinking -- as opposed to facts.
- In his 1941 book Escape From Freedom, meanwhile, the psychoanalyst and
  social critic Erich Fromm wrote: "The pathetic superstition prevails that by knowing more and more facts one arrives at knowledge of reality.
  Hundreds of scattered and unrelated facts are dumped into the heads of students; their time and energy are taken up by learning more and more facts
  so that there is little left for thinking. To be sure, thinking without a knowledge of facts remains empty and fictitious; but 'information' alone
  can be just as much of an obstacle to thinking as the lack of it."
- this third meaning of "21st-century," the only one that's actually kind of progressive, is the one that's come under a withering and apparently
  coordinated attack from the "core knowledge" contingent.
- This approach to education is worth endorsing only if we are very clear that the reason for helping kids to think deeply and critically, to evaluate and
  apply knowledge, is because these capacities will enrich their lives and contribute to the common good in a democratic society. Not because it will
  outfit them with skills that will be useful to the corporations where they may eventually work, thereby allowing one company -- or country - to triumph
  over another.
- In other words, apart from the means by which we educate (facts or skills, basic or advanced), we have to think about the ends.
  Even if there really were something new about 21st-century schooling, fostering "competitiveness in a global economy" is a wretched rationale for
  providing it. And that will continue to be true even when the next century rolls around.

09 Jan 09

Borderland » Blog Archive » What We Measure

borderland.northernattitude.org/...what-we-measure - Preview

education progressive critique standards measurements accountability teaching learning

20 Nov 08

Digital Ethnography » Blog Archive » Kilpatrick on Education as Life

mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg - Preview

education progressive philosophy

31 Dec 06

Daily Kos: All things being equal

www.dailykos.com/...060 - Preview

academic blog interesting justice opinion philosophy politics progressive science

Though misguided in the economic quagmire of this country that disguises the realities of life, these are true urges of humanity - this is what we are: the creators of our own lives. That is what reason in its earliest formulation is: of that which is, that it is, humanity is the measure. This is science - the thought that by our own ingenuity in interpreting repetititve events, we can devine physical laws defining what we believe to be the world - and they can be [at least in part] universal - they can work. We can engineer things based on this knowledge. They may not be the ultimate truth, as even mathematically speaking, we have no way to capture truth, we only ever approximate it, but they can build the Verrazano Bridge, put humans in space, and destroy the planet.

14 Nov 06

The Science Creative Quarterly » SCIENCE AND SCIENCE EDUCATION IN THE SOUTH

www.scq.ubc.ca/?p=618 - Preview

article blog epistemology philosophy politics progressive public puns science science_education

But as a few of us in academia have come to realize, this segregation of science into its own small little world is not okay anymore. There needs to be a better understanding of the role of science in society, so that we can better use science to its fullest power. Especially in faltering societies floundering in poverty, disease and environmental destruction, there is certainly a need for a diffusion of science information.
the goal of this article is to be a call to arms for fellow science lovers who believe in a positive role for science in society. Scientist and science educators must be applied to for help in achieving the United Nations Eight Millennium Development Goals, lofty though they may be, to combat poverty and end environmental destruction. The interest and engagement of this grand epistemic community will be a small step forward in goal number eight alone which is to “foster a global partnership for development”[1].