5 Subjects That Schools Aren’t Teaching (But Definitely Should)
Raise your hand if you learned about mitosis in school?
Now, leave your hand up if you still know what mitosis actually is?
Finally, keep your hand raised if you’ve used your knowledge of mitosis at your job in the last few years?
My guess is that not many of you reading this would still have your hand in the air.
And this demonstration is how Harvard Professor David Perkins gets his audiences to see the pressing need for curriculum reform.
He acknowledges that mastering content is important, but in the digital age in which we live, educators must re-assess what content they teach remains relevant to students’ futures.
He says,
“Conventional curriculum is chained to the bicycle rack,” he says. “It sits solidly in the minds of parents: ‘I learned that. Why aren’t my children learning it?’ The enormous investment in textbooks and the cost of revising them gives familiar elements of the curriculum a longer life span than they might perhaps deserve. Curriculum suffers from something of a crowded garage effect: It generally seems safer and easier to keep the old bicycle around than to throw it out.”
While teachers may feel more comfortable keeping their lessons as is, students are rightfully frustrated.
In a recent op-ed published in the New York Times, the Learning Network surveyed students to find out their opinions about school.
One of their major concerns? That school doesn’t prepare them for real life.
One student said,
“It feels like once we’ve graduated high school, we’ll be sent out into the world clueless and unprepared. I know many college students who have no idea what they’re doing, as though they left home to become an adult but don’t actually know how to be one.”
And still another commented,
“Students get into the habit of preparing exclusively for the homework, further separating the main ideas of school from the real world. At this point, homework is given out to prepare the students for … more homework, rather than helping students apply their knowledge to the real world.”
