Schools for Wisdom
Wisdom is a hard-earned intuitive awareness of how things will flow. Wisdom is playful. The wise person loves to share, and cajole and guide and wonder at what she doesn’t know.
.. Literally 50 years ago a classmate in our first year of medical school challenged our professor regarding why we needed to learn so many facts when we could look up information. The reply seems relevant here:
“You only see what you look for, and you only look for what you know.”
.. My gifted high school students HATE project-based group learning. They complain about it constantly. There is a teacher here at our school who does nothing but these gimmicky cooperative group projects that involve the students “discovering” the information themselves (using technology, of course), and my kids are so frustrated by it because they don’t have enough background knowledge to even know how to begin or what to search for online. I’m with Brooks on this – you need a basic framework of information before you can be left to your own devices to direct your own learning. It’s also incredibly inefficient. My students loathe the fact that they’ll spend weeks on something that the teacher could have told them in a single period. Just sayin’
.. Very much in agreement with David Brooks here.
The current worst tendency of educational reformers is the emphasis on skills at the expense of content.
You have to know what you’re talking about before you can talk (or write or think)persuasively. To know what you’re talking about, you have to know a lot: to acquire and then possess a body of knowledge.
The reason why skills are emphasized in education now is not far to seek. Students are referred to as future “workers.” Not citizens, not participants in a civilization that has been going on for quite a while. Education becomes job training, or what’s called the acquisition of “life-skills for the current high-tech economy.”