In this article Jordan Shapiro asserts that “We’re not thinking the right way about learning.”
Having worked as a professional chef, he draws on an analogy from the culinary arts: “Learning to think about food prepares a cook to be comfortable with uncertainty and to adjust the recipe on-the-fly.”
And further …
Transfer this example to any human endeavor and you’ll see what digital-era schools should really be teaching: the thinking skills involved in working with content. The trouble, however, is that we’ve all been so seduced by Silicon Valley marketing that we’ve deified data. We don’t train people to work with it, only to identify, measure, and consume it.
Students aren’t learning how to think about information, how to make sense of it and apply it across multiple contexts.
Mr. Shapiro then draws on a religious metaphor to describe the state of education in the US:
Just like all religions, when rites and rhetoric become obligatory without preserving everyday applicability—without maintaining meaning in context—worship loses its allure and even the gods abandon the temple.
Photo: Vani, Ruins of Ancient Temple by Gaga.vaa CC BY-SA 4.0
The temple is in ruins. We need to abandon the empty rites and rituals of standardized, lockstep assessment and follow a new ‘faith’ built on the construction of meaning. Teachers need to be set free to help students find the resources they need and then guide them in making sense of the information. If this occurs, we can help shape a citizenry that will avoid many of our mistakes as well as remedy the errors of past generations.
