It’s 5:00 on a beautiful snowy Sunday and I am finally able to exhale; this much needed release of oxygen has nothing to do with school or work, it has to do with another week of NFL contests coming to a close. This is my first year of participating in fantasy football and, it is with a knock on wood and some salt thrown over the shoulder that I tell you, I am in first place. I was definitely the underdog headed into this years contest and may have fulfilled this prophecy were it not for a young rookie quarterback named Robert Griffin III. I still remember the day that I added him to my team; I had to wait through a weekend of football, hoping that no one else in my league would recognize that potential for a rapid increase in weekly scores by picking up this young athlete. I sat on pins and needles while I waited to see his name on my roster; once it happened, I knew that I was sitting on a secret that the rest of the world would discover once it was too late.
Funny thing, I had that same feeling about the educational system - I wasn’t worried at all about China or India because I felt like I had all the answers to fixing our failing educational system. These answers were the exact opposite of thousands of years of Chinese teachings, so surely, they would never even think to give this a try... And then I saw it.
This video, posted on Apple’s website, begins with a man speaking in Chinese:
“The greatest failure of Chinese education has been that students only excel at passing exams.”
And then it hit me - they’ve figured it out, and we may never catch up.
I have written several blogs describing this problem (for example) , so I will not retype or paraphrase on here. Instead, let’s get past the idea of playing catch-up and talk about what we can do right now.
I have quietly been starting a war on Wikipedia in my own environment; while I love this website, it highlights one of the biggest problems with our educational system. For however long teachers have been teaching facts rather than concepts. This was fine for the pre-Google era that seems archaic to our own students but thanks to sites like Google and Wikipedia basic facts are at our fingertips. In fact, I’m going to try a bit of an experiment; first, I will wake up Siri on my iPhone and ask her a couple of questions.
#1 - Siri, what is the average weight of a polar bear? 900-1600 lb. (4 seconds)
#2 - Siri, who was Teddy Roosevelt’s Vice President? Charles W. Fairbanks (12 seconds)
#3 - Siri, what is the distance between the Sun and Jupiter? 5.058 astronomical units (3 seconds)
#4 - Siri, how long is one astronomical unit? 92.96 million miles (4 seconds)
With technology like this, teaching basic facts is literally wasting our student’s time! On the flip side, I am entering into my grand experiment for the year; my Diploma Program Music Students need to know Sergei Prokofiev’s First Symphony inside and out for their DP Music exams. We do not have a set text for this work or for Prokofiev himself, to compensate for this, my students are creating their own Prokofiev textbook. The students will need to know everything about the man that created such a wonderful variety of music, all while waging war on Wikipedia’s basic facts. For example, when a student tells me that Prokofiev was born in Russia in the late 1800’s, I want to know what is going on in the world during the late 1800’s and how it could impact this man’s compositions. When they say that he was influenced by classical composers, I want them to show me direct links from the score to scores from Mozart or Haydn.
This is the big secret that I wanted to keep hidden all to myself: if we want to succeed in education, economics, technology, medical breakthroughs we must focus on the concepts that basic facts lead to rather than the basic facts that lead to high test scores. It’s time to create the innovators of tomorrow rather than romanticize the learners of the past, and it’s time to value the skills of creating, digging beyond the surface, getting out of our comfort zones, and not being trapped by the realm of possibility. After all, it was Einstein who said, “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.”
China might be figuring this out but in the world of globalization, education doesn’t have to be about who scores the most points. We are talking about moving this world forward and building the future we want for ourselves; when I want to study who’s beating who, I’ll stick to fantasy football.
