“I wonder what would happen if instead of waking up every day and going to school to learn yet another formula, yet another piece of information, kids would wake up every day to go to school to invent something new . . . every day, a new invention, every day, a big idea,” said PAULO BLIKSTEIN, assistant professor in the Stanford School of Education.
Blikstein’s question capped a presentation he gave earlier this fall in a TEDx talk in Manhattan Beach, Calif. Blikstein, director of Stanford’s Transformative Learning Technologies Lab, argued that a lot of the skills we currently teach students are obsolete. He presented a slide featuring a traditional telephone headset, a telephone dial and a Discman to illustrate what an iPhone might look like if designed by most education reformers.
“We don’t know what to give up. We want to teach the new 21st Century skills, but we don’t want to give up any of the previous 20 centuries of knowledge. The day has just 24 hours; there’s no time to teach everything.”
Blikstein argued that you can’t teach innovation in a room with 40 chairs and a blackboard, and you can’t effectively assess new skills with a traditional paper-and-pencil test. Watch the video to find out what he recommends.
