For as long as I’ve been associated with K12 education (just about 50 years if you go back to when I started going to school), the focus has been dominated by a push model of content dissemination. The curriculum represents a body of knowledge/facts that we assume one needs to be successful in the world beyond school. The push model has served many (but certainly not all) well in the decades before the K12 landscape was saturated with technology. The teacher was pretty much the sole authority in the classroom, with the support of carefully vetted books available through the school and local library. Knowledge was not abundant and we needed to rely on others to push the content to us as they best figured we needed to know.
But we don’t live in push times anymore. Technology has transformed knowledge in many ways––not only making it abundant, but allowing us as learners to gain access to so many more authoritative sources of knowledge that we simply didn’t have access to before the internet. We are now living in times dominated by a pull model. There is more information and new knowledge than we could ever consume, but we can now consume it “just in time” rather than “just in case.” The pull model has allowed us to personalize our lives and our learning.
The question to ponder, then, is does the purpose of an education shift in a world where we have the ability to personalize access to information based on our unique needs––era of pull? Is it still important to cram gobs of content into the brains of learners when they may no longer ever need it? Is there something more important for K12 education to be focusing on?
After watching this short video from Yuval Noah Harari (author of 21 Lessons for the 21st Century), I think there is––self-awareness. Self-awareness is not only critical in a landscape of abundant information and the ability to access knowledge on our own terms, but it’s also important as we live in times, as Harari suggests, where technology knows more about us than we know about ourselves. Could this imbalance lead to a loss or serious depletion in our own agency as Harari suggest? Possibly.
How are schools currently prioritizing learner self-awareness? How do schools help learners uncover what Todd Rose calls “micro-motives”––those things that push our buttons, fuel us with excitement? Do we understand the why behind valuing self-awareness over standardized knowledge sets? Is it an either/or?
A colleague of mine and I have agreed to explore the topic of self-awareness and the potential shift in the purpose of schooling by doing a cross-read of five texts. More to come on our exploration in future posts!
- Drive by Daniel Pink
- Insight by Tasha Eurich
- Mastery by Robert Greene
- Dark Horse by Todd Rose
- 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari
How might a new purpose of education based on self-awareness help us redefine our visions for K12?
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