In our quest to create a rationale for what young people need to know and be able to do in the future and for changing instructional practice we have come to rely on our reading of books such as the World Is Flat, A Whole New Mind, videos such as Did You Know, and the various organizations identifying 21st Century Skills. The focus of these works is on economics and sustaining our place in the world of the future. We talk about knowledge and skills that position our kids for options in the future that result in sustaining a high quality of life; in other words making enough money.
The following blog entry and video does a great job of putting this economic driver in a different context. It questions the focus on economics and forces one to think about the world these kids and future generations will inherit if we don't start thinking about the physical world and not just sustaining or improving our place in it. It questions competition as a driver and what are we intentionally doing to create a focus on what the economic driver has done to our world and will continue to do if we don't change our focus. We talk about much of what is shared in this video, we focus on much with our Outcomes and Indicators, but are we really teaching in a way that will change this economic focus? Should we be adding another level of complexity to our work? Certainly our legislators at the state and federal level see the economy as the main driver for change in our profession. We need more engineers and IT people to complete in this global economy is what we continually hear from them.
This video and the blog entry have certainly created more dissonance for me. I encourage you to view it and read the entry. It would serve as a wonderful point of departure for a conversation with staff about our Classroom 10 goal. It has also made me admire Bruce even more with his decision to buy a hybrid. I kidded him about it at the time and laughed about Hill calling him a tree hugger, but he cares and is aligning his behavior with his belief system. I still struggle to recycle when I go to the dump. At the system level what is our belief system and is our behavior aligned with it?
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I whole heartedly agree with the idea that we need to have a balanced curriculum that includes social and environmental responsibility. However, I was a little uncomfortable with this video (just as I was a little uncomfortable with “Did You Know.”) This video and the message at the beginning felt very socialist. I think we walk a cautious line in our democracy about creating “truths” for our kids. Fundamentally, we need to teach our kids to determine what they value. We need to make sure they understand consequences of their actions, but I am not sure that it is our job to tell them that economic wealth is the same as environmental wealth. (I may believe it, but it is not my job to deliver my message, it is my job to help the students be able to think for themselves.) This reminds me of a class in my master’s program when we took a quiz that ultimately showed us what we thought the fundamental purpose of education was. From what I remember, there were about seven categories. Some of these included “to continue our democracy”, “to create good workers for our economy”, “to create an educated population that will continue the cultural growth of our nation”, etc. I am certain that if our ELT sat as a group and took that quiz, we would not share the same “fundamental purpose.” I don’t remember if “teaching kids to think” was one of the categories, but that would my hope for the future.
I would not show this video to my staff. While I thought “Did You Know” was near the line on political correctness, it was mostly facts that came with cites that allowed the person watching to determine the value of the information. This video was more about images, quotes, and conclusions, rather than the presentation of facts. Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” is a much better “fact based” video (of course he draws his own conclusions, but the watcher has facts by which to base their own opinion). Showing part of the Inconvenient Truth and having a conversation with the staff about what those facts mean for educating our students I think would be more effective. I am interested in what other people thought about this.
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