Education Then and Now

Written for my Entrepreneurship & Leadership students PTHS 2018.  Welcome to Robert Fulgham’s DEEP KINDERGARTEN. Will you passively receive knowledge or will you actively seek to answer your questions?

“What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.”

George Bernard Shaw 

There was a time when parents and educators considered children’s minds to be blank slates ready to be filled with knowledge. We were drilled with facts and tested on memorization. Education meant preparing us to work in an industrial economy in which we would be given a task and then be expected to complete the same task in a prescribed routine.

We understand that children’s brains are not a blank slate. We also realize that the workforce you will be joining will require you to come up with new solutions to as yet unknown questions.

We are not filling your brains with everything you need to know, but that is OK because you have a miniature computer and can access every fact that has ever been studied.

So what should this new education look like? Questions. We are teaching you how to come up with the right question. You need to think.

Valid, meaningful, and productive educations aren’t adequately measured by multiple-choice questions. That is not to say that certain basic concepts shouldn’t be learned or become second nature. We should all have laid down the groundwork of reading, writing and arithmetic. We all need to have an understanding of history, social studies and civics. We also need to understand science and engineering, nutrition and health, housekeeping and economics. And don’t forget the social graces, emotional intelligence, and psychology.

All of those subjects work together to inform our questions: “If, then?” “How?” and “Why?”

Mame’s famous line was changed for the film version to “Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!”

Imagine that you have been given a small piece of bread. You can eat the bread, or you can use the breadcrumbs to find your way to the dinner table. Will you be satisfied with a small roll, or will you choose dinner?