One problem that education is facing today is the sheer amount of life paths that one can choose to take in today's society. Spanning from laborers to painters to engineers to fiction authors, it is hard for educators (particularly those from secondary schools) to keep their material relevant to everyone attending their class. I don't know how many times I heard my peers iterate the high school cliche: "when will I ever use this?"
The other dilemma that schools are facing is the digital world that we have created. We have so much information available to us that can be accessed within minutes, or even seconds, that schools have almost become redundant. I could tell you the plot to a book without ever reading a single page of it, or tell you the 1976 Chicago Cubs starting lineup despite being born in 1993 and not having any Cubs fans in my family. The new cool thing is to say "why am I at school when I can just look all this up online as I need it?"
 |
| xkcd 903 illustrates my point |
That comic also illustrates one of the downfalls of this digital age. Having a crutch to lean on can help make you stronger, but using a wheelchair for prolonged periods of time will make you weaker. By this I mean that having the internet and other resources available is great for adding to your knowledge and occasional use when you forget something, but using this technology over and over again makes you more dependent on it for your knowledge to the point that, without it, your intelligence appears to drop.
However that is no reason for the majority of public schools to shun the use of these resources as if they are inferior. I have had major papers where we were only allowed to use up to, say, 3 sources from the internet, with the rest of the information being required to be found in print sources. I have also seen schools ban the use of wikipedia, which although their reasoning is sound, also shows their ignorance of the internet and the resources available on it.
What the American school system needs to do is adapt their curricula to match today's technology. They seem to be trying, but it's ineffective. Instead of making students memorize what's going to be on their state exam, we should be focusing on teaching our students to effectively utilize the resources available to them. We can make wikipedia safe again by teaching students how to verify citations. Instead of limiting students to .org, .gov, and .edu domains for their research (yes there are teachers that do that despite the large amount of effective and legitimate web sites utilizing the .com and .net domains and the fair amount of .org domains that stretch the truth or report inaccurate information), we should teach students how to check multiple sources for the same information to get a good consensus.
If we continue to solely use traditional views of education to set up our school systems, we will fail. I'm not saying get rid of the books and the lectures. But I do say we need to focus more on utilizing resources that are easily available and occasionally more accurate than memory.
