Ctrl - Alt - Del
As a leadership team we have spent a lot of time over the last few weeks talking about the current trends in education and their implications for Shannon Forest Christian School. Collectively we have read hundreds of articles and talked with dozens of people. What I would like to do with this blog entry is begin to distill what we are discovering.
As a leadership team we have spent a lot of time over the last few weeks talking about the current trends in education and their implications for Shannon Forest Christian School. Collectively we have read hundreds of articles and talked with dozens of people. What I would like to do with this blog entry is begin to distill what we are discovering.
1. For over a hundred years education has looked largely the same. Same song, just change the lyrics. The next ten years will alter education more than the previous hundred. This will be true of what it means to “be educated” as well as how one “becomes educated”.
Currently, proof of education is a transcript, diploma, or degree granted by some vetted organization, a neat, orderly, and largely homogenous summary of schools attended and the results. In the future this will not be so tidy. There will still need to be some summary of sorts but the paths will be much more diverse. One might take a class/course locally, online, self- taught using youtube videos, do an internship or utilize a myriad of other mediums. The student’s entrance into a college or job will be based more on his/her accumulated portfolio than simply a diploma, transcript or degree.
2. What is required for the jobs of the future is not what our current approach to education is designed to produce. Don't be fooled; the largest single driver of education in the US has always been to produce an educated workforce. But what kind of educated workforce?
The ones needed for the industrial revolution; large corporations, often manufacturing, where you will work till you retire and then collect your pension. That era has passed. Many wrongly believe that the reason so many recent college graduates are unemployed or under employed is because of fallout from the economic crisis of 2008. The real reason is because a majority of those jobs are gone - forever! Nonetheless our education continues to mass produce workers aimed at these non-existent jobs. The largest employer in the US is Wal-Mart.
It is no coincidence that many new college grads work there. These types of jobs are the only enduring relics of the age of big corporations. Not convinced? 50% of the jobs in which the class of 2012 will work do not exist today. Some experts estimate that over half of today’s graduates will start their own business. There is no script for our students to follow. We had better prepare them differently.
In addition to a strong high school transcript, we believe Shannon Forest students need to leave here with valuable transferable skills and qualities. We want it to be said of our students that they are: problem solvers, communicators, influencers, and people of Godly character. I will spend the next couple of blogs developing these areas.
Links for articles and sites:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U – changing paradigms
No comments:
Post a Comment