Fear is at the root of what's happening today. I think it's about change for many. Change is scary. But some also feel their values are being eroded or disregarded. Consider the religious right. On Bloom, Creating is the top level, but creativity happens much earlier. You can't "construct meaning" or "interpret" without it. Often those "gifted" students are doing all of levels at once. They just didn't need explicit instruction to get there. But I also think you can ask students to create and have them come up with what they need to know about something as they try to figure it out. Just make sure Foundational Skills are in place first. For me, it's skills, not facts.
We're living in a culture in which our media and advertising have learned to trigger our amygdalae for their own profit and for everyone's loss. People who are fearful, research has shown, can't learn as well so not only do we have them being triggered by false information, but once they're triggered, they cease being able to process new information in any rational way. I hate to pin this on a "king"-like figure, but I do think that those people might need someone charismatic to guide them back. Right now they've got someone charismatic guiding them into the hole he got them to dig for him.
As to learning, yes, basic skills are important. But when I look at my own lifelong way of learning new things, I always start by assigning myself a creative task that I know I am not quite prepared to do. I can't learn in the order of Bloom's Taxonomy levels—at all. I completely fail when I try. I never understood this about myself until I started to teach children and realized that educational pedagogy is just 100% wrong—upside-down, in fact—for many learners. Some of those learners are identified gifted, but many aren't. Whatever you call it, those learners tend to be the people who achieve at a higher level eventually, whether they were stellar students or dropouts. They use their whole brain for tasks, and rote learning with no purpose of the sort that is emphasized in many schools just doesn't work for them.
My episode on creativity has definitely sparked a lot of thoughts!
It's true that education has always followed fads. But I think there's a real struggle in public education in dealing with the fact that unlike 100 years ago, there are many families who simply don't believe in a basic set of skills and knowledge that makes you "educated." Now, 100 years ago that set was deeply tied to assumptions based on racist and sexist ideals, and so it definitely needed a reset. But in fact, once you do away with the racist and sexist underpinnings, there still is a set of skills and knowledge that make someone educated.
The problem here is that since public education serves the public, they have to respond to the public for better and for worse. It's much better, for example, not to force kids to read a boring old novel that doesn't relate to their current lives just because some white guys decided in 1925 that all kids should read it. But these days, many schools are doing away with reading novels altogether because families don't value it. Reading and understanding a metaphorical work is very definitely part of being a person who has attained basic education, in my opinion. So is knowing how to do enough math to function well in modern society, in which case we should be requiring statistics because that's the math that really matters now.
But how do we make that case when so many people think that because their phone in their hand can answer any question they ask it (with AI that may or may not be telling them the truth)? How do we make that case when politicians want our educational system to promote a political agenda? How do we decide what is a fundamental aspect of society that kids need to learn about and what is a political agenda?
I think we fall into these fads because they're easy. They make some people giggle with glee and some people hopping mad, but leave very few people noticing that our kids aren't getting a basic education that sends them into the world as "educated" people.
I've never heard of a school system that doesn't teach novels. Do you have a source on that? Which brings me to another point: What we need most with today's technology are critical thinking and research skills. These are the skills that allow someone to go to the source of information and determine whether the source is biased and toward what. But there is an issue today in the definition of "fact." By definition, if we have to agree on what the facts are, we aren't discussing facts.
I have probably read about it in the press, but this discussion is the sort I hear all the time now. Also, tons of college profs say they have students who have never been assigned a novel. https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/s/jVnQx2Y3v0
This is not my experience at all. I'm in NY, and both my kids read novels. (They are 24 and 20.) The state Regents Exam in English is required for graduation. Past exams can be found here: https://www.nysedregents.org/hsela/. The Common Core State Standards did create a push toward nonfiction, but novels didn't disappear. One of the AP English classes seems to focus on nonfiction and media literacy in our high school; the other is a lit class. There are also a few IB schools around, and they read novels and plays. I wonder if region plays into this. (This is not to say that post-pandemic education losses aren't real--they are--but the novel isn't dead in schools.) Of course, some soft censorship may be at play too as so many books have been questioned over the past few years.
Fear is at the root of what's happening today. I think it's about change for many. Change is scary. But some also feel their values are being eroded or disregarded. Consider the religious right. On Bloom, Creating is the top level, but creativity happens much earlier. You can't "construct meaning" or "interpret" without it. Often those "gifted" students are doing all of levels at once. They just didn't need explicit instruction to get there. But I also think you can ask students to create and have them come up with what they need to know about something as they try to figure it out. Just make sure Foundational Skills are in place first. For me, it's skills, not facts.
We're living in a culture in which our media and advertising have learned to trigger our amygdalae for their own profit and for everyone's loss. People who are fearful, research has shown, can't learn as well so not only do we have them being triggered by false information, but once they're triggered, they cease being able to process new information in any rational way. I hate to pin this on a "king"-like figure, but I do think that those people might need someone charismatic to guide them back. Right now they've got someone charismatic guiding them into the hole he got them to dig for him.
As to learning, yes, basic skills are important. But when I look at my own lifelong way of learning new things, I always start by assigning myself a creative task that I know I am not quite prepared to do. I can't learn in the order of Bloom's Taxonomy levels—at all. I completely fail when I try. I never understood this about myself until I started to teach children and realized that educational pedagogy is just 100% wrong—upside-down, in fact—for many learners. Some of those learners are identified gifted, but many aren't. Whatever you call it, those learners tend to be the people who achieve at a higher level eventually, whether they were stellar students or dropouts. They use their whole brain for tasks, and rote learning with no purpose of the sort that is emphasized in many schools just doesn't work for them.
My episode on creativity has definitely sparked a lot of thoughts!
Rote learning for the sake of knowing facts never functioned, and I'm seeing it replaced by project-based learning. I do think this is a pendulum swing though. I'm concerned it will go too far the other way. Those folks following a "king" may not have learned enough about the true foundations of our democracy (or may have forgotten what they learned). My concern becomes focusing so much on creativity that we allow "2+2=5." Which, of course, it does. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=a69cbbbda68ed245&sxsrf=AE3TifNpOZFeJkdB5YjFdpVA2Qv-bB1cXQ:1751484334889&q=2%2B2%3D5+proof+trick&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiSk_HM856OAxVFKFkFHdmFFNEQ1QJ6BAhbEAE&biw=2176&bih=1045&dpr=1.76#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:f017e32a,vid:R4Xh7EQZqow,st:92
It's true that education has always followed fads. But I think there's a real struggle in public education in dealing with the fact that unlike 100 years ago, there are many families who simply don't believe in a basic set of skills and knowledge that makes you "educated." Now, 100 years ago that set was deeply tied to assumptions based on racist and sexist ideals, and so it definitely needed a reset. But in fact, once you do away with the racist and sexist underpinnings, there still is a set of skills and knowledge that make someone educated.
The problem here is that since public education serves the public, they have to respond to the public for better and for worse. It's much better, for example, not to force kids to read a boring old novel that doesn't relate to their current lives just because some white guys decided in 1925 that all kids should read it. But these days, many schools are doing away with reading novels altogether because families don't value it. Reading and understanding a metaphorical work is very definitely part of being a person who has attained basic education, in my opinion. So is knowing how to do enough math to function well in modern society, in which case we should be requiring statistics because that's the math that really matters now.
But how do we make that case when so many people think that because their phone in their hand can answer any question they ask it (with AI that may or may not be telling them the truth)? How do we make that case when politicians want our educational system to promote a political agenda? How do we decide what is a fundamental aspect of society that kids need to learn about and what is a political agenda?
I think we fall into these fads because they're easy. They make some people giggle with glee and some people hopping mad, but leave very few people noticing that our kids aren't getting a basic education that sends them into the world as "educated" people.
I've never heard of a school system that doesn't teach novels. Do you have a source on that? Which brings me to another point: What we need most with today's technology are critical thinking and research skills. These are the skills that allow someone to go to the source of information and determine whether the source is biased and toward what. But there is an issue today in the definition of "fact." By definition, if we have to agree on what the facts are, we aren't discussing facts.
I have probably read about it in the press, but this discussion is the sort I hear all the time now. Also, tons of college profs say they have students who have never been assigned a novel. https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/s/jVnQx2Y3v0
This is not my experience at all. I'm in NY, and both my kids read novels. (They are 24 and 20.) The state Regents Exam in English is required for graduation. Past exams can be found here: https://www.nysedregents.org/hsela/. The Common Core State Standards did create a push toward nonfiction, but novels didn't disappear. One of the AP English classes seems to focus on nonfiction and media literacy in our high school; the other is a lit class. There are also a few IB schools around, and they read novels and plays. I wonder if region plays into this. (This is not to say that post-pandemic education losses aren't real--they are--but the novel isn't dead in schools.) Of course, some soft censorship may be at play too as so many books have been questioned over the past few years.