How about schools not try to prepare compliant workers and instead try to teach children how to learn and think?
History, art, music, mathematics, science, literature... you know, an education, not training.
History, art, music, mathematics, science, literature... you know, an education, not training.
The whole Willingham book is excellent.
Teaching taught me that the number of students who want to learn how to learn and think is small, but the number of such people who congregate on sites like Slashdot (and now Hacker News) is quite large.
Schools will worry when their funding sources are at risk, and we're (realistically) so far from that world that I doubt any of the powers that be in schools give a damn.
Very few people in society have the privilege of treating education as a route to becoming cultured. The storied universities you cherish were built by the rich for the rich, it is only recently that we have determined that the masses desperately need a grounding in romantic literature. Is it important to you that your accountant know Chaucer? Does your favorite artist really need to know chemistry?
In the end you have to feed yourself. I don't want to be responsible for feeding you and you don't want to be responsible for feeding me. If that means you learn something applied that is only useful for ten years and requires you to learn something else useful in the next ten years, so be it.
As it stands, why do people put such an emphasis on what someone studies as an undergraduate? Personally, I love reading history...read dozens of dense history books a year, and consider myself a decent self-taught historian. My degree is not in history. Why does it need to be?
So some of what I speak of is personal and up close.
I work at a liberal arts university and hear this from faculty: "We don't care about skills, we care about the ability to learn". The problem is that today's learners need to be super learners. They need the ability to do divergent thinking, then need to work collaboratively in teams. Working this way is a skill. They need to be able to solve a wide body of problems safely where failure does not impact grades.
https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_pa...
But they don't encourage this sort of learning. And don't even mention the "skill" word which is considered evil. I hear the 500 year old liberal arts model woks just fine.
While our business school quietly is working on these skills and the students are finding great jobs and starting businesses successfully and more all while the liberal arts side is ignoring the future.
The book did sound a little conspiracy theorish, but on the whole it was rather interesting and well there is an entire unschooling movement exactly trying to undo/avoid the damages of the school system.
On a personal basis I didn't get my love of reading, computers or math from school, and mostly it was a waste of time. Did learn the official way to touch type though, so there is that.
That would upset the policy makers and their paymasters.