Change

I found this quote on Possibilities ---- blog.

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." --Buckminster Fuller

I have been thinking a lot about change. Fuller's words make me think about the conversation David Warlick has started on "the new story". Education has to change. The old model is for an earlier time. But there are stakeholders (textbook companies, testing companies) who rely on things remaining the same and I fear they have political clout. We have to get people to understand that a 20th century education will not equip our students for the realities of even the current world, much less the future.

In David Warlick's latest post he says:

Its not so much that technology has changed the nature of teaching and learning, but that technology has changed the nature of information and how the world works, and how people work and learn and play. Because the world that we are preparing our children for is changing so dramatically (and continuing to change), we must rethink the what, how, and why we are teaching our children, and retool our classrooms to accomplish new goals.

I think it is more than retool classrooms. Although I don't agree that schools will disappear (if nothing else, parents need a safe place for their children while they are out working), but they have to change into a more fluid place, where students interact more with other students of varying ages and where they is a lot of contact with the outside world, both virtually and physically. We need to retool our schools. This is a big subject and will need a lot of thought.