Many years back, I wrote an essay about the poor track record of those who purport to know the jobs of the future. I looked back at predictions made by great minds over the 20th century, and they were all wrong. We don’t seem to have a magic crystal ball.Just the other day, a neighbor asked me to advise his daughter, a high school student, about how to prepare for the future. We haven’t met yet, but when we do, I will urge her to get a solid liberal arts education, to immerse herself in literature, history, and delve deeply into her interests.
Ann Cronin, who has been a teacher, administrator, and all-round accomplished educator in Connecticut, uses this post to offer advice about how to prepare for an unknown future. She calls it “a toolkit for the future.”
The most important preparation is to develop as thinkers and learners.
Here are three practical ways that teachers can do that:
“Teach students to question.
“Teach students to write essays that explore questions of importance to them.
“Teach students to write essays about how they came to know what they know.”
She observes:
“The Common Core State Standards do not ask students to think in these ways. They are falsely marketed as being about critical thinking; those standards do not give students the learning and thinking skills needed for the future. Also, no standardized test in the United States assesses questioning, collaborating, creative thinking, or learning to learn skills. Every minute of class time given to preparing students for those tests takes students away from what they really need to learn.
“The future is almost upon us; it is just about here. It’s time to give students what they need. Invite them to question, to explore possibilities, to imagine solutions, to grow and change as thinkers, and to fall in love with learning. Then sit back and watch where they take us. It will be better than we now know.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The DEFORMERS don’t want a citizenry who QUESTION the status quo and authority, otherwide they lose their money and perks.
OOPS, citizenry who QUESTIONS the status quo and authority, OTHERWISE they lose ….
DEFORMERS are just power hungry and greedy for money. SICK.
The only way standardized tests can teach creative and critical thinking is to have each student write their own test questions and share them with their classmates.
Michael Haran
Institute of Progressive Education and Learning
To educate children to accept the flat-earth theory and that the universe was born 6,000 years ago when “their” god flipped a switch to set off the Big Bang, and all life was created in an instant, children must not learn to question, explore who they are and why, and never to think for themselves.
All children must be programmed to think like a Betsy DeVos and to be monitored by an algorithm that will brand them as a dangerous deviant if they stray from the anointed path.
Diane writes: “I will urge her to get a solid liberal arts education, to immerse herself in literature, history, and delve deeply into her interests.”
Yes indeed. I do believe that’s what’s missing in today’s technocratics, sciences, and business curriculum. (Though Denmark’s Business School is the exception, as is the European-mostly Bologna Project signed-on to by many schools of higher education there.)
But if I may, and though the “teach students to question” idea is paramount, I think these ideas still don’t get to the core of the problem in the teaching-learning relationship. That is, and ever-so-briefly, that children wonder from the get-to and already are curious and have questions.
Somehow in much of education, children get systematically separated from their own natural desire to learn (school becomes boring) so that “content” becomes implicitly understood (felt by them) as an effort to impose “knowledge” from the outside, as factory machines impose form on an automobile. Children’s NATURAL curiosity too often gets overlooked for many reasons, and by way of many erred policies and pedagogies.
So while I would keep “teach students to question,” I would add first: recognize students as questioning beings (already) which, in turn, suggests that they don’t need to be taught to question, but rather they need to be correctly GUIDED in their questioning by a trustworthy teacher. This might seem a small distinction, but it’s big.
I think we all here know this: That teachers (at least implicitly) already know the above, though they are also overwhelmed by misguided policy and the more general crises in education, as are often regarded on this site–policy and by prescript pedagogy that either ignores good cognitional theory or doesn’t understand its place in the education of our children. CBK
I had some great teachers when I was in school, when I was in public schools. They wrote essays on the backs of my essays. It was a back and forth of reasoning. They didn’t correct my mistakes as much as they added to my discourse with their own thoughts. My writing was impassioned and strong. I remember this as early as 5th grade, and all the way through the universities I attended.
Then I became a teacher. Soon thereafter, NCLB went into effect and everyone around me stopped assigning essays. They all went out and bought multiple choice test prep books. Reading involved counting the number of letters in words, and counting the number of mistakes in pronunciation. Writing became sparse and formulaic: counting words, counting prestructured sentences in prestructured paragraphs, counting paragraphs, counting correct responses… language became math!
We have to find a way back to reasoning and communicating with each other, and being able to reason and communicate with each other.
I learned most of what I know about writing in the public schools. In high school I had to write essays, numerous compositions and even some research projects. We are shortchanging students if we emphasize test prep over authentic reading, writing and thinking. Most of the big ideas are not found fragmented passages in the pages of a bubble test. They are explored by reading whole works, thinking, discussing and writing at length.
My best English teacher in high school taught me that good writing is basically a subtractive process.
You get down the basic ideas and then remove all the stuff that is superfluous. She called the latter “weeds”.
She was right — and not just about writing.
I have since learned that almost all artistic (including scientific) endeavors are about removing the superfluous until one is left with the absolute minimum needed to convey what you are trying to say.
As Einstein said about scientific theories, they should be as simple as possible but no simpler.
No, that is sculpture not writing.
That’s right, Poet. My teachers and professors told me the same. Poetry boils down thought to its simplest, most elegant form. Nowadays, teachers are encouraged to teach the weeds, though, transition words like “therefore” and “for example”. And the way to get your students to score well on the Common Core test writing portions is to get them to write as much as possible, whether it’s meaningful or not. My students score well because I teach them the difference between writing and test taking. Ugh.
Interesting, I was thinking about sculpture too.
Poet –Wouldn’t you say that what your teacher taught you was a method of refining writing, not the core capacity of writing? Subtracting the superfluous will only yield good writing if the essential stuff has already been committed to the page. What generates this essential stuff? One’s core capacity for writing. The core capacity comes from having cogent thoughts about a topic, having the vocabulary and other linguistic wherewithal to express those thoughts, and having mental templates of what good verbal expression looks and sounds like. English teachers do not and cannot impart this core capacity –it is the sum total of one’s exposure to language and knowledge.
Ponerosa
Yes, I would agree. Its refinement. You have to have the essential stuff there to begin with.
Otherwise you violate Einstein’s second criterion: no simpler.
That is good hisch-level teaching: it’s editing. If one has been taught to question, explore, develop ideas per Cronin’s formula since primary, editing down to the essentials will come into play gradually in midsch, increasingly in hisch.
And “sculpting” is just one side of the coin. It was key for me, as I am a burbler who needs to write and write to figure out what I’m feeling, experiencing, concluding– then rewrite to shape it into coherent communication to the reader. (Poet here also). And I had the benefit throughout growing yrs of a parent who always was asking what we thought & helped us to figure out why, with more questions.
But there are many more students who start from premises or conclusions that are so self-evident to them they haven’t questioned their thinking process, unaware others may start & end up elsewhere– & find they have nowhere to go, nothing more to write. It’s a beginner-style of writing that reflects answer-focused thinking– & probably (as CBKing says above) reflects early stifling of natural impulse to question.
bethree5 Yes, yes, yes. “. . . there are many more students who start from premises or conclusions that are so self-evident to them they haven’t questioned their thinking process, unaware others may start & end up elsewhere– & find they have nowhere to go, nothing more to write.”
It’s also at the root of the contempt or even hate for different-others that we see in all sorts of biases, like racism, xenophobia, you name it. To break through those assumptions is the beginning of a kind of wisdom that opens doors to the meaning that’s all over the place, and that otherwise we cannot see it for our own ignorance.
The other thing is one of the deeper problems that come from children’s present tech obsessions. There is a KIND of interaction that goes past the passivity of watching TV or merely listening to others talk. However, and though (of course) tech is excellent in many ways, as a “tool” of education, it’s great limitation is that it’s basically “canned” and can set patterns of passive response in children that make the child’s reality similarly canned. Gaming is an abstraction from life, which is okay for awhile, like playing baseball or soccer. But children are in development where patterns become habits of mind that are “set in stone.” And as with patterns of listening and responding, so go omissions of them.
I couldn’t voice it, but I knew something was wrong when we stopped talking to one another around the dinner table and watched TV instead.
“Rewriting” is much closer to what I was trying to get at than just editing.
The particular teacher I was referring to allowed us to rewrite papers as many times as we wanted and each time she would make suggestions and corrections.
Few things are purely subtractive processes, at any rate. Even sculptors who work with clay can put back material when they make a mistake.
Only those who work in stone are engaging in pure subtraction.
“Only those who work in stone are engaging in pure subtraction”
Very well said.
And those who are in the performing arts, as well, in a more transient way. As a musician, I’m sometimes been envious of my friends who work with mediums in which they aren’t required to continually perform their finished works. After all the hard work; when it’s done, it’s done.
Editing and revision. The latter requires more introspection, questioning, and creativity. My main teaching point when working in that area is to show…not tell.
gitapik Yes, about rewriting. I think that, in writing anything “from scratch” we are writing out of a flow of insights that, when we finish a draft and then return to it, are already being integrated into our background of memory from which new insights emerge. And so when we RE-write, we are “seeing” the first draft with new and more developed interpretive “eyes.”
Thus, we can find ourselves thinking: why didn’t I see that before? It’s like reading a novel and then reading it a second time while THIS TIME knowing what happens in the end: TOTALLY different reading.
Also, when we write, we often are THINKING what is NOT going on the page–the interaction between thought and page is so intimate. But in the reverie of writing, we THINK it got there when it didn’t–it was only in my mind. So that when we read a second and third time, we recognize that what we thought we were writing on the first draft didn’t really get there.
So there is (a) a build-up of insights that are in a constant feed-back-loop dynamism and (b) the intimacy between page and thought.
The above makes me want to puke when I think of bubble tests.
CBK@ 11:55. Gosh CBK what a good post.
1. “It’s also at the root of the contempt or even hate for different-others that we see in all sorts of biases, like racism, xenophobia, you name it.” You nailed it. That questioning parent was my Mom, who could (& usually did) have an interesting conversation w/anyone she encountered. She never challenged our assumptions, just asked what made us think that way, then usually thro anecdotes of others she’d met, illustrate other ways of looking at things.
Re: gaming et al kidtech: “it’s great limitation is that it’s basically “canned” and can set patterns of passive response in children that make the child’s reality similarly canned.” This sounds more like a criticism of ed-tech, which sets up a pretend, answer-focused version of learning, stifling questioning, discovery, innovation.
In my experience, kids recognize the abstraction from reality of gaming (& soccer & football), & use it as a refuge from the disconcerting complexities of IRL daily interaction.
“I knew something was wrong when we stopped talking to one another around the dinner table and watched TV instead.” 20+ yrs ago I consulted my wise younger sis, a SpEd teacher, on my boys’ struggles in primary. Her first response: “Umm, do you guys still watch TV during dinner? ;-). We switched immediately to my reading them a story, which morphed into taking turns telling each other stories & jokes.
Ms. Cronin wants us teachers to give “questioning, collaborating, creative thinking, or learning to learn skills”. I’m not sure these things can be taught. Elicited, sure. But taught?
“Questioning”: you can make a kid captious, but wherein lies the ability to ask incisive questions? General knowledge coupled with domain knowledge.
“Collaborating”: is there really an all-purpose collaborating skill, that works for both planning weddings and designing rockets?
“Creative thinking”: this is what happens when you mix disparate bodies of knowledge. Ergo teaching knowledge makes a student more creative.
“Learning to learn”: our brains are hard-wired to learn. When they acquire knowledge, they learn new knowledge faster. Teaching a brain to learn is like trying to teach the guts to digest: it’s a fool’s errand. Teach knowledge lucidly and the brain will learn it, and thereby become a more powerful learner.
Why am I inclined to question the very conventional opinions Cronin has expressed? Because I have read E.D. Hirsch. In other words, my knowledge of E.D. Hirsch’s books as empowered me to question. Other teachers do not question because they have not read Hirsch. It seems to me that there is no all-purpose questioning ability that teachers can impart. But perhaps Ms. Cronin can correct me.
So we should stop reading literature and writing essays, and instead memorize lists of vocabulary words and grammar rules. We should read but short excerpts of text and test for main ideas and details with multiple choice questions. That’s E.D. Hirsch. Does the fallacy of his argument really need explaining?
Hirsch is: flood kids with general knowledge through topical units (e.g. on rain forests). This knowledge is the sine qua non for true reading, writing and thinking skill. Knowledge forms the core capacity for these other things. There is no such thing as reading, writing or thinking skill independent of a knowledge base. I strongly recommend that you read “Why Knowledge Matters”, his latest book. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum is filled with FAR more complete works of rich fiction than any Common Core-aligned curriculum I’ve seen. What makes you think Hirsch likes the current vogue for teaching “bleeding chunks” (i.e. excerpts) to be used as mere grist for analysis, as our school’s lame StudySync curriculum does? His whole opus is dedicated to attacking this mistaken approach to teaching reading. Hirsch has very interesting and sophisticated ideas about vocabulary acquisition that I wish more teachers were aware of. He is for the most part against the idea of memorizing word lists. He says immersing kids in knowledge domains through multi-week topical units is better because it creates a context that accelerates vocabulary acquisition.
Wait a minute, we’re sort of in agreement here. I agree you can’t teach skills like questioning, collaborating, creating, and learning (and that Common Core and StudySync are wastes of time). Rather, asking students to question, collaborate, and create are methods of teaching that help students acquire knowledge. Read, discuss, write, repeat. Right! Sorry I disagreed with you. I thought you meant students didn’t have voices worth listening to. I see my error now.
But, but… I think there’s a nuance worth hanging onto there, LCT. “Flood kids with general knowledge through topical units (e,g, on rain forests). Eyes glaze over when we’re flooded with info. “Flood” implies a high-ambient-heat swift evaporation cycle– more appropriate to describing a well-educated adult mind. Children need to be active participants in knowledge acquisition. Young plants in a temporate climate are developing their root systems. You don’t flood them, you provide them with a regular source that percolates around them; the roots take in what they can process then reach [themselves] for more. Lots more info is percolating all around them on the internet: questioning & guiding them to ask questions is an essential part of the process.
Agreed. That’s why it’s important to keep an eye on the interests of the kids in your class(es). Teaching the general information is the beginning. When you see that Joseph has really latched on to how the buds on some plants look different from others, you can open the floodgates a little bit further.
“Children need to be active participants” in learning. Perfect!
LeftCoastTeacher I like the growing-plant analogy. And it’s the Little Red Riding Hood Theory: Too much water too soon, and it drowns; too little early on, and it cannot grow at crucial moments in its exponential development. “Just right” is the key. And THAT takes a good gardener-teacher.
Also, The deeper and broader the root system, the more water the plant can take in from more and deeper places. Although the “too late” thing doesn’t work because even adults with extremely distorted and traumatized backgrounds can develop and thrive, and even use their traumas to deepen their wisdom and that of those around them.
Bethree5: I can see how “flood” is not the right word now. “Feed” might be better (“drip irrigate” does not sound quite intensive enough). “Flooding” implies exceeding kids’ capacity to assimilate new information. Such capacity limits need to be respected. A better paraphrase of Hirsch might say that by feeding kids core knowledge in a sequential and systematic way, we build schema in their brains which then serve as a sort of Velcro that catches and hangs on to new knowledge. The sequential and systematic is his way of dealing with the capacity problem. Laying the foundations of knowledge early on expands kids’ ability to take in higher levels of knowledge later. The trouble with the Common Core curricula (and the NCLB curricula before them) is that they do not lay any foundation of knowledge, except in a haphazard and accidental way as they present texts to be dissected.
Because I have a fair amount of medieval history knowledge in my head, I can go to Chartres and enjoyably follow most of what the tour guide says. I imagine for many people, the ability to assimilate this Louis and that Louis fails pretty quickly. Conversely, my capacity to follow would quickly fail at a JavaScript conference. Background knowledge is the key.
We can flood students with all types of knowledge, but it still will not erase the harmful impact of poverty. I know all poverty is not equal. I worked with extremely poor foreigners. Yet, there was less dysfunction in their lives compared to some very poor American students. Dysfunction and neglect are two big problems in poor communities.
Teachers are not against teaching content. After content it is what the teacher does with it that counts as well as content itself. Teachers certainly model as well as question to elicit thinking and responses. I have read ED Hirsch and Bloom’s Taxonomy. Learning is not a contest between content and skills. They can work together to help students become critical thinkers and responsible citizens.
They’re not against teaching content, but they’re led to believe by education school professors, David Coleman, and other soi disant experts to think it’s not nearly as important as teaching skills. Common Core ELA has been universally interpreted to mean that teaching “skills”, not content, is what it’s all about (I use scare quotes because, as Bob Shepard says, these particular skills don’t really exist; they’re reifications of wishful utterances. CC is premised on the notion that there’s such a thing as an all-purpose “complex text reading skill” that can be taught. There isn’t. Only broad knowledge and exposure to sophisticated syntax and proper grammar makes one an advanced reader.) The new tests plumb for these mythical skills, not content, for the most part. Principals around this country don’t give one fig for content anymore. It’s all about the imaginary skills that the tests purport to suss out. Ergo our district bought StudySync (get it? It’s “synced” with the Common Core ELA test) –“bleeding chunks” of literature such as * Lord of the Flies* instead of the whole text, with processing chores ad nauseam. The processing chores are believed to build the skills. No proof. Not happening. Good readers remain decent readers despite the curriculum. Bad readers make no progress, except by bureaucrats fudging cut scores. We must protest this debasing of education.
Well said, Ponderosa. I am often tongue-tied when trying to explain the problem of skill-based ELA stds to friends. You explain it succinctly. (I may leave out the bleeding chunks metaphor tho 😉
I think you are right about questioning.
It’s about asking informed questions, where “informed” depends on the stage you are currently at.
Obviously, informed for a first grader is going to be different from informed for a college student.
There is one problem with this however.
Sometimes all the information is wrong and one stops asking what are perceived by all the experts as dumb questions.
Sometimes such questions are not dumb at all.
Einstein developed his special theory of relativity by questioning things that nearly everyone else had taken as given. Stuff like the all pervading “Aether” and the absolute nature of both time and space.
I should have said
“Sometimes some of the information is wrong” because in Einstein’s case it was really a conflict between available information that he was trying to remedy.
SomeDAM Poet writes about questioning: “Sometimes all the information is wrong and one stops asking what are perceived by all the experts as dumb questions.”
You don’t mean K-12 teachers have to be skilled enough in child development to know about such things?
Bite your tongue!
By the way, have you read any books by Hirsch?
No, but I have read some books by D. Ravitch.
Heh. Maybe I’ll pick up a Hirsch next time I visit the bookstore. Although I have to admit I am pretty happy with the essays my students write. Hope the book will agree with that.
I sincerely hope you do; a thoughtful teacher like yourself will probably find it stimulating. An older book of his, The Knowledge Deficit, is a quicker read and encapsulates his main arguments for a knowledge-focused curriculum.
Hirsch made one major error: he ignored all the important influences on a child’s interest in learning that occur outside the classroom.
Hmm…
I’m inclined to agree with Diane. The fact is, students learn best when thinking instead of regurgitating.
LeftCoastTeacher Yes. Compare your expression of your knowledge by (a) filling in a bubble as you “answer” someone else’s questions, to (b) saying what you know in your own words or writing it down as your thoughts about what you have studied unfold on the paper in front of you.
(B)
Diane –I disagree. Teachers can create new interests if they make the material intelligible (the opposite of what Common Core strives to do: it intentionally obfuscates to contrive “rigor”) and appetizing. I find that ultra-lucid, visually-intensive lessons about medieval history are eagerly gobbled up by the otherwise alienated special ed and “delinquent” kids in my seventh grade classes. Hirsch’s curriculum, done well, is the path to enfranchise the alienated kids. Common Core is the diametric opposite: it is the death knell to students’ interest.
Ann: your three points literally brought me to tears. You expressed, in such a simple, direct way, what I believe teaching should be. You describe my college education, especially those teachers who truly educated me.
I want my kids to know a lot, about a lot of different things.
Dearest Dr. Ravitch:
I am sure that Albert Einstein completely agreed with your statement: “I looked back at predictions made by great minds over the 20th century, and they were all wrong.”
Albert Einstein expressed that
1-“Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.”
2-” Sometimes the technology we have today is because of someone’s insane ideas.”
3 – “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity”
In short, regardless how outstanding the sculpture and the painting are, they cannot be compatible to the living one. Yes, the soul or the aura of the object is the true force behind all living objects. Being honest and compassionate is true through actions, NOT in expression. Any beautiful writing is not NOT ONLY through clarity, vocabulary, and structure, BUT ALSO through experience and knowledge in the writing topic. Back2basic
In order to be prepared for the future, students need to leave school as intrinsically motivated, life-long learners. This will NOT happen via the test prep exercise regimen of the standards-and-testing regime. Precisely the opposite will and is happening. A great horror, this.
This is slightly off topic but extremely important. [It comes from WaPo but I Googled the headline and now can give the information from the Chicago Tribune.]
This is horrendous. To Trump, the only ones that matter are billionaires, Nazis, and white men. He has already demonstrated his dislike for a disabled journalist. The man is repulsive.
……………………………
DeVos rescinds 72 guidance documents outlining rights for students with disabilities – Chicago Tribune
Moriah Balingit
Washington Post
The Education Department has rescinded 72 policy documents that outline the rights of students with disabilities as part of the Trump administration’s effort to eliminate regulations it deems superfluous.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-devos-disabled-students-20171021-story.html#share=email~story
Thanks for the link, Carol. I just forwarded it to my friends and colleagues.
Looks like a strategy. They know that repealing IDEA might easily go up in flames, but if they blur the definitions and guidelines associated with the Act, they’re creating great big gray areas and loopholes that will allow the states to “unknowingly” move out of compliance.
When my daughter was considering college and career choices, we spoke with a friend who was highly placed in a world health organization. She strongly recommended a liberal arts degree.
She always looks for that in any and every resume she receives. It’s a strong indicator that the applicant will be able to discuss Socrates or Shostakovich with a potential donor at a fundraiser as well as having the ability to understand a culture and how to communicate effectively with villagers while planning and helping to build an irrigation system to increase crop yield.