What Will Become of American Education?

What Will  Become of American Education?

After looking at Will Richardson’s post “Crazy Days”  on Feb. 19, my grandmother’s words come to mind—“We’re all going to hell in a handbasket…”.  This seems to sum up the state of the American education system after looking at the newspaper headlines and happenings across the country with regard to education.  In Arizona, life for the K-12 teacher started to really get rough when the security of having tenure was eliminated.  That coupled with budget cuts eliminating positions and any possibility for wage increases makes the teaching profession even less desirable than ever before.  Truthfully, why would any sane person go into such a profession?  What I see is that the education system that is currently in existence will cease to be in the same format.  For fiscal reasons, I predict that online education will be the primary delivery system of education not only at the college level but at the K-12 levels as well.  This has some very serious pedagogical implications.

Some of these pedagogical implications are exposed in the author’s post entitled “Online Learning is not Learning Online” where he shares a list of “benefits” of online learning supplied by high school sophomores in Utah.  The author is not impressed by this list and neither am I.    “I can do all my math for the week on one day if I want to”  and  “I can work around a busy schedule” are just a couple of items on the list.  Such reasons are superficial and imply that online education is a means of convenience.  Students don’t mention anything about “learning” at all.  The author is chagrined by the students’ views on online education and argues that they may doing coursework but are not getting the connections needed to sustain them beyond the class.  Essentially, these students are not demonstrating that they are becoming the “life-long learners” that educators hope they become.

So what does all of this mean for the current teacher?  It means we have super challenges ahead of us.  We will need to sort out meaningful from non-meaningful technological activities that we require of the online student.   If our goal is to have students become critical thinkers and lifelong learners, we will need to require activities that require much from the student.  Activities in which students can “click” their way through the course should not be the focus.  Activities that require the student to seriously reflect about their experiences should be the norm.  Easier said than done…