Stickybuffalo.com

I have been thinking about education issues for some time, and this seems like as good a time as any to collect my thoughts. Though they are still scattered, at the moment, and I will probably end up with a couple of posts here, at least.

We’ll see. I think part of the difficulty with this subject, of course, is defining the problem. In fact I’m pretty sure that there are multiple large challenges within the overall category of “education,” and identifying them is further complicated by questions about what the purpose of education is or should be.

When it comes to primary education, I think we can at least establish some kind of core goal, basically i.e. to sustain literacy and numeracy in our society, along with some rudimentary familiarity with history, civics, science and the arts. That’s by no means a comprehensive list of either current or proposed objectives, for K-12 education, but it probably serves as a reasonable starting point.

Whereas with higher education? I honestly have no idea. I’m almost beginning to suspect that modern colleges and universities, at any rate as we are familiar with them in the United States and peer nations, may prove to be something of an accident of history which brought together a lot of functions in a combination which, with a few more generations, will no longer make sense as a whole system. (Perhaps a bit like the struggling nationwide system of metropolitan daily newspapers?)

I think it’s difficult for me, perhaps for anyone, to fully grasp what going to college really means, simply because the experience can prove so transformative. It’s very hard for me to imagine, personally, a life without having gone to college and I suspect that it’s difficult for those who didn’t to appreciate all they missed, as well. For what it’s worth, let’s just try to list some of the things college can mean: (more…)

Admittedly, getting wound up over the remarks of somebody like Dan Tapscott is probably a bit like getting wound up over the remarks of Tom Friedman, Richard Florida or Faith Popcorn. Nincompoops selling half-baked pseudo-insightful drivel; shouldn’t I just ignore them?

Perhaps, yes. I would do so more readily, however, were it not just journalistic-sweatshop hacks who have to fill space on news portal sites and in business magazines paying attention to their brand of fluff.

Unfortunately this sort of starry-eyed gosh-wow new-economy-technology-future-go dogma has seeped into conventional wisdom without anyone ever questioning it. In reading a CBC interview with Tapscott the other day, I was struck by his perfect, if obviously unintentional, summarization of this mindset and how utterly barking mad it is: (more…)