What is a good education in the 21st Century?

Great Debates
1

A friend of mine who has two children, a girl in middle school and a boy going to college, told me that education is different now. Her children go to very expensive private schools, so they probably don’t represent the norm, but she says that their education represents the future.

According to her, facts are no longer going to be taught, because facts are so easily acquired, making it a waste of time and resources. A good education in the modern world is an education that first, of course, teaches you how to acquire the facts, but which focuses primarily on how to think about those facts.

I think the issue of facts vs. thinking has always been at the heart of assessing education, we’re all familiar with complaints about how useless it seems to memorize historical dates and places and events, and I think it is a little pointless to memorize it.

But I dont’ think it’s pointless to learn about it.

I don’t have kids so I don’t have direct access to understanding how they are being taught. I’m not even much of a source of information for how they used to be taught beyond grade 6 since I pretty much stopped going to school in seventh grade. [SIZE=1](I failed everything except English for 6 years, got out on the California Proficiency Exam the first year they offered it, screwed around for a couple years, then went to junior college and maintained a 4.0 for three years straight, so school was not a necessity for me. I’m kind of a weird reflection of my parents: my father was an auto-didact, my mother graduated Catholic school with honors two years ahead of schedule.)[/SIZE]

So I put this in GD for this debate, mostly so I can learn what others have to say about it: what constiututes a good basic education? What does a person have in their head when they have a good education? Is it reams of data and facts and specific skills (mostly math related) or is it the ability to find what they need to know and use it effectively? All of the above? Did a good education ever really include all of the above? In light of the ease with which facts can be acquired in the modern world, is it wasteful to focus on facts for their own sake, outside of using them as tools for thinking exercises?

Are some subjects the same as they ever were while others are different now, in terms of the role they have in a good education?

It occurs to me that this is kind of the macro version of the micro question I’ve always had about math and calculators, which we did not have or use when I was a kid. Is it important to be able to do it in your head, or is it enough to know how to make the calculator do it?

Maybe it won’t be debatey, just opiniony, but I’m sure the mods will handle it if that’s the case.

2

when she says that

she is indeed correct to a significant extent - not in terms of what is actually good, but in terms of what the educational establishment is pushing on the unsuspecting populace. YMMV depending on who you get as teachers, but that is indeed a popular “philosophy” amongst the “educators”. It has been popular, under various names and disguises, ever since the end of WW1. Yet it never succeeded in fully taking over because, well, the sane people have fought back and were to some extent successful in slowing the spread of this evil.

But what you have to realize is, just because this is what is being done it doesn’t make this a good education in the 21st century. Or in any other century. What is happening is educational malpractice on a colossal scale - indeed, the scale is such that they have managed to brainwash the bulk of their victims into accepting this as the “normal”.

Just because Oceania got its people to accept that “freedom is slavery” by continual brainwashing does not make it so. The same applies to the Western “educators”. They are lying, and your sister just happens to be one of the patsies who fell for these lies.

3

Well, ok, but could you expand on this by explaining why you think it is true?

4

And that would be my friend, not my sister, calling into question what you were taught as far as acquiring information… :smiley:

5

If anything, I’d say more emphasis is needed on facts in the 21st century. So much information available and most of it full of omissions, half truths, and outright lies.

6

Learning lists of facts has never been and never will be adequate for a good education.

Quoth Hbns:

This is precisely why teaching facts is useless: Even if you teach true facts, someone else is going to come along and teach false facts. If you’re just teaching facts, then misinformation gets taught just as easily as information. You need to learn how to tell the difference.

7

I agree that learning facts does not, in itself, constitute a good education; students need to learn concepts and ways of thinking as well. But what often gets lost in these discussions is that these types of learning are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they reinforce each other, and the more of one type of knowledge you have, the easier it is to acquire other types of knowledge.

For example, the ability to think critically and assess sources is important, but students need some basic factual knowledge before they can do any of these things. An educated person can discriminate between, say, a scholarly article about the causes of autism and a whack-job anti-vaccination web site because they know a bit about the history of this particular debate, about the reputation of various sources, about logical fallacies, and maybe even about spelling and grammar. A person who lacks any of these types of factual knowledge can’t reliably engage in this kind of critical thinking (although a robot that only knows facts couldn’t do it either).

It works the other way, too – you’re more likely to remember facts if you can see how they fit together. Being able to recite all the states in the order when they were admitted to the union is a parlor trick (and I wouldn’t recommend that schools spend any time at all forcing students to memorize this), but it’s a parlor trick that’s a lot easier to learn if you understand the general concept of westward expansion, know a little about the Missouri Compromise and its consequences, etc. Understanding the concepts makes the facts fall into place, and vice versa.

8

Just enough liberal arts and humanities that you learn how to question and think critically, but not so much that you start thinking it’s a good idea.

9

I tend to agree with your sister. You aren’t going to remember facts unless you use them or are interested in them anyway. That’s just not how human brains work, unless you spend a lot of time and effort to get people to memorize stuff, which is not necessarily helpful. I went to St. John’s College, which does the Great Books program. We didn’t really have to memorize much beyond some conjugations, and the emphasis was on critical thought and learning to judge ideas on their own merits. That’s been a lot more useful to me nowadays than any of the memorization that I had to do before. Moreover, that method of learning generally requires a better understanding of the theories behind the ideas. If you understand those, you don’t need to memorize the basic equations or whatever; you’ll be able to figure it out on your own.

10

While we do live in a world of instant access to facts, it is impossible for a person with no former knowledge of (genetics) to simply go on line and understand how modern genetics work. If the person has a background of basic information regarding genetics already, and has been taught how to distinguish good info from bad info on the net, then the person is in a position to then extend their understanding of genetics and to find answers to specific questions.

If the person does not have a background in genetics, then they will not be able to distinguish between good and bad sources of information on the internet. This discrimination skill can be taught…

So yes, we do still need a basic factual knowledge of many areas, but most simple facts can be found by research. The teacher puts the initial information into a meaningful form so that the student can understand and continue to learn on his/her own.

11

i believe in reasonably priced formal education and proper nurturing above all. don’t teach your children to study and get good grades. teach them how to think.

12

21st Century education is being developed by organizations like Knowledgeworks, New Tech Network, and STRIVE to restructure schools into “project-based learning” institutions.

Most of the schools this is being applied to are 9-12, although studies are being done to convert K-9th grade. Since most of the working public engage in project-based endeavors, applying the principals to students makes for very effective citizens, employees, and leaders.

As such, students are given projects like, “Develop your own student government.” To do so, they have to research various forms of governments (history), debate the forms and systems they might like to apply (social studies), and draw up constitutions by which to run the school by (english). Most of the classes are blended; biology and P.E., the aforementioned English, history, and social studies, etc.

In the schools I have visited that are applying this type of education rubric, all of the students are given computers, and because they are working in teams, no one child excels with another failing - there is accountability and practically no cheating.

It is pretty astonishing that many of these schools have 99% graduation rates and 95% of the students go on to college.

13

Good working knowledge of facts are needed for several reasons. For starters it forms an excellent filter for nonsense that knocks some misinformation from getting in right off the bat, and there are going to be times when you need to know something and google isn’t handy and you don’t necessarily get to the true facts on it quick anyway. Facts create an infrastructure that attaches to other knowledge- the connections between A and K and J and BL and P and QA are what really keep the brain sharp. Much of the addition to knowledge by great researchers is discovered through serendipitous learning rather than straightforward “What is A plus 12” searching.

Plus, they’re just good to know: I hope Jeopardy isn’t ever replaced by Find-it-on-Google.

I agree that critical thinking and research need to be taught of course, but I don’t think they should supplant factbased education and to do so reeks of really impractical pedagogy. Facts are essential to critical thinking or else it becomes all theory and sophistry.

14

Is this debate very much narrower than it first appears? The discussion makes sense in the context of teaching history, though I struggle to see how you could teach history meaningfully without establishing some facts. But chemistry? There’s no point teaching factual chemistry, kids need to understand how to think about the facts of chemistry (which you can find out from the internet)? This doesn’t seem to me to be a coherent hypothesis. Though I’ve probably just misunderstood the point.

15

We are in agreement then.

In retrospect I can see that emphasis on facts does not read as I intended. Should have said “emphasis on fact finding”. Or just come out and said critical thinking skills, but I tried to be a little too cutesy.

16

I fully agree that critical thinking is a vital component to a 21st century education (though if you’ve ever been in a room of 12 academics, every one of whom LOVES the sound of their own voice [and keep interrupting me :p] then you know that what constitutes “teaching critical thinking” is a huge loaded way-more-controversial-and-nebulous-than-it-needs-to-be topic). However, in the southeast and other red states I agree with the Fundamentalists on one thing, that being we’ll see the Second Coming before we see true critical thinking taught in schools because it’s always going to be on a collision course with “What about God?” I live in Alabama where there are still “only a theory” stickers on biology textbooks and of course the stickers don’t mention that it’s a scientific theory which is a tad different than a conspiracy theory and or that gravity is “only a theory”; it’s not going to be easy working Occam’s Razor into the classrooms.

17

The only time I can recall where facts were so important was in history classes, but even then, points were given for analysis, too.

I’d say critical thinking is important, so philosophy classes, especially logic is helpful. One needs to be able to communicate effectively, too, so rhetoric is also required. And, people should know math and it’s effects in daily life, so add in mathematics and physics. Mastery in all these areas (assuming one can read, too) will definitely make for an intelligent person.

18

Although in general I think students need to be taught both facts and critical thinking skills, the specfics depend on the subject and grade level.

I mean, my wife is a first grade teacher, and in her math class she teaches the fact that a dime is worth ten cents. That’s a fact which needs to be taught (lots of kids don’t know it yet upon entering first grade) and of which there is not much dispute.

19

Learning facts is really important in the early grades, when most kids don’t know how to read and barely know how to count. Just knowing how to spell “dog” is a fact that must be learned.

20

This has been one of my central questions as a high school science teacher
for the last 10 years. The old content vs process debate. But I have
arrived at a point in my thinking where I have to wonder if the debate
exists because we spend too much time on “irrelevant” and “trivial”
details in classes. While it might be useful to know that DNA is a recipe
for making a living thing and is unique to each person (in case the
government politely asks you for some), do most people really need to know
about adenine, tRNA, rRNA, protein folding, codons, etc?

So, what does the average person actually NEED to learn/know to get by on
a daily basis in the 21st century? This average person excludes experts
in a given field like academics, professors, teachers, researchers,
consultants, etc who make their living in that given field. In other
words, does a fireman NEED to know how to analyze a poem, does a math
teacher NEED to know about allopatric speciation, does an English teacher
NEED to know geometry, does a programmer NEED to know the order of the
Chinese dynasties? Do you get by without knowing these and lots of other
facts that were taught to you in school? If so, then what’s left that you
do remember and NEED on a daily basis from your school days?