The next time you show “Did You Know?” to anybody involved in education, please consider showing this new video by William Farren, an educator in the Dominican Republic, as a vital counter-point:
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I’ve invited William to either guest-post here, or better still, be the guest for a student podcast for my Project Global Cooling activity, which is in sore need of traction after months of failed effort.
Invitation to Dialogue to Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod:
Karl, Scott, as two of the biggest voices about 21st century education, due in no small part to the embrace worldwide of the “Did You Know?” video, I hope you’ll take a moment to make whatever comments come to mind after watching the video, either on your own blogs or, for the sake of conversation, in the comment thread to this post (or both). And without meaning to be in any way antagonistic or inflammatory, I’d like to ask if you see any possibility of either giving time, in a future version of “Did You Know?”, to sustainability and green learning, or at the very least to helping William’s video get as much exposure as “Did You Know?”
More Background
Here’s some background to my worry about “Did You Know?” being used so uncritically to frame our educational imperative for the 21st century. It’s from a post I wrote back in July, 2007, called: “Did You Know? There’s More to the Future than Economics.” I only include the last half, which is a response to a Diane Cordell post about “student voice” that includes the following quote:
The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered. –Piaget
The next generation, which we’re teaching now to be replicants of our own problematic lifestyles, are damned if they’re not equipped – or even conscious of – the world of their future. It’s been said a million times: “Our past is not their future.”
The one wrinkle I see in letting students decide what to learn is this: they are only aware of what their community – parents, teachers, preachers – make them aware of. And that community is generally not cognizant of the shape of the future, busy as it is with its own daily round and daily diet of soft news.
So I still see a role for adult educators to serve as sort of “futurist guides” to the next generation of adults.
Karl Fisch is already an example of someone playing that role, however unintentionally, by virtue of the viral reach of his “Did You Know?” video. According to that vision, largely a condensation of Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, the future to prepare for is one of economic competition with China and India.
But there’s more to our young people’s future than economics – especially when most of those economic practices are unsustainable. All this talk about “21st century workplace skills” disturbs me to no end for its trancelike oblivion to the unsustainability of that workplace.
Friedman actually mentions “green innovation” as one of those skills, incidentally, but that’s not mentioned in “Did You Know?”, so educators are largely not thinking of it. This isn’t Karl’s fault, since that video wasn’t intended to be anything more than a district edtech professional development presentation. But it’s taken a life of its own, and educators are so wowed by the flash of the animation they don’t seem to think beyond it to what else awaits in the future.
There are other futures we need to alert this generation to that are more fundamental, in my view. Global Warming and Climate Change, combined with the Peak Oil situation, top the list.
If we adults don’t use our capacity for being more informed, beyond the media, about the future we’re creating for our young, they have nobody to educate them in what is relevant to their future. We’ve surrendered our role to the larger forces of culture and media that are stuck in the status quo.
I can’t thank William Farren enough for taking such time and care to self-produce this video. It’s an inconvenient truth, but no less true for it: the hidden curriculum does matter. For all the talk we do about caring for kids, we seem to forget the grandkids – and all the other species on this planet – when we forget to teach the whole future, and not just the (problematic) need for economic competition.
Related reading: “The Year of Global Cooling and Understanding by Design” – project-based learning across the curriculum, for a sustainable future.
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