We are preparing our students for life. I hear so many educators use this sentence when asked, what is the purpose of education? Many years ago I believed that to be true as well. Maybe many generations back it may have been true. In consideration of all that I observe, even with some great innovation, and a whole bunch of technology integration that is taking place in so many schools across the country, I don’t believe “preparing our students for life” is the focus or goal of education today. The real irony is that school for kids is real life, a fact often overlooked by educators.
The most obvious reason this is not the case is that we don’t have a clue what the future holds for our children. We will have them in public schools for 13 years. Try to envision what it was like looking backwards to the world as we knew it then. 1999 was quite a different world. We had scarcely a clue of what to expect to find in 2012. The only way to prepare kids for life was to make adjustments every step of the way. The education system does not favor on-the-fly adjustments. The education system needs to weigh, deliberate and consider each and every change. It must all be research-based and research takes time. Education is not ahead of the curve in incorporating technology in learning, it continues to play catch up. A technology-driven society does not allow the luxury of catching up. Yet, we still claim to be preparing kids for life.
Content in past decades was slow to change. Even as advances were made in science, history, geography, and literature, the world itself moved at a slower pace, so time and change were less critical. We had a print media that was driven by time sensitive events, but the time was stretched out by print deadlines. Textbooks were relevant for longer periods of time. Today, whole countries that were in existence a short while back have changed names boundaries, populations, and cultures seemingly overnight. Our outdated textbooks that we continue to use cannot hope to keep up with the rapid change of the world today. Yet, we still claim to be preparing kids for life.
We have research showing us different modalities of learning. We embrace differentiation in teaching. We strive for inclusion of all students to learn in a single teaching environment, while addressing individual strengths for learning. We talk about personalized learning for each student. We use individualized learning plans to maximize learning. We recognize that all kids are created differently. Even in consideration of all of that, we standardize their assessment. Yet, we still claim to be preparing kids for life.
We hold up the innovators as models. Innovators are our 21st Century heroes. We encourage out-of-the-box thinking while restricting our teachers to in-the-box teaching and assessing it with in-the- box tests. We want our students to be innovative, but require them to be compliant with teaching methods of the past. Yet, we still claim to be preparing kids for life.
Why do we continue to limit the learning time of our students in order to do test preparation? How can we continue to insist that kids limit themselves with the cramming of content for a test instead of using their skills to get that content anywhere and at any time? How can we continue to prepare our students for a tech-driven culture demanding critical thinking skills and the ability to problem solve by assessing their content retention? We are not matching up the skills that our children will need in a future that we know little about to the education that we provide today? Yet, we still claim to be preparing kids for life.
We cannot continue on the current path of education if we want to prepare our children for their future. Our children will not live in the world that we grew up in. We need to prepare them to be flexible, critical thinking, problem solvers. They need to be able to get beyond the limitations of their teachers and parents. Our kids are not empty vessels to be filled with content in order to pass a standardized test. Each day, as technology moves faster, that fact is driven home with more emphasis. Will we ever be able to truly claim that we are effectively preparing kids for life?
Tom, a fine and sensible blog, but in a society that just doesn’t get it. What we are trying to produce in our schools are standardized kids, taught by standardized teachers, all of whom live in a non-standardized world and will live their lives even less standardized. What to do but start over again? And that won’t happen either. Let’s not give up. It’s the Season of Hope.
And yet in a way what you describe prepares them for life. Living in a world of constant and fast-paced change, yet having to work in and deal with less flexible and less than nimble systems… I don’t know
Life happens and few of us are adequately prepared for the infinite possibilities we might face. I’m not at all convinced that school can prepare anyone for anything other than more schooling. Is the best way to prepare children to face life to remove them from it for several hours every weekday for ten or more months? Since some feel that model is not adequate, there is movement to remove them for even more hours and days.
If we cannot base what we do as educators on the fantasy of preparing our students for life, on what basis can we justify anything we do?
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A thought-provoking blog entry. As a retired teacher, I thought I was prepping my students for “life”, but I doubt that was the reality. But it never was, and never will be, as this blog points out. I agree that we need to emphasize not only critical thinking skills, especially when applied to media, but we also need to give significant, meaning alternatives to their own tech-driven world, what Neil Postman called “subversive teaching” that balances and moves beyond what they know, to what they don’t know. In my mind, that means a resurgence of the arts and humanities….not just the high-profile and traditional arts (e.g. music and visual art), but also drama (not theatre, but drama…..using their brains and bodies to explore real-life issues and problem-solve) and dance, which focus on interpersonal skills and creative expression. That is learning for their future.
This is certainly a struggle I’ve witnessed many teachers wrestle with. I agree that “We need to prepare them to be flexible, critical thinking, problem solvers” and I would add creative. It will take great creativity to problem solve the looming disasters and we cannot continue thinking in the same way that gave rise to these problems. I think a more proactive discussion could be centered around what teachers are doing. Often times teachers feel tied to standards and expectations without realizing their full creative authority. From my experience, there is no requirement that we teach from the textbook to any percentage. Once teachers realize the liberties they have in a classroom and are confident in their own knowledge, we see transformative learning. Learning that engages students because it has direct importance to their current life. Teachers need to first ensure sure they have growing critical thinking skills themselves. There is so much going on in the world right now that can be tied to curriculum but it is sometimes frightening to hear teachers understanding of the state of the world. This disconnect is then perpetuated in the classroom. Perhaps it’s the teacher education programs we can ask more from. But change doesn’t happen in one direction and we will need bottom-up approaches as well. Not only do reflective, critical teachers need to be inspiring their students, but also their peers in teaching for the 21st century.
Thanks for maintaing such a critical conversation Tom!
Great conversation Tom. From a manufacturing & engineering perspective there are certain basic facts & skills a child must master. If you view education as a transfer function with the skills on the left side of the equation, the child on the right side and the education system becomes the transfer function in the middle. Focusing on the left side there certainly is basic “static” information that does not change such as the laws of Physics, Math etc.. Then there is all of the “variable” information as Tom mentioned with geopolitics etc. On the right side we have the children with learning environments that are constantly changing both socially and technologically. Given these two boundary conditions I’m not sure any education system could be “flexible” enough to work perfectly for each child in total. My thought is to break it into two pieces, static and dynamic. The static portion can be set into standards like Common Core and assessed. The dynamic portion is best addressed by the means Tom and others have mentioned such as teaching students how to independently research, learn, solve problems, think creatively and also work in teams. By lumping the static and dynamic into one pedagogy it tends to appear like a huge and hopeless task. If they could be formerly disengaged I think the dynamic portion would be easier to manage and have less of a debilitating effect on the whole overall system.
This method of isolating boundary conditions is the way I’ve always solved problems in engineering and manufacturing. I was just thinking it may be a way to look at the education “Transfer Function”.
Tom, you really keep us thinking and that is key to solving problems! Thanks!
Great thoughts! I love that you say “school is real-life for them”. That is as authentic as it gets. Luckily, as human beings, we are all programmed for our time. Our children will continue to thrive and be successful because the human spirit is perseverant. Those who do not find success will make it a point in their adulthood to become the change they wish to see. I have faith in my students because they don’t sit quietly and listen to all I say, because they have wild and crazy ideas and because they know who they are and what they want. Thank you for your insights.
[…] *Tom Whitby. Prof of Education. Long Island, New Cork. Fuente: https://tomwhitby.wordpress.com/2012/12/12/are-we-preparing-students-for-life/ […]
You have nailed the only drawback to my job (as I see it!). I want to inspire, motivate, and prepare my students. Yet I can’t help but feel that even on my best days I am failing them. Not because I’m not trying hard enough, but because the system we are using is a bit of a broken one. It has great aspirations and goals, yet the means are all jacked-up. Honestly, in my own life the things I find the most joy in are those that I’ve learned freely and at my own pace. Until school becomes more of a free-learning environment, and the Universities begin valuing original and creative thought, we will continue to play catch-up.
A very thought-provoking post. I only wish there were some democratic forum where thinking along these “lines” could be pushed further and could actually mean something.
My 2 cents: As I read this I see an oscillation between different notions of “life” (and an extra dimension is provided by the photo of the person in the hammmock on the beach in the sunset – is that life?). As someone who comes from an existentialist background, I read “life” as being the sort of thing that Virginia Woolf describes in the second paragraph of her essay “A Sketch of the Past” http://bit.ly/SSY5tc – life as existence experienced and appreciated in the bowels of our being – in those precious moments when we see through the cotton wool of the everyday (and it would be fun to rewrite the curriculum so that we increases the chances of students being able to see beyond that cotton wool).
But then I realised that that was just my wishful thinking, and the life in question was really the world of work, as if work = life. Is work life? Is this kind of work life? In the current state of things, do people live to work, or do they rather work to live?
Then you raise the dreaded “t” word, and it starts to seem as if life = our technologically driven world. Can we just equate the two, or is there something discordant there – something slightly problematic? Some of us might wonder whether that world is not itself anti-life.
I end up with this suspicion that no discussion of how to prepare children for the world can be complete without a discussion of how to prepare the world for children.
[…] We are preparing our students for life. I hear so many educators use this sentence when asked, what is the purpose of education? Many years ago I believed that to be true as well. Maybe many genera… […]
[…] We are preparing our students for life. I hear so many educators use this sentence when asked, what is the purpose of education? Many years ago I believed that to be true as well. Maybe many genera… […]
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Love everything you say…my only question is what are colleges and universities preparing students for? My kid is in her second year of University and all her courses are about content…she is still cramming for that mid-term exam in the same way I did many, many years ago. I am not sure she realizes how much more valued her social media skills (that she learned by participating in that environment) will be than her recall of Chaucer’s work or Piaget’s stages of development. With everything we know about 21st century learners isn’t it about time our colleagues in Higher Education got on board, too? After all, we only have them for 13 years, as you said.
[…] We are preparing our students for life. I hear so many educators use this sentence when asked, what is the purpose of education? Many years ago I believed that to be true as well. Maybe many genera… […]