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| Teachers.Net Gazette Vol.6 No.4 | April 2009 |
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 When “21st-Century Schooling” Just Isn’t Good Enough: A Modest Proposal Are we serious about educating students for the global competitive economy of the future? | |
| by Alfie Kohn www.alfiekohn.org
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 This is no time for complacency, though. Not everyone is on board yet, and that means we’ll have to weed out teachers whose stubborn attachment to less efficient educational strategies threatens to slow down the engine of our future economy. How can we rid our schools of those who refuse to be team players? Well, we can insist that all classroom instruction be rigorously aligned to state standards – a very effective technique since most of those standards documents were drafted by people steeped in the models, methods, and metaphors of corporations. We can also use merit pay to enforce compliance by stigmatizing anyone who doesn’t play by the new rules. (Come to think of it, here, too, we’re already well on our way to creating 22nd-century classrooms.) The final distinguishing feature of education that’s geared to the next century is its worshipful attitude toward mathematics and technology. “If you can’t quantify it or plug it in, who needs it?” Of course, the reason we will continue to redirect resources toward the STEM subjects (and away from literature and the arts) isn’t because the former are inherently more important but simply because they’re more useful from an economic standpoint. And that standpoint is the only one that matters for schools with a proper 22nd-century mindset. One last point. We will of course continue to talk earnestly about the need for a curriculum that features “critical thinking” skills – by which we mean the specific proficiencies acceptable to CEOs. But you will appreciate the need to delicately discourage real critical thinking on the part of students, since this might lead them to pose inconvenient questions about the entire enterprise and the ideology on which it’s based. There’s certainly no room for that in the global competitive economy of the future. Or the present. 
Alfie Kohn has recently completed a book called Crime and Punishment. He expects to begin reading another one shortly. Copyright © 2009 by Alfie Kohn. This article may be downloaded, reproduced, and distributed without permission as long as each copy includes this notice along with citation information (i.e., name of the periodical in which it originally appeared, date of publication, and author's name). Permission must be obtained in order to reprint this article in a published work or in order to offer it for sale in any form. Please write to the address indicated on the Contact Us page.  | |
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Alfie Kohn writes and speaks widely on human behavior, education, and parenting. The latest of his eleven