Most Likely to Succeed?

This film made me reflect further on how education is transitioning from teaching content to teaching competencies, and exactly how big a shift that requires from teachers and schools. In an age when vast quantities of information can be obtained in seconds, memorization has started to matter less and critical thinking, analytical skills, and real-world application of knowledge has become imperative. Furthermore, we are no longer operating in an economy where we learn in a streamlined fashion for a particular career. Instead, people are switching career tracks more often and requiring interdisciplinary skills in order to be successful. Skills are also being made obsolete more frequently due to rapidly evolving technology, so people will have to able to constantly learn and take in new information and develop new abilities. You can see the shift towards this kind of thinking in the B.C. curricula, which are being developed as increasingly open-ended (for example, there are no required texts on the English curriculum), focusing instead on the competencies and skills that teachers should strive to develop in their students.

High Tech High provides an example of how this shift in society can be met by the educational students. The students were encouraged to take initiative and show leadership, with the teachers facilitating their learning rather than dictating it. They developed team work and time management skills through preparing their projects through the exhibition, and brought their learning to life in an exciting and tangible way. You could tell that the fact that their parents, peers, and communities would be viewing their work gave the students increased buy-in and made them more invested in the results. I thought the way that the teachers unpacked the exhibition afterwards with the students through giving them feedback, asking for their thoughts on the process, and asking what they could have done differently, was a particularly admirable example of a dynamic and relational educational model.

However, I also thought the dismissal of older styles of education was a little too wholesale. For example, the English/Philosophy teacher at High Tech High said that we need to teach students how to learn instead of teaching them content. However, before you can successfully “do” philosophy you need to have a rich understanding of philosophical theories and the history of how they developed. Content is still important for making smart, innovative, and creative individuals. If you’re having a conversation, you can’t stop to Google everything. Your stored knowledge is still part of your intellect. That being said, I agree that the way we teach that content can definitely be updated. The study that showed how little students retain after their exams proves that. I also think that some students learn best in a more traditional way. I love writing papers, where I get to express my thoughts and develop my ideas and make sure I’m communicating effectively. That is a far more exciting and enriching prospect for me than a group project. It is not a lesser way to learn just because it’s less trendy.

I also thought the movie was suffused with a “we’re about to be replaced by robots” panic which resulted in a focus on equipping our students to be marketable and still relevant in our information economy. The repeated theme of what countries will “win” in the 21st century struck me as narrowminded and non-global thinking. Of course I see the relevance of teaching students applicable and practical skills and competencies so they can survive in our ever changing world. But don’t we need to think bigger? Maybe we can make a society where decent living standards are a guaranteed right, so that people don’t have to compete with each other to prove their value in a capitalist system. Then, we could truly teach in a way that is solely about the love of learning. A student could memorize Shakespeare’s sonnets to a word if they wanted to and it made them happy, without having to prove what is marketable or useful about that ability. If that could also be called success, I think that would be a beautiful world.