I believe the primary and original purpose of education was and still is to prepare students to be more productive than they would be without an education. The value of an educated person is so far beyond that of an uneducated person that the education pays for itself. Education is an investment that pays off in the future. It is impossible to predict the future, but investing is about making the best decision possible with the information available.
In the next fifty years I see two potential futures. In the first, our reliance on technology ends catastrophically and we enter something like a Dark Age as we wait for another Enlightenment. In the second, technology continues to become a central part of almost all day-to-day activity and supplant people in various ways while creating new industries. Both of these scenarios sound like they’ve been ripped from a science fiction story, but look around, and you’ll see we are in a science fiction story. Google has made a self-driving car and Apple’s iPhone has made Star Trek’s tri-corder look like a 90’s brick-cellphone. If our students end up living in the first scenario, Boy Scout training will be far more helpful than their formal education. In the second scenario, knowing the capital cities will be useless (and so will many other “fundamental” skills) because the information will be readily available online.
Technology will be a fundamental part of the future and if education is going to be a good investment our students need to enter the “real world” ready to use search engines efficiently, write algorithms, and use their own minds to merge, analyze and connect bits of information. It will be awhile before computer programming joins the other core classes like Reading and Science, but in the mean time we should be integrating technology into the classroom whenever it is pedagogically appropriate. The purpose of this blog is to share my research and experiences using technology to provide greater differentiation and prepare students for the digital future.
