Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Synthesis #1 - content knowledge and skills in 2025

I believe that the role of content knowledge, now and in the future, is primarily as a vehicle through which to teach skills. Memorizing the names and dates of history is not a relevant skill for students in the present, and rapid recall of 19th century presidents or Chinese dynasties is required in the day-to-day life of a non-teacher only as often as one opens a crossword puzzle. Especially as instantaneous access to information increases, there will be even less use for rote memorization of historical facts in 2025. Many students in 2011 carry a pocket-sized device that can provide them with nearly every bit of factual information available; most students have easy access to the Internet at home as well as at school. By 2025, I expect that all students will have mobile Internet devices, or something even more advanced that further eliminates the need to learn factual content knowledge for the sake of memorizing it. I just finished watching an IBM computer completely outmatch the two greatest Jeopardy! champions in history; pure information recall is not likely to be relevant for students in 2025.

That said, history and social science play an essential role in providing the background for students’ understanding of themselves, their communities, and the world at large. As a properly trained historian, I do believe that we must know where we have been in order to figure out where we are now or were we are going. The role of content knowledge, at least in terms of what teachers must help students acquire, is to provide a scaffold on which students can hang their experiences and try to make sense of what is going on in the world. The broad themes of history and general historical and social science principles will always be an essential skill set for anyone attempting to make sense of the world. Many of the same skills are also applicable in personal and social situations. So while the need to teach facts may decrease in 2025, from an already low level, the need to teach skills of analysis, comparison, and causation will not go away; the need to understand the sociocultural background of future coworkers can only increase; the need to think critically and work collaboratively will still be essential. Not only is content knowledge a wonderful set of data we can use to practice and process those skills, “content-specific” skills and objectives are much more transferable than most students tend to think. There is value in learning how to identify, for example, cause and effect, whether one is studying the outbreak of World War I or a fight between two friends.

In terms of skills, students will need to master several skills to be productive in 2025. First, students will need to be able to analyze and organize complex sets of data and information. When information is more readily available, sorting through it becomes more difficult; even a massive trivia-playing computer is unable to interpret all types of human language and thought. If our robotic overlords will still allow humans to perform some job functions in 2025, those jobs will likely be more complex tasks that cannot be assigned to machines. Students will need to practice and learn strategies for digesting and linking large and disparate sets of information, such as through identifying the themes and key events from a historical time period.

Secondly, students will need to be able to work collaboratively. I tend to dislike single-sex school systems or online high schools, as the interaction with all of their peers is a necessary part of developing students into successful adults. The high school environment remains an essential laboratory where students learn what works in dealing with authority figures and their peers. At their best, school projects encourage students to work together to create something greater than they could have achieved on their own.

Third, students will need to be able to cross cultural borders, which requires both an understanding of one’s self and an understanding of others. This is an offshoot of collaboration in some ways, but also requires additional social and intellectual skills in order to try to understand the neutral meaning of culturally-loaded phrases and actions. Without a background in history, sociology, psychology, and related disciplines, students will be unable to understand themselves or their peers. History provides a wonderful opportunity to explore what leads a person or a culture or a civilization to a particular decision point, and to the resulting decision. It also helps us evaluate those decisions and our own biases in order to better understand ourselves as individuals, members of a cultural group, and players in social situations.

Finally, students need to be masters of technological experimentation. It is less essential that students are taught specific technologies, because technology changes too rapidly for this instruction to be useful. A student who masters Windows and Microsoft Office as a high school freshman will be unable to recognize the system they use to write their college senior thesis. Instead, students need to learn how to adapt to new technologies, how to experiment with the capabilities that are available, and how to make new uses out of old tools. This requires a specific type of problem-solving and critical thinking that has many applications outside of word processing – students will always be confronted with unfamiliar tools and questions, and this type of experimental thinking can lead them to success in any challenge.

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