First thread:
The workplace is changing, and these changes are gradually rendering
education as traditionally delivered more and more unconnected to what its
graduates need to know and how they need to perform at work...
These changes are transforming the workplace
- reducing the number of lower-skill jobs
- requiring higher level skills
- changing what all workers need to know and how they need to use what they
know
- limiting the long-term value of any current stock of knowledge or skill.
The example is given of the obsolesence of repetitive skills in banking,
replaced by a shift toward workers understanding bank services and
customers needs. Another example is in textiles, where the practice is no
longer for workers to run looms, but instead reconfigure, program and
troubleshoot automated machines to handle frequent style changes.
Second thread:
Our schools routinely and profoundly violate what we know about how people
learn most effectively and the conditions under which they apply their
knowlege appropriately to new situations...
There are several bulleted items, here are two that seem to relate to
previous posts:
First. What makes learning situations so ineffective is that they reflect
mistaken assumptions about how people learn. Most education and training
is structure around the assumptions that:
- learners are passive receivers of wisdom
- what is learned should be broken down into separate pieces
- getting the right answer is the purpose of learning
- skills and knowledge should be acquired independently of their context
Second. The mismatch between the current focus of K-12 schools and the
needs of our students is deeply routed in a dualism that distinguishes
between
- head and hand
- academic and vocational education
- knowing and doing
- abstract and applied
- education and training
- school-based and work-based learning.
Finally, there are three fundamental recommendations:
1) Change the mission of K-12 schools to take educational responsibility
for the economic futures of all students.
2) Dissolve the dualism that perpetuates the deep division between adademic
and vocational education
3) Organize learning around the principles of cognitive apprenticeship.
Taken from "The Double Helix of Education and
the Economy", by Sue Berryman and Thomas Bailey
Bill Barowy, Associate Professor
Technology in Education
Lesley College, 29 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790
Phone: 617-349-8168 / Fax: 617-349-8169
_______________________
"One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself
and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful."
[Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]