Need a(nother) vivid, visual, inspiring example of what school could be? Do you have 14 minutes to see that “Tis better to give than to receive?”
BRAVO Stephen Ritz and Green Bronx Machine! (Hat tip to Nikhil Goyal @TalkPolitical for resource suggestion.)
At bedtime, my two boys, my wife, and I often return to Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree.
For me, the story has always been aspirational. Throughout my life, I hope to grow closer to the end of the spectrum where giving is more valued than receiving. In the book, of course, the boy takes and takes from the tree and his happiness is only temporary and fleeting – it lasts until he needs the next thing…maybe shorter. But the tree finds its happiness and joy from giving, and the tree’s joy seems to be more permanent and long-lasting.
This weekend, as we read The Giving Tree, I was struck by the lessons that this story could teach school. I am constantly amazed by the latest generations’ generosity. As a school principal, I had countless students come to me seeking permission to have a fund raiser for a special cause to help others. I had numerous others want to stage events to make a positive difference in the world. In fact, my school had to create a policy to deal with the number of requests for coordination and organization reasons.
Interestingly, most, if not all, of these special requests existed outside the curriculum. Shouldn’t such giving, and work, and lessoning BE the curriculum? Or at least more of the curriculum?
Schools seems so geared to getting. So much of the fundamental set-up is about what each student gets, as they enroll in math, English, science, history, etc. We send them from class to class to be filled like vessels with departmental knowledge so that they can “get” into a good college and so that they can “get” a good job.
What if school were re-imagined and re-purposed to be about what students can give? What they can contribute to the world now.
This is why I feel so passionately about PBL – project-based learning, problem-based learning, passion-based learning, place-based learning, etc. This is why I love examples like Kiran Bir Sethi’s Riverside School. This is why I feel so strongly about school curricula being more integrated and participatory in design-thinking and problem solving.
This is another piece of why people talk of 21st C education.
Twentieth-century education was modeled on the widget-creating, assembly-line system. Send the product down the line to have parts added and reservoirs filled. It was about 1.0. It was about receiving, like radios taking the signals from the towers.
Twenty-first-century education can be about giving. It is 2.0 and 3.0. Students can be co-creators of systemic improvement in the world – from better design, to water solutions, to energy enhancements, to health improvements, to more powerful robotics, to improved communications tools, to…, to…, to….
Tis better to give than to receive. Let’s facilitate kids “giving an education” instead of just “getting an education.”
Does any of this make any sense?
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Young people today think in terms of fixing the world,…
Young people today think in terms of fixing the world, by making things, and selling them. Selling them is just the necessary end point of the process.
William Deresiewicz, Writer and Critic speaking at CreativeMornings/Portland (*watch the talk)
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Related Posts:
[“A piece of ‘why,'” A piece of ‘what,'” and A piece of ‘how'” are strands of a series on why school needs to change, what about school needs to change, and how schools might navigate the change.]
Innovation Excellence | Have You Considered the Three Horizon Approach?
10 Real-World BYOD Classrooms (And Whether It’s Worked Or Not) | Edudemic
What Every CEO Can Learn From The Olympics’ Wacky Opening Ceremony | Fast Company
Rethinking Higher Education | The Nantucket Project | Big Think
Demonstrations of Learning for 21st-Century Schools
Conflated from these six resources are the following:
Is Khan Academy and Online Learning a Threat to Formal Schooling? « Center for Teaching
Filling The Instructional Hole in our Standards Conversation | PRINCIPALLY SPEAKING
Filling The Instructional Hole in our Standards Conversation http://t.co/xZgPARwA via @ideaguy42 < Love #s 4, 7, 8, 10, & 11!
Between the By-Road and the Main Road: Cue the Rhizome: A Post-Better World
The Innovative Educator: BYOD in the 21st Century – Video Quickie
Strand #1: Tony Wagner as cited in the National Association of Independent School’s 21st Century Imperative…
Tony Wagner from the Harvard Graduate School of Education interviewed over 600 CEOs, asking them the same essential question: “Which qualities will our graduates need in the 21st century for success in college, careers, and citizenship?”
Wagner’s list of Seven Survival Skills is a distillation of the outcomes of these hundreds of interviews and adds validity to the case we are making. They are:
- Critical Thinking and Problem-solving
- Collaboration Across Networks and Leading By Influence
- Agility and Adaptability
- Initiative and Entrepreneurship
- Effective Oral and Written Communication
- Accessing and Analyzing Information
- Curiosity and Imagination
The World Has Changed
In The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach The New Survival Skills Our Children Need – and What We Can Do About It, Tony Wagner argues that “in today’s competitive global ‘knowledge economy,’ all students need new skills for college, careers, and citizenship. The failure to give all students these new skills leaves today’s youth – and our country – at an alarming competitive disadvantage. Schools haven’t changed; the world has. And so our schools are not failing. Rather, they are obsolete – even the ones that score best on standardized tests. This is a very different problem requiring an altogether different solution.”
[from NAIS COA “A Guide to Becoming a School of the Future”]
Strand #2: Seth Godin – “Stop Stealing Dreams”
6. Changing what we get, because we’ve changed what we need
If school’s function is to create the workers we need to fuel our economy, we need to change school, because the workers we need have changed as well.
The mission used to be to create homogenized, obedient, satisfied workers and pliant, eager consumers.
No longer.
Changing school doesn’t involve sharpening the pencil we’ve already got. School reform cannot succeed if it focuses on getting schools to do a better job of what we previously asked them to do. We don’t need more of what schools produce when they’re working as designed. The challenge, then, is to change the very output of the school before we start spending even more time and money improving the performance of the school.
[from Seth Godin “Stop Stealing Dreams”]
Strand #3: Sir Ken Robinson – “RSA Animate – Changing Education Paradigms“
NOTE: I highly recommend studying all three of these resources in great depth. Of course, there are countless related resources, as well. ANd there are more pieces to the “why,” such as brain research, technology advancements, world conditions, etc. But if a faculty would commit to studying these three resources as a think tank of sorts, I believe that a group of committed thinkers and doers could reveal and experiment with many of the “whats” and “hows” to make this transformation in education.
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Works Cited:
Godin, Seth. “Stop Stealing Dreams: (what is school for?).” http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/docs/StopStealingDreamsSCREEN.pdf.
Robinson, Ken. “RSA Animate – Changing Education Paradigms.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U.
Witt, Robert and Jean Orvis. “A Guide to Becoming a School of the Future.” National Association of Independent Schools. 2010. http://www.nais.org/files/PDFs/NAISCOASchools.pdf.
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[“A piece of ‘why,'” A piece of ‘what,'” and A piece of ‘how'” are strands of a series on why school needs to change, what about school needs to change, and how schools might navigate the change.]
On one of my morning walks this week, I listened to a How Stuff Works: Stuff You Should Know podcast about time travel. I was struck by the sci-fi idea of altering the future by traveling to the past. [Brief aside…I don’t really think such is possible. But I was amazed that the idea popped back into my head when I watched a TED talk today: Juan Enriquez: Will our kids be a different species?]
Enriquez weaves together a number of historical-scientific developments and innovations that have serious implications for our future as a species. Of course, such makes me think about the evolution of schooling and education. I wondered if we should be fast-prototyping education so that we can prevent what Enriquez presents, or if we should do so to accelerate what Enriquez predicts, or if we just resign ourselves that school is school and somebody else will figure all this stuff out.
