What School Should Be: On Curriculum
I want my kids to attend a school where the curriculum is forged in the realities of 21st century learning.
Ours is now a world marked by immediacy, ubiquity, and mobility, by digits, data, and bandwidth. Technology is beginning to
trump geography as the circumscriber of culture and the arbiter of affluence. And yet our school curriculum has not substantively changed since the 19th century. (Common Core is about systemic efficiency and national test score pissing contests, not about pedagogy rearchitected for technoglobalism.)
Schools should teach literacy, integrity, numeracy, and technacy (LINT) to help our kids master the fundamentals of language, character, mathematics, and technology. Language learning must start early (pre-puberty) and include English (both grammar and rhetoric), at least one other European language, at least one Asian language, and at least one programming language.
Character learning must stress becoming a person of strong integrity and unswerving ethics. In the next few years, our children will face unprecedented issues around bioethics, human rights, and even what constitutes humanness. Reinforcing common values like honesty, empathy, courage, and kindness in the classroom is also fighting a preemptive attack on the moral rot at both ends of the American class spectrum: it’s a war on Jerry Springer’s depraved booger-eaters and also an attempt to inoculate the Goldman Sachs douchebag crowd before they get drunk on their own top-shelf success.
Mathematical learning should involve all of the usual suspects (from single-digit addition through differential equations) but with an added emphasis on critical thinking, problem solving, finance, and system design. Courses on practical algorithms, securities investing, sports statistics, and games of strategy should become commonplace.
Technology learning is not 30-minutes at a Dell Optiplex playing Poptropica. Technology learning should peel back the curtain on black boxes that produce magic dancing pictures. Students should learn how stuff is made and how technology works. It should include disassembly of smart phones, building crude CRUD applications, and hands-on exercises with 3-D printing. It should include an understanding of gene sequencing and the nanofabrication of graphene, of engineering hadron colliders and forecasting global pandemics.
Wrapping around literacy, integrity, numeracy, and technacy must be an integrated emphasis on creativity. The winners of the 21st century will be the ones who generate compelling solutions to fundamental problems around agricultural and energy resources and around security, communication, and health. The winners will not be rank-ordered by grade point average but by creative gigawattage. Schools should teach improv, rap, blogging, and graphic design alongside other forms of artistic and literary expression.
