Bo Adams's List: School Change

• those with control over education policy are making decisions on the old model of schooling — knowledge held by teachers who deliver information to students — while young learners are clamoring for something different.
• “Modern learning is more about discovery,” Richardson said. “It’s not so much waiting as doing.”
• Learners should be empowered to continue learning and to use their interests and passion to fuel projects that they care about.
• “In modern learning it’s all about producing and iterating, figuring out what’s working and not working, revising, trying again,”

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• We “learn,” and after this we “do.” We go to school and then we go to work.

   

  This approach does not map very well to personal and professional success in America today. Learning and doing have become inseparable in the face of conditions that invite us to discover.
• In such conditions the futures of law, medicine, philosophy, engineering, and agriculture – with just about every other field – are to be rediscovered.

  • In this paragraph there are so many "project starters" that one could design an entire "curriculum" to weave them into an advanced problem solving component to school!
• Americans need to learn how to discover.
• Failing to create a new way of learning adapted to contemporary circumstances might be a national disaster.
• Against this arresting background, an exciting new kind of learning is taking place in America. Alternatively framed as maker classes, after-school innovation programs, and innovation prizes, these programs are frequently not framed as learning at all.
• Discovery has always provoked interest, but how one discovers may today interest us even more.
• in the course I teach, How to Create Things and Have Them Matter, students are asked to look, listen, and discover, using their own creative genius, while observing contemporary phenomena that matter today.
• Learning by an original and personal process of discovery is a trend on many US university campuses
• Success brings not just a good grade, or the financial reward of a prize. It brings the satisfaction that one can realize dreams, and thrive, in a world framed by major dramatic questions. And this fans the kind of passion that propels an innovator along a long creative career.
• Culture labs conduct or invite experiments in art and design to explore contemporary questions that seem hard or even impossible to address in more conventional science and engineering labs.
• The culture lab is the latest indication that learning is changing in America. It cannot happen too fast.
• we need to get smarter in ways that match the challenges we now face.

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• Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.
• The first thing that college is for is to teach you to think.
• Learning how to think is only the beginning, though. There’s something in particular you need to think about: building a self.
• But it is only through the act of establishing communication between the mind and the heart, the mind and experience, that you become an individual, a unique being—a soul.
• Perhaps it’s no surprise, when kids are trained to think of service as something they are ultimately doing for themselves—that is, for their résumés
• How about just doing good?
• I don’t think it occurs to the people in charge of elite colleges that the concept of leadership ought to have a higher meaning, or, really, any meaning.
• It’s considered glamorous to drop out of a selective college if you want to become the next Mark Zuckerberg, but ludicrous to stay in to become a social worker.
• “What Wall Street figured out,” as Ezra Klein has put it, “is that colleges are producing a large number of very smart, completely confused graduates. Kids who have ample mental horsepower, an incredible work ethic and no idea what to do next.”
• You cannot cogitate your way to sympathy with people of different backgrounds, still less to knowledge of them. You need to interact with them directly, and it has to be on an equal footing: not in the context of “service,” and not in the spirit of “making an effort,” either—swooping down on a member of the college support staff and offering to “buy them a coffee,” as a former Yalie once suggested, in order to “ask them about themselves.”
• Kids at less prestigious schools are apt to be more interesting, more curious, more open, and far less entitled and competitive.
• If there is anywhere that college is still college—anywhere that teaching and the humanities are still accorded pride of place—it is the liberal arts college.
• The education system has to act to mitigate the class system, not reproduce it.
• If schools are going to train a better class of leaders than the ones we have today, they’re going to have to ask themselves what kinds of qualities they need to promote.

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• Deresiewicz offers a vision of what it takes to move from adolescence to adulthood. Everyone is born with a mind, he writes, but it is only through introspection, observation, connecting the head and the heart, making meaning of experience and finding an organizing purpose that you build a unique individual self.
• to discover “just what it is that’s worth wanting.”
• Instead of being intervals of freedom, they are breeding grounds for advancement. Students are too busy jumping through the next hurdle in the résumé race to figure out what they really want. They are too frantic tasting everything on the smorgasbord to have life-altering encounters. They have a terror of closing off options. They have been inculcated with a lust for prestige and a fear of doing things that may put their status at risk.
• The system pressures them to be excellent, but excellent sheep.
• What we have before us then, is three distinct purposes for a university: the commercial purpose (starting a career), Pinker’s cognitive purpose (acquiring information and learning how to think) and Deresiewicz’s moral purpose (building an integrated self).

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