now, in the shadow of the technological singularity, there are a slew of movies about humankind’s desire to transcend the biological limits of body and brain.
Singularity is that moment when the whole game board changes, when artificial intelligence pulls even with, and then rapidly exceeds (or merges with), human intelligence.
Chaltain recommends that we should
Start focusing less on what we want kids to know and more on who we want them to become. And the good news is that lots of communities are already doing this — not by designing futuristic curricula or teaching kids how to build a better robot, but by recognizing that content is merely the means by which young people develop new skills and habits to carry them successfully through life and to equip them to solve problems we can’t even conceive of.Read more here.
At the Mission Hill School in Boston, educators have decided four characteristics matter more than anything else: forethought, perseverance, production and reflection. At the MC2 School in New Hampshire, there are 18 habits to work toward, from critical thinking to self-direction. At the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia there are five — inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation and reflection; and at Indianapolis’s Spring Mill Elementary, it’s a set of 12, which includes traits such as empathy, integrity and cooperation. These qualities are timeless, as critical in an era of computerized knowledge as they are now. These schools demonstrate that our education system doesn’t need to aspire to a single, universal set of facts to impart. Instead, every school needs to decide for itself that, of all the characteristics the ideal graduates could embody, which ones must they hold to be successful in the world, no matter the decade?
The latest research about how people learn affirms the value of this priority shift. As Paul Tough writes in “How Children Succeed,” “What matters most in a child’s development is not how much information we can stuff into her brain in the first few years. What matters, instead, is whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence.” California State University’s Arthur Costa makes a similar point in “Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind.” “We are interested in enhancing the ways students produce knowledge rather than how they merely reproduce it,” he writes. “The critical attribute of intelligent human beings is not only having information, but also knowing how to act on it.”
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