We Live in Interesting Times

I wrote a blog entry about the business of education. Here is the beginning:

We live in interesting times. If you have been around for as long as I have, you can remember vinyl
records, 8 tracks, and cassette decks. You may even have about 25 Disney movies on VHS and are wondering if you should upgrade to DVD since all of them are now on the iTunes music store. Still have that film camera? Remember when a phone was attached to a wire in the wall? Remember when gas had lead in it?

Our students don’t. Your kids don’t.
Remember BBS boards, where you connected to the “net” via a 300 baud modem and
all the information was ASCII Text? That is where emoticons came from. :-)
Kids don’t remember that. They are the “digital natives.” They never knew Nixon and they never knew Carter.

So everything is changing and everything is changing quickly.

Change comes to education as well, but perhaps not as quickly as in the “real world” as business likes to call itself.

I remember when schools were run like schools. Then…

In the late 1980’s, a billionaire named H. Ross Perotdecided that public education sucked in general and really sucked in Texas, where he had his base of operation in Dallas. He then set out, with the blessing of the then-govenor Bill Clemmens, to change education to be more “businesslike.” Compounding Perot’s ideas that schools needed more accountability, was the Department of Education’s landmark report on “A Nation at Risk” which essentially said that there were major problems in education and we were not preparing our students for the “real world” ie the business world.

Click on the link to read the rest of the post, and the links to Br...

Enjoy

Tim