208 Teaching Minds

208 Teaching Minds How do we choose who studies the elite subjects? We don’t. Offer choices. Stop making lists of what one must know and start putting students into situations where they can learn from experi- ence while attempting to accomplish goals that they set out for them- selves, just as people did before there were schools. Education has always been the same: learning from experience with help from wiser mentors. School has screwed that all up and it is time to go back to basics. So the “what” question is simple. We should teach children what adults know that enables them to function in the world they inhabit. This has much less to do with academic knowledge than it has to do with practical, and often subconscious, knowledge of how to do a va- riety of things in the social and physical and economic world we have created. Now let’s address the question of how to teach these things. John Dewey noted, in 1916, that he had been talking about learn- ing by doing for a long time, but nobody ever listened to him about it—-which was exactly his point. He was frustrated about changing the system. In 1916! Imagine how he would feel today. It is not unreasonable to ask why the system never changes, and who is making sure that it won’t change. The answer is obvious. So many people have vested interests in things staying as they are that the system basically cannot change—at least not of its own free will. The President of the United States could help make the changes needed, but he won’t. Here is a piece from then-Senator Obama’s education speech given during his campaign in Dayton, Ohio, in 2008: We will help schools integrate technology into their curriculum so we can make sure public school students are fluent in the digital language of the 21st-century economy. We’ll teach our students not only math and science, but teamwork and critical thinking and communication skills, because that’s how we’ll make sure they’re prepared for today’s workplace. Some advisor of his had read my writings and was quoting me on that one. I usually say reasoning and not critical thinking, but this is taken from my many speeches on education. And what has the President actually done? He said in that same speech: HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023954