Educating Students in the 21st Century: Part 1

By:  Mike Duncan, Superintendent

“In times of change learners inherit the Earth: while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exist” Eric Hoffer

Pike County parents, community members, local employers, pastors, teachers and students were asked in 2013 what the school system should do to prepare students for a dramatically changing world during a year-long community dialog around the purpose of schooling.  The input we received set us on a new course; one in which I believe will allow our students the opportunity to fulfil their dreams, and as parents, our dreams for them.

So, let us begin by setting the stage for the community dialog:  schooling has not changed much in the past sixty years.  Today’s schools, much like the ones all of us attended, were designed to prepare workers for a manufacturing economy; and, consequently, they look like a factory-students moving from grade to grade with the same pace in the same time window until "Viola", a graduate is made.  Unfortunately, many of those factory jobs that schools were preparing students for are now in China.

The notion that you can graduate from high school, get a job, work for a handful of decades and retire with a comfortable pension is gone.  US Department of Labor states that today’s students will average 10-14 jobs by the age of 38-all the while the demand for workers to complete repetitive routine tasks has decreased exponentially due to automation, digitizing, and off-shoring.  Students will be, by and large, employed to do jobs involving non-routine tasks, complex thinking, and enhanced communication.  To this point, Karl Fisch, in his video documentary Did You Know? , states the top-ten in demand jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2004.  Furthermore, he states, “We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist using technologies that haven’t been invented in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.”

 This is a seismic shift for traditional schooling.  Nationally, the response has been to push down expectations to younger and younger students, increase the amount of standardized bubble-sheet testing, and to expand the breadth of curriculum students are expected to know.   Not to get too semantically snobbish, but notice I used the word “know” instead of “learn”.  We’ll talk about that later. 

In response to all this change, we initiated a conversation with our community and the charge was clear: students must be able to think critically, problem-solve creatively, communicate clearly, and collaborate effectively.  In this five part series, we will discuss each of the 4 C’s and what it looks like for students and its importance in the job market.