Social justice education is an idea that has captured the attention of teachers, scholars, leaders, and other in recent years. I have tried to find just what it means for me for some time. For context, I am a white, heterosexual male with grey hair; while I was raised in a weakly-practicing Protestant family, I Read More
Category: Schools
How Education is Changing
With the arrival of digital electronic computers and the knowledge age late in the 20th century, the stability and predictability of necessary literacy and numeracy skills and knowledge evaporated. These technologies evolve much more rapidly than other information technologies, and this necessitates information skills to be updated constantly and for new skills to be learned Read More
One Teacher’s Experience
Teaching is a fascinating profession; it comprises individuals who were all successful as students. Implicit in our concept of teaching is replicating for our students what proved successful for us. The reality, however, is that most of our students are not on the same path we are on (there are exceptions to this especially in Read More
Ideas About Education that Deserve Our Attention #2
Mark Deuze (2006), a scholar from Indiana University, Bloomington, identified participation, remediation, and bricolage as skills needed for the 21st century media landscape. Social networking sites and media sharing sites are examples of technologies that encourage this participation. The Internet provides access to vast information from sources of dubious reliability; this necessitates individuals take a Read More
A Short Rant on the Future of Education
Education is a well-established social institution. In modern history, it has served the multiple purposes to prepare young people to participate in the economic, political, and cultural life of the society. They have also been developed to prepare novices to enter professions and function within organizations. For many decades, that society was stable and slowly Read More
An Observation on Education and Politics
Especially in this century, education has become the focus of much political attention. Government agencies, politicians, and philanthropists are all much more influential in determining educational policy and practice than they were in previous generations. Neal McClusky, a policy analyst for the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom observed the effects of No Child Left Read More
A Response to Standard Education
Education has broad and diverse goals in our society; *free* and *appropriate* education is to be available for *all* learners. We educate learners who have many different needs and goals. We educate for society that recognizes many different needs and goals. Despite this, a generation of students and teachers have heard that education is grounded Read More
The Nature of Learning and Education Policy
My email response to a leader seems to deserve a place on this blog: The purpose of education is to help people learn. Learning is a natural physiological process of the human brain. Nature, then, defines the rules within which educators (and education policy makers) must play. While it might be convenient for policy makers Read More
Becoming Educated
As any teacher with more than two years of experience knows, education is an endeavor that is rich with fads. Each year it seems, the initiatives that were held up as “essential to the progress of the school” at the beginning of the previous year are forgotten and at the start of the next school Read More
Context and Curriculum
For 20th century purposes, de-contextualized curriculum created independent from students’ interests and experiences that has been stripped of complicating factors and designed to create products and performances for teachers alone may have been sufficient. Advocates of flat classrooms are among those who argued that more complex and sophisticated problems were appropriate for student tasks, especially Read More