Stop Stealing Dreams (what is school for?)

Found this on my Facebook page from 2012; reposting here because I think it's all still true.

Seth Godin has been applying his "markets are changing" thinking to education for a while, so it's no surprise that he's collected and expanded these thoughts into a manifesto. It's well worth reading. Here are a few of my thoughts:

1) Two weeks ago, at ELI, I said to a colleague that "it's not that teaching to the test is bad, it's that our tests are broken." Nice to have a famous person say that over and over. The big problem is that our high-stakes tests don't test the right skills, so teaching to them does hurt people.

2) We're building a huge infrastructure of open information, and even closed information at better price points, but this is show more really only relevant to people with the drive to benefit from them. (There are too many other distractions if you're not in hot pursuit of a skill or knowledge base.) So the question is, how can we raise more people with the drive to learn?

3) I'd like to see a response which fleshes out what the role of a teacher looks like in this regime. This goes hand-in-hand with the above... in lots of fields, people need scaffolding, both emotionally and intellectually. I'll also throw out the question again - what would college look like if we didn't have to spend time unlearning bad habits from high school?

Manifesti are hard reading, even when you agree. Long ones moreso. Take breaks, question sentences, don't hurt yourself. show less

Great free ebook that pretty much synopsis all my thoughts on education. I feel like the book could have came from my brain. :)

Favorite Quotes: "The fork in this road is ever more pronounced because there’s now so much more to choose from. A citizen can spend his spare time getting smarter, more motivated, and more involved, or he can tune out, drop out, and entertain himself into a stupor. The same devices deliver either or both from the online ether—and the choice that people make is one that’s going to develop early, based on the expectations of our teachers and the standards of our peers."

"When access to information was limited, we needed to load students up with facts. Now, when we have no scarcity of facts or the access to show more them, we need to load them up with understanding." show less

The book is good. It is just a subject I am not interested in.