Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics, talks to The Telegraph about his views on the future of learning.
The old-fashioned model of education still prevalent in today’s schools, involving remembering facts ‘off pat’, was designed for the industrial age. […] This might have been good for the mass production economy, but it doesn’t deliver for the challenges of the digital economy, or for the ‘net gen’ mind.
Children are going to have to reinvent their knowledge base multiple times. So for them memorising facts and figures is a waste of time.
This quote brought to mind the following statement from Shift Happens, winner of SlideShare’s World’s Best Presentation Contest in 2007:
According to former [US] Secretary of Education Richard Riley, the top ten in–demand jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2004. We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t exist yet, using technologies that haven’t been invented, in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.
This reminds me further of another quote on education from an unrelated article; that “universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers.”
These are important points; ones that cannot be overlooked when policy-makers look at evolving our education system.
via Seed