Washington International School
The ceremony at the U.S. Capitol on January 20th will be as close to a global inauguration as one is likely to find in history. Perhaps there has never been such a thirst for visionary leadership as is now felt by a worldwide audience.
President-elect Obama’s campaign call for “change we can believe in” has been interpreted by enthusiasts far from America’s shores according to their own sense of urgency. Many focus upon a quick delivery from the current global economic crisis. Others wish for progress on social, political, or environmental issues. I recall a televised interview with a Nigerian dancing in the street immediately after the election who exclaimed that Africa’s problems would finally be solved.
I have nothing to add to the pundits’ inexhaustible commentary about the president-elect’s likelihood of success during these momentous times, though I wholeheartedly hope for the best. My take on change has to do with education. I am among those who believe that humanity is on the cusp of a new epoch and that it has never been more important for us to reflect upon what young people need to learn.
Futurists talk a lot these days about 21st Century competencies and the need for schools to embrace them in order to maintain national competitiveness. Numerous reports funded by large corporations and governments have reached similar conclusions about the importance of a global outlook, languages, the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), Web 2.0 skills, collaboration, inquiry-based learning, multidisciplinary thinking, etc. Skeptics wonder if these reports are not simply a new wave of expectations for teachers who are already overstretched, a fair question if such expectations are simply to be heaped on all the rest. Progressive schools, public and private, will claim that their students are already adept at these competencies.
What may be missing, even among the best schools, is a sense of the imperative. We are facing a body of alarming data that eclipses our concern about the global economy, such as a global population increase equal to an additional China and India, lower water tables and higher sea levels, the loss of biodiversity at 1000 times the normal rate, and ultimately a climate that may prove uninhabitable for our species — all issues that require new solutions and an unprecedented level of international cooperation.
Unfortunately, high school students are all too often covering the same topics as their parents’ generation with an emphasis upon discrete subjects and western culture, as if the circumstances above were irrelevant. One might hope that this traditional approach is providing a foundation for one that is more interdisciplinary and globally-minded in higher education. A recent report, however, by the Association of American Colleges & Universities suggests that we “miss entirely the question of whether students who have placed their hopes for the future in higher education are actually achieving the kind of learning they need for a complex and volatile world,” adding that “the modular curriculum, organized a century ago and still largely intact, has become increasingly dysfunctional.”
To this day, most students in secondary and tertiary institutions are assessed by their teachers for their mastery of a set body of static knowledge, demonstrated by their individual performance on assignments and examinations. In what ways does this mirror the real-world demands of working collaboratively in teams, where there is a constant search for new knowledge with an eye to the future? At the end of the day, the focus needs to be largely about problem-solving, defined by the OECD as the ability “to understand problems situated in novel and cross-curricular settings, to identify relevant information or constraints, to represent possible alternatives or solution paths, to develop solution strategies, and to solve problems and communicate the solutions.”
I am convinced that young people today will be able to solve our most pressing issues if we are willing to recalibrate what we do in schools and universities. Don Tapscott, author of Grown Up Digital, says of the Net Generation, “For the first time in history, children are more comfortable, knowledgeable, and literate than their parents with an innovation central to society.” He describes them as smarter, quicker, and more tolerant than previous generations. What an assertion, and let’s hope he’s right. We must determine the most effective way to incorporate academic structure and rigor with the dynamic communication and collaboration that students demonstrate outside of school on the Internet. We must help students to question the adequacy of our existing paradigms. We must encourage them to preserve the environmental systems upon which we all depend. We must, in short, embrace a new beginning. This is change we must believe in.
