HuffPo | From Plato to Aurobindo, from Vygotsky to Montessori, centuries of
educational thinking have vigorously debated a central pedagogical
question: How do we spark creativity, curiosity, and wonder in children?
But those who philosophized pre-Google were prevented from wondering
just how the Internet might influence the contemporary answer to this
age-old question. Today, we can and must; a generation that has not
known a world without vast global and online connectivity demands it of
us.
But first, a bit of history: to keep the world's military-industrial
machine running at the zenith of the British Empire, Victorians
assembled an education system to mass-produce workers with identical
skills. Plucked from the classroom and plugged instantly into the
system, citizens were churned through an educational factory engineered
for maximum productivity.
Like most things designed by the Victorians, it was a robust system.
It worked. Schools, in a sense, manufactured generations of workers for
an industrial age.
But what got us here, won't get us there. Schools today are the
product of an expired age; standardized curricula, outdated pedagogy,
and cookie cutter assessments are relics of an earlier time. Schools
still operate as if all knowledge is contained in books, and as if the
salient points in books must be stored in each human brain -- to be used
when needed. The political and financial powers controlling schools
decide what these salient points are. Schools ensure their storage and
retrieval. Students are rewarded for memorization, not imagination or
resourcefulness.
