The title of Chapter 6 is "The Three Eras of Education."
The three eras reflected upon are apprenticeship, universal-schooling, and lifelong-learning, the latter of which we are entering now. When we moved from apprenticeship to universal-schooling, a lot of changes were made in several different areas. Examples of areas where change was made include expectations, content, pedagogy, and location. These areas and more are changing now as we move to lifelong-learning.
Quotes from Chapter 6:
"Before the Industrial Revolution, parents wanted their children to follow in their footsteps. And so the education they expected for their children was the same education they had acquired." pg. 93
I am so glad that this is not the case. I truly believe that the majority of parents don't want their children to follow in their footsteps, but to instead get an even better education than the one that they themselves have received. This is at least the case with my parents. Neither of my parents graduated from college. My father works in a factory and my mother is a waitress. While my parents lead fulfilling lives and have a lot to show for all of the hard work that they do, they have always wanted better for me and my little brother. I am going to be the first in my household to graduate from college, and my parents couldn't be happier for me.
"With the knowledge explosion, it is becoming impossible for schools to teach people all the knowledge they might need as adults. Extending schooling for more and more years to accommodate the explosion of new knowledge and the growing demands for education is not a viable strategy So learning how to learn and learning how to find useful resources are becoming the most important goals of education." pg. 95
It used to be that a four-year education at a college was the norm. Now students have to push hard to get through in four years, with the norm being four-and-a-half to five years for many majors. I personally will have to be at UWSP for five years total to complete my major, which is why I related to this quote. I also remember in high school how much information there was for me to learn, and how much I could have learned beyond what was able to be taught to me during the short 50 minute class periods. I completely agree that the best skill to teach a child is to find useful resources so that they can teach themselves because there is no way to teach children everything during the 8 hour school day.
"The pedagogy of schooling has evolved a long way from the early years, when, as Larry Cuban describes, students were expected to recite in order the names of all the bays along the east coast of America. But it is still a mass-production pedagogy, where many students fail to learn what is taught." pg. 97
When I read the quote, I imagined Ms. Trunchbull from the book Matilda slamming a ruler on a desk and calling out a student to stand up and ramble off some relatively useless information. It seems ridiculous to me that there was a time when rote memorization was thought to be the best way to teach students. If anyone told me to memorize the bays on the east coast of America today, I would laugh in their faces. There are so many more useful things that I could spend my time learning, my favorite being how we learn. From my studies, I have learned that memorizing information isn't always the best way to learn. Most importantly, it's not fun. We need to be able to engage students so that they are having fun while they learn. We have so much technology and methods to engage students that rote memorization seems like a very barbaric way to teach. We have certainly come a long way as a culture.
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