We the People, can either continue with a head-in-the-sand attitude to our children’s future or wake up and face the fact that educational reform is probably the only thing that matters.
Which skills do we need our children to wield to combat misinformation, viruses, climate change, prejudice, and nuclear weapons proliferation? Do we want the current Convergent Thinking curriculum, or should we instead encourage Knowledge-based Thinking? Divergent Thinking? We should choose Discovery Thinking, not Recovery Thinking.
I am not the only canary in the coal mine. And that’s probably because this could not be happening at a worse time. The challenges are getting exponentially more difficult and, more than at any other time in our history, we need to encourage our children to use the magical Hybrid Skills all children possess.
Instead, we are boring the majority of children and teachers to death with testing and convergent thinking.
In a study cited recently by Sir Ken Robinson, a prominent education theorist, 98% of children between the ages of 3 and 5 exhibit a capacity for divergent thinking: making connections between seemingly unrelated facts and scenarios and using metaphors and analogies. At age 15, only 10% retained this capacity and at age 25, the percentage dropped to 5%. You should be worried about this. But employers should be horrified. That is exactly the skill they need. Imagine if China stopped stressing convergent thinking, and we kept on going.
#Ideation #Hybridskills #Justifiedbelief #Futureproof #Infoliteracy
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Excerpted from my book Hybrid Learning.
