Education's Great Restructuring

Education's Great Restructuring

Education is in disarray and being challenged by the demands of the New Economy because society is in disarray and being challenged by the demands of the New Economy. Society’s perspective on education, the administrators’ distractions, the teachers’ worries and the students’ anxieties make for a complicated and often confused educational system, from grade school through higher education. The growing misalignment between society’s requirements of an educated person today and the traditional system for educating that person is forcing education into its own version of Great Restructuring. Education has reached the Experimentation phase of its Great Restructuring, and a survey of some of these experiments shows that they fall into four areas: (1) Deconstruction of the Curriculum; (2) Digitization of the Classroom; (3) Leaving the Classroom; and (4) Integrating the Digital and the Analog. Whereas learning in traditional environments meant getting more and more knowledge from instructors who had that knowledge, digital technology shifted learning from acquisition of knowledge to acquisition of skills to access knowledge. With knowledge accessible via a device, skills other than memorization are becoming more important: experimentation, observation, performance, participation, creativity, collaboration and deep thinking, with new educational outcomes, such as problem solving, conceptualization, multicultural familiarity and creating new knowledge. Educational experiments are under way to embed these kinds of concepts into standard curricula.

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