Teaching Tip #167

Teacherscribe’s Teaching Tip #167

The title of this one is very intriguing: Academic Teaching Doesn't Prepare Students for Life.

I have to agree.  Now hear me out.  About 100 years ago - or even 75 - when about 5-10 percent of the American population went to college, it meant you were 'educated.'  That meant you read Shakespeare, spoke another language, and had advanced science and math courses.

But that is the stuff of high school today.  Or so we hope anyway.

I fear, though, in the name of academics today we are teaching simply factual recall.  NCLB nobly tried to close the achievement gap via high stakes testing. 

What did the tests test?  Factual recall.

Okay.  Then guess what gets taught in school?  Facts.

So we are prepping our kids to master trivial pursuit.

How does this tie in to what I wrote about 100 words ago concerning colleges at the turn of the century? Well, it means that most of the students who came out of high school (actually, they dropped out since fewer than half actually earned a diploma), could find basic work in our job market.  They could drive trucks (as my father did), work in a factory, build houses, and so on. 

The folks who earned college degrees became doctors and lawyers and so on.

Fields like software engineers, search engine optimizers, internal logistics, data analysts, and public relations didn't exist.

Now they do.  Now they are essential.  All the basic jobs, are outsourcer or automated.

So simply teaching students to recall facts isn't enough like it used to be.

This, in turn, is leading to another achievement gap.  This one much more worrisome.

The new achievement gap results from schools teaching to the high stakes tests ushered in by NCLB.  What we aren't teaching are the two main things businesses want: how to solve complex problems and how to work in teams (how can you fill in a bubble to test any of those skills).

So focusing more on academics will not help students prepare for the jobs of the future.