PROVIDING STUDENTS WITH THE MOST POWERFUL WEAPON

Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy

-John Dewey

Ironically, his statement above is as poignant in the current educational system as in the educational system of his own time.  Writing in a period of incredible transition, John Dewey convinced educators to depart from the rigid curriculum of the nineteenth century and embrace a flexible, yet practical form of instruction that would help students to better navigate their world and contribute to their society. By merely participating in our culture, individuals today hold even more constructive and destructive power than the students of Dewey’s era. Unfortunately, students today are not usually encouraged to cultivate their own talents and better participate in their culture.  Instead, they study content that they view as irrelevant and which they will forget immediately after completing the school year.   Consequently, the words “curriculum” and “standard” have become hallmarks of an era marked by unprecedented change and openness. Content absorption, rather than skill training and critical thinking, has become the task of our schools and teachers.  However, the flexibility required by the burgeoning knowledge industries is ensuring that we are about to see the crest of wave that will soon crash.

As the twenty-first century progresses, parents will demand that schooling not be detached from their children’s’ home environment and future work environment.  As a result, educators will be forced to ensure a high level of seamlessness between pedagogical methods and industrial innovations.  Activities and the direct instruction upon which they are built will focus more upon the future, and less upon the past.  Using technology, educators will couch discussions of the past within lessons based upon the current and future geographical, cultural, and economic circumstances of the entire globe. The current standards will be overruled, and classes such as World History One will cease to exist.  Social studies within the secondary schools will become oriented more towards the social sciences and less towards history.

While the nature of content changes, its purpose will change as well.  Instead of being the defining factor of standardized assessments, content will come to be seen primarily as the context in which critical thinking takes place.  The antiquated gauges of cultural competency that define our current social studies programs will be replaced by a focus on current events.  Teachers will require their students to practice their oral, written, and technological skills in order to better understand social and economic problems that plague different regions of the world.  In the process, students will exercise the higher order thinking of Bloom’s taxonomy and the lower level thinking sanctified within our historical surveys will pass.

In order to gauge analytical thinking and the skills used to express it, educators will develop a system of rigorous and extensive electronic portfolios.  These resurrections of the state-mandated, standardized portfolios of the 1990s will survive due to the better organization of labor made possible by faster Internet connections.  After crafting their portfolios over the course of a semester, students will submit them electronically to anonymous state employees who will gauge them according to skill-centered criteria.  Since the pooling of teachers into a central location, as is currently done with AP and IB assessments, will no longer be necessary, travel costs will be eliminated, and more educators can participate.

“The night is darkest before the dawn,” an old proverb echoed and popularized in the recent Warner Brothers blockbuster, The Dark Knight, describes the current state of our educational system well.  In an era of education marked by assessments that act as cultural litmus tests, it is good to know that the personal needs of students, as well as the economic needs of the burgeoning knowledge sector, will illumine the irrelevancy of our current focus within the social studies.  The deadliest weapon, a student’s ability to change his or her universe with thought, will again dictate the priorities of education as the growing panoply of different learning opportunities outshine the traditionalism sanctioned within our schools.  An older focus on analysis, and the new tools used to further it, will take precedence in the coming decades.