Searching and Supermarkets
Our schools don’t hold classes in candle-making, the fashioning of hunting snares, or how best to farm rice or corn. We don’t spend much time wishing more of our kids knew how to herd goats, milk cows, or catch fish. Of course there are many among us who wish we would teach these things, that we’d connect more to life’s essentials, but these folks lose out. And why? Supermarkets.
I’ve never had to kill, grow, or catch what I eat. Most Americans haven’t. We go to the supermarket and never give a thought to learning how to get food through our own personal toil. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, I’m fine with it really, but the supermarket has utterly supplanted any innate need I’ve ever inherited to hunt, fish, or gather. It seems everybody else is fine with it too, as we don’t see agricultural education listed as a course path in most of our school districts or reflected in The Common Core national standards.
Imagine how ridiculous it would seem to test students on their ability to hunt, catch, or grow their own food when they’ve come up in a world that always has had, and always will have, supermarkets. Yet we’re doing the same thing to our students when we design our entire assessment system on skills like factual recall, memorization, and isolated learning in an age of the search engine and social learning networks.
The search engine is the supermarket. It’s not going anywhere and it has utterly supplanted skills that we had previously held in high esteem. Just as a thought exercise, look at every single test given in your school over the next year and think what the scores would be if students had access to a search engine. Then ask yourself if we want to continue to have school systems that so clearly are not preparing our students for the kind of thinking they need in their future and present lives..
It’ll be easy to say that maybe one day the supermarkets won’t be open, or that the internet could crash so we’d better still learn the old way just in case. But if either of those things happen, we’d probably have bigger things to worry about. Until then, we should at least begin to openly question why our education systems are failing to provide our students with both the skills and the context that will be most useful to them in the actual world of supermarkets and search engines we live in now.
- Sean Wheeler, @mrwheeler, @teachinghumans