Walton Family Foundation and Gallup’s latest Teaching for Tomorrow report finds that while most teachers engage in professional development, the most beneficial opportunities — like peer collaboration — are often engaged in at a lower rate. At the same time, many teachers lack the classroom resources and staffing support needed to do their jobs effectively.
This report from Walton Family Foundation is a common perspective about the future of education. Education, like medicine, community support for the indigent, and even the nation’s governments – all are subject to the fate of history, changing society and real world confrontation. It is true that education as a concept is under great stress; it is true that the the recent plague interrupted an entire generation’s sense of decorum in the classroom; it is true that internet communications have reshaped the center of informative social dialogue; it is true that a slowly decaying form of government is incompetent in its service to the nation’s educational need and other government-supported cultural need as well.
Mariner suspects the largest impact, especially in colleges, is books. Who needs them? He has written in past posts to the blog about why we need education, methods of education and even the management of education. In this post he focuses on how humans must be educated in the future and even now as great shifts of the planet, technology and behavioral environments are bouncing about in the winds of change.
Education, in particular, is easily affected by culture and innovation. Note the following examples and how quickly and fully these examples modified ‘normal’ education practices.
֎ In 1910 only 79% of children enrolled in schools. Only 11 percent of all children between ages fourteen and seventeen were enrolled in high school, and only 8.8% graduated. By 1950, the age of fossil fuel emerged, two world wars occurred, and an economic restructuring changed the social structure of society. Education statistics immediately changed. In 1950 84% of children enrolled in school and high school graduation leaped to 59%. The GI benefit of a paid college education thrust colleges into the general public sphere and bachelor degrees were economically available.
֎ Ezra Stiles, a former president of Yale University, died nearly 230 years ago. It is Mr. Stiles that we owe the grading system that has prevailed since. His clear intention was to publicly rank and sort students according to their achievement, not to give them feedback on their learning or to suggest how they might improve before the next exam. This kind of class ranking was a mechanism for conveying status and privilege (or withholding them), oftentimes mirroring the social structures of the world beyond the ivy-covered university walls. (Some suggest this intent created the ‘woke’ class).
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Whether we accept it or not, Mother Nature outfits each and all her species with all the survival skills and behaviors needed to sustain a normal lifestyle for each specific species. In the case of mammals and many other branches of evolution as well, Mother outfitted them with ’emotion’. Emotion is the way humans integrate with one another, learn social values, develop compassion and reinforce safety. Emotion permits bonding not only to others but to the world around them.
Mariner looked back to our forefathers, the early Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals. No books. There was lots of art in caves, on stones and wood, even on pottery; perhaps art is a primitive form of writing, of documenting emotion.
Our forefathers learned through social bonding the need to build homes for shelter without the benefit of watching This Old House on PBS or the dozen books mariner bought in order to build his house. These primitives learned by watching, sharing and caring. – Call it peer collaboration.
Instructors of any subject no longer need to read a lot of books and be the only source of truth and knowledge. That form of respect is gone because students don’t need books any more. However, indeed very important, is the fact that today a student’s emotions are needed in order to build knowledge for survival. Instructors must use tools out of the emotions kit to build a world value system that is not available in today’s society.
Ancient Mariner
Mariner’s normal inclination is to see the world through the eye of a sociologist. The core of sociology is the study of results from human social patterns and aspects of culture associated with everyday life.