INTERCONNECTEDNESS
In the new millennium, the world will be an increasingly interconnected place. We need to look at education holistically – as a total system with continuity through all levels. Right now, we are doing the opposite. We do not teach students to see the world as an interconnected place – to see the big view, to think integratively. We do not teach them to function in a complex world. The fundamental educational experience of our students now is that they learn in silos, right from kindergarten, a stale curriculum that does not connect to the society in which students actually live and function. We can’t produce integrative thinkers with a nonintegrative machine. Why do we teach our children to think in silos and not integratively? There is some sense to it, but plenty of nonsense as well. On the sense side, the world of knowledge is vast. We can’t expect everyone to tackle it like a Renaissance scholar. So we pursue simplification and specialization to handle the complexity of the challenge of learning in a vast sea of knowledge. As such, a critical part of education involves breaking the interconnected world into chunks – simplification – that can be tackled and mastered one by one – specialization. This makes sense. Our students need to gain mastery, and mastery is achieved more quickly with simplification. |
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On the nonsense side, we have become so comfortable with the drive for mastery that we have forgotten in the educational world about the interconnectedness. We simplify and implicitly believe that multiple specializations in a wide assortment of simplified subjects will educate our students well. That is where the fallacy lies. Side-by-side learning of topics does not equate to integrative learning. |
Creating an education system that can produce integration is no small task. Right now, as the world changes rapidly and our stale educational bureaucracy refuses to change, young people are ahead of us. They are connected to the Internet and already linked to a global bank of knowledge and people, which is starting to make their school experience seem less and less relevant. Many of them no longer bother with studying and extracurricular activities, but are participating in the real world by working after school and communicating globally over the Internet. |
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