Superintendent's Message
How will our culture change the way we learn?
Chris Kleidosty
December 18, 2006
As hunters and gatherers, we taught our young by modeling, telling stories and drawing pictures. Much of our time was spent in gathering necessities for survival.
Around 5,000 B.C., the agrarian age saw us maximize our crop yields to spend less time gathering necessities and more time using the cognition of our minds. The book The Illiad gave rise to scholarly work in 776 B.C.
The rise of scholarly work led to new discoveries in the 19th century, particularly how to exploit energy that could drive machinery and equipment to mass produce perfected goods. Universities began to flourish to promote more scholarly work. The thought of wanting children to have opportunities to scholarly thought gave rise to the one room school house. Information was limited to mostly books published by noteworthy scholars. The culture of the Industrial Age created a model to mass produce the education of the masses who attended public school.
In the early 1900's, traffic ways for information exploded with the advent of print media, telephones, radio and television. By the end of the 20th century, the Internet allowed essentially anyone to share AND publish information. Although the way information is gathered, delivered and published changed dramatically, the mass production model of education became perfected through continuous improvement yet it did not adapt to the culture of the times.
Human kind has essentially lived through 4 ages and if history and trends stay the same, the duration of such ages will continue to be a function of our exponential population growth thus ages will exponentially become shorter. The implications are the children in public schools today will live through 4-5 ages while most of the adult population today has lived through 1 or 2 (industrial and information ages). What are the implications for public education?
It is my belief that schools must create opportunities for students and staff to have access to information anytime, anywhere. Having access to this information must change the way we think about learning. Rather than delivering a set amount of information to the masses, we as educators must become facilitators to steer students how to find, sift and sort information. Technology allows for guided, individualized learning that can draw on past learning experiences of the individual. Rather than time being a function of learning, performance must drive what and when information is learned.
If history is bound to repeat itself and global trends continue, then we owe it to our kids to equip them with a learning model that allows them to learn and adapt quickly. If our kids indeed live through 4 or 5 ages in their lives, they will need to learn how to learn with the information that is available, not having the luxury of time like adults of yesterday and today.
As a learning community, we owe our time, planning and resources to discover how our culture can continue to revolutionize the way we teach our youth in public schools.
