An Educational Contrarian

The nature of our public dialogue in its current form reveals a gaping chasm that only education can fill. We see that chasm in our current political ugliness, the fact that social media amplifies falsehoods exactly as it amplifies truths, and in our personal management of irreconcilable positions. I would argue that we paid a huge opportunity cost at the outset of the information age by shifting the focus of education to science, technology, engineering, and math (affectionately referred to as STEM) and away from other subjects. That focus meant the information age was going to be viewed and treated first as a technological challenge and second as a content challenge. It is in this vein that Facebook and Twitter ironically identify themselves as technology companies when what defines them and the value to their stakeholders is the content in the interactions that occur. I’m not suggesting we never needed real expertise in the STEM areas, but rather, that the way we turned our gaze to ...

In education, the recent concept of “learning loss” in reference to the effects of the pandemic (a marketing strategy for testing companies if ever there was one, and a gift to pearl clutchers) is only possible in a world in which we can only see the past, only see an old way of doing things. In that past students start kindergarten at the age of five, attend an additional twelve years of scripted coursework, and then walk across the graduation stage supposedly ready to start their lives. That system has most certainly been disrupted. What we have long understood about that system is how deeply inflexible it is given its entrenchment in a dizzying array of state and federal policies, how poorly suited it is for serving the needs of a more and more diverse student population, and how behind it is given the needs of an eighteen year old when they head out into the ever changing modern world. One thing the pandemic made possible was the removal of the scales of ignorance from the world’...