Do you think the main purpose of schools is to prepare your child for a career? Think again. Workers entering the workforce in 2014 may hold as many as 30 jobs in their lifetimes, half of which do not even exist today. How could schools possibly prepare students for jobs that don't even exist? They can't.
Instead, schools should prepare students who can deal with the vast array of information this is available to them. Instead of trying to memorize it all, they should learning to wisely search for it, analyze it for accuracy, synthesize it, and communicate it. They need to be able to creatively construct answers to problems, and not even ideal solutions, just sufficient ones, rapidly. Thomas Jefferson told us the to sustain a democracy, public schools should help students to be ethical participants in "the marketplace of ideas," able to listen to reasoned arguments, detect logical conclusions from impassioned and fanatical ideas.To do this they need a basic literacies in reading, math, history, and science, plus the new literacies of dealing with the Internet and virtual worlds.
Does our new Common Core State Standards, and our new set of Chromebooks support the development of these important skills, or are schools losing touch with their main purpose?
I will address these and other school issues in future posts.
-- Dr. Mike
This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.
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