Over the last few months I’ve had the good fortune to participate in a number of professional development opportunities.  Not surprisingly, the vast majority of presenters I’ve encountered have made a point of reminding me that the world is changing and we need to provide our students with a “21st century education”.  To paraphrase a summer’s worth of indoctrination, “our students need an engaging, learner-centered classroom environment that teaches them to work collaboratively, communicate effectively, discern the quality of information, create as opposed to consume, and meet the challenges of ever-changing technology.”  While those are certainly valuable skills, they are hardly unique to the modern age.

Consider this article excerpt describing a specific decade of American education:

“…rejecting both traditional curricula and traditional methods of teaching … educators in this crucial decade developed important new ideas about educational practices—ideas founded on a new understanding of the nature of child development and grounded in new insights suggested by advances in psychology. Most centrally, these … educators advocated moving the child in school from the background to the foreground of classroom life. They assumed this fundamental shift in focus would be accomplished by creating new opportunities to engage the child’s cooperation and imagination.  Not surprisingly, old-fashioned rote learning was discouraged in the new, child-centered curriculum.”

Sound familiar?  Sound contemporary? It’s a synopsis of the first decade of the 20th century taken from “1900′s Education: Overview.” American Decades. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Richard Layman. Gale Cengage, 1996. eNotes.com. 2006.

Let’s not forget that this time period also saw the development of the automobile, airplane and radio, and schools shifting to a “corporate model” with efficiency being quantified and measured.  Are Dewey’s thoughts on education, the invention of life-changing technologies, and looking to the business world for guidance all that different from what we read and hear in today’s professional circles?  Constructivism is back in style, technology has never been more dominant, NCLB is on everyone’s mind, and we can’t seem to read enough “improvement” books from the corporate world like The World is Flat, A Whole New Mind, and, Wikinomics.

Granted, the world has changed quite a bit in the last 100 years.  The world is becoming flatter.  Creativity is as important as logic. Mass collaboration can produce wonderful results.  However, the notion that the challenges we face are unique to the 21st century does not acknowledge our profession’s history; we’ve been there and done that.  Perhaps it’s time to look past the “2.0″ panacea hype, recognize that we are eight years into the new millenium, and take a cue from Dewey in regard to preparing students for the future: “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”

Posted: 07|20|08 at 5:18 pm. Filed under: Misc, Professional Development.
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