Roger Schank on "Educational Question of the Year"
What knowledge or skills will students need most to be effective citizens of our world in the future?
but, you have asked the wrong question; it is not what they will need most but recognizing what they will not need that helps frame the
issues to be dealt with in education; today I noticed an article
about tutoring parents in math in order to help them not look stupid in front of their kids:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060315/od_nm/media_discovery1_dc
curiously people do tend to know what they need to know as
functioning adults; so, if they don't need to know math to function in their lives how come we ram this stuff down their children's throats?
Here is some stuff children don't need to learn:
algebra, geometry, trigonometry, english literature; world history;
american history; economics; physics; chemistry; biology
Have I made myself clear? the entire high school curriculum is a joke
-- written down in 1892 by people who were trying to get college material to high school students who would never go to college. We
don't even teach most of that in college any more.
Some skills for today? OK here are some:
writing; communication; human relations; reasoning; basic medicine
and health issues; dealing with the legal system in which you live;
entrepreneurship; current world political issues and how to make a voting decision;
the issue is not the attempt to list what cool technologies might be coming that we need to lecture students about and make them pass
tests about; the issue is getting our schools to help students do what functioning adults know how to do;
alas, this will not likely happen; too many vested interests trying to preserve the status quo
for a view on what I think is worth doing check out
http://www.engines4ed.org/
roger schank
Roger Schank is President and CEO of Socratic Arts and Distinguished Career Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and the Chief Educational Officer of Carnegie Mellon West. He is the author of more than 25 books including Designing World-Class E-Learning published by McGraw-Hill.