How does an institution such as education that is
conservative by nature survive, much less thrive, in a social reality noted for
enormous change? There is little
evidence of it thriving today. There are
pockets of dynamic and interesting developments and innovations but, by all
accounts, this common enough institution is suffering from a general lack of
successes.
We all generally feel we know this
place called school; it’s an institution we deal with for a number of years
during our lives – as students and parents of students. But how well do we know these places? If you
ask the typical person why we have schools, he/she would probably respond that
schools are the places we learn things, where we acquire knowledge.
Yet knowledge is not a stagnant entity; as a matter of fact, we are in
the midst of an explosion of knowledge.
There are two areas of concern where this explosion is being palpably
felt: in the fields of technology and of
social relations.
The first of
these fields is readily seen. Warren L.
Ziegler makes a few observations on the pace of technological change: the language of mathematics has added more
developments to its arsenal of expressions in the last hundred years than were
developed in all of history before 1900; it is anticipated that about half of
what we teach engineers today will be passé in ten years, and half of what we
teach students today will be no longer truthful or otherwise useful by the time
they are in their forties or fifties.[1] That is a quick turn around and reflects how
much new knowledge is being produced.
Allan C.
Ornstein and Francis P. Hunkins attribute a great deal of this explosion to
something called “branching.”[2] That is, specialties are being subdivided and
creating areas of study at a greater pace, and within each subspecialty, there
are very bright people advancing what is known in ever greater
specificity.
Of course, this causes certain
concerns. One, the more obvious is how
do we as a society, generally, and education, more specifically, deal with this
increase not only overall, but in such variety?
And two, how do we assist in informing people about developments across
various fields? How do scientists,
engineers, and other experts keep up with developments in other branches, much
less in other disciplines, that have bearing on their work or interests? This is daunting in itself.
Now consider what that means to
education that is charged with introducing people to those various fields. One would think that central to such
introductions is giving the neophyte a good sense in which direction a
particular discipline is headed. And yet
with so much branching, is there a direction?
Curriculum workers, therefore, have
the challenge to select meaningfully and viably the knowledge they will include
in any given field and determine how they should organize that knowledge, both in
what is new and what is not so new. The
disciplines are dynamic entities.
And yet, in the midst of all this
change in the one basic “commodity” that education peddles, knowledge, how does
it sustain essential areas of knowledge that education must not forget, especially
public school education? It has been
argued in this blog – and it is still believed – that the primary
responsibility of schools is to prepare young people to be good citizens.
Given that, how do schools maintain a
focus on that charge? Any change agent
must hold on and honor that basic responsibility. And it is in this more socially oriented realm
that we are experiencing the second source of great change: the social dimension and how schooling is
expressed politically.
Schools are not the traditional
comfort zones they used to be. From
dealing with diversity to the handling of “inconvenient truths” such as global
warming and what we now know about race, the beginnings of life, what actually
happened historically in our past, all of this is part of the “boom” in
knowledge.
And this could prove to be the most
challenging aspect of schools as a change target for change agents. It is in this political environment that
he/she will attempt to introduce even newer ideas, goals, functions, and
processes. And yet, given the paucity of
successes alluded to above, can we afford not to attempt change? Given the effort here, one can surmise that
the answer being proposed is no.
Hopefully, the reader agrees.
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