Wednesday, October 28, 2009

21st Century Schooling According to Alfie Kohn


Ben Rimes, over at the Tech Savvy Educator, posted a link to an article about 21st Century Education and and a silly graphic making fun of the title "21st Century Tool". It *is* pretty funny, but the required reading he included for the post is the more salient part. When “21st-Century Schooling”Just Isn’t Good Enough: A Modest Proposal by Alfie Kohn examines what is really behind the drive for this new "brand." Good for introspection and self-examination.


2 comments:

Ben said...

I find myself ever torn between the Edupunk culture and the mainstream, so it was fantastic to see this nice intersection between the two. It's a shame that our society is based on consumerist ideals; it's makes it all that much easier to corral a concept, coin a phrase for it, market it to death, and then leave it for dead before it's even had a decent run.

Alecia Berman-Dry said...

Ben, this morning I was having a conversation with a colleage from Nepal. He is part of a panel of educators helping to restructure their educational system and wanted to know how we hire our teachers. It evolved into a larger discussion about education and I think it illustrated your point exactly about the marketing of ideas here in the states. He was surprised at how something like No Child Left Behind or "Web 2.0 tools" could influence education so radically. We definitely have an agile, flexible system in some ways because of our "consumerist, survival of the fittest" mentality.