How to Raise Children Who Will Change the World

Is the American Educational System Obsolete?  Yes, answers Tony Wagner, the Education Fellow at Harvard University's Technology and Innovation Center.  Prior to that, Wagner had spent over 10 years at  Harvard's School of Education analyzing the changes that need to happen in education in order to prepare students for the 21st century global economy.

In his new book, Creating Innovators:  The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World,  Wagner studies American innovators and discovers some common patterns in their childhood and education--patterns that, alas, are discouraged by most traditional schools.  Wagner puts forth a case for a radical transformation of the fundamental principles of education, with the emphasis on the following five principles:

1.  Focus on Collaboration and Teamwork, rather than Individual Competition and Achievement
All the most important ideas and issues are just too big for only one person to handle

2.  Take a Cross Disciplinary and Multiple Perspectives Approach
This is kind of the curricular corellary to the point above.  Wagner points out that the Carnegie-unit-based high school structure is now 125 years old and is outdated for today's realities.

3.  Take Risks
Innovation, by its nature, requires experimentation, which means that most time, you are going to fail and/or be wrong.  That is anathama to way traditional school curricula approach most things.

4.  Learning Should be Active, Not Passive
Wagner argues that our current educational systems make students into learning consumers, not learning creators.  How are they suddenly going to turn into creating exciting new ideas and projects if they've been trained to sit back and be spoon fed everything during their education?

5.  Learning Should be Based on Instrinsic Rewards and Passions
Traditional schools are built around motivating students through extrinsic rewards--grades, gold stars, praise from happy teachers and parents, etc.  But innovators are driven by their internal passions, ideas, and motivations.

You can learn more by viewing this TED-style talk by Wagner:



or by reading a recent Forbes article: Creating Innovators:  Why America's Education System is Obsolete;

or, of course, by ordering his book.

Curriculum Resource: A Google A Day

I've written on this blog before about the importance of knowing how to use Google to find the information we need on the Internet.  I've just recently stumbled upon another way of learning how to use Google effectively; take advantage of the search engine's daily puzzle, A Google a Day.

What this website does is pose, basically, a trivia question.  However, it is a trivia question that usually has several different bits of information that you need to combine in order to answer the question. Here is an example:

After everyday exposure to this element with 82 protons and 126 neutrons, the Huns were the least of the Roman Empire’s problems. This cumulative poison was used as a preservative in what drink?

As this demonstrates, the questions makes students isolate what information they do have and figure out how to use that to get the information the question is seeking.  So this is a great resource because it is teaching the thinking component of the search process, not just giving technical instructions.  However, sometimes they do ask questions that require some advanced searching techniques, such as the ones I mentioned in this post.

Once you answer the question (or give up), the website suggests the items on which to search, or the search techniques to use, in order to get the right answer.  So it can be a stand-alone teaching device for searching techniques.

I don't use this every day, but every so often, I will send one to my son to help develop his searching skills. So, for example, since he is a cephalopod lover, I gave him this one:

All cephalopod mollusks with three hearts are carnivorous, but only one type living in temperate waters is deadly to humans. What does this deadly cephalopod normally feed on?

...which actually turned out not to be a great problem for him, since he already knew the only deadly cephalopod living in temperate waters, and thus didn't have to do a two-level search.  But you get the idea.