The World Has Changed Marion Brady Note: Frame animation is complete when the blue arrow appears. Left-click the mouse (point anywhere) to advance to the next frame.

2 Copplestone, Devon, England Farmer

3 Copplestone, Devon, England Farmwife

4 John and Marys major problems: Keeping well Keeping well Maintaining tools and buildings Maintaining tools and buildings Making the land produce Making the land produce Caring for animals Caring for animals

5 John and Mary had children. They taught the children their solutions to these problems. The solutions worked because the world the children inherited was the same as their parents world.

6 And so it went, generation after generation. Same problems, so same solutions. This made educating very simple: just a matter of transferring information factsfrom one generation to the next. Piece of cake!

7 But one day John and Marys great- great-great-great-great-great- (etc.) grandson faced a problem. The world had changed. Somebody had invented a machine for harvesting grain.

8 Should he borrow money to buy the new machine? His father, who knew all about horses (his father had taught him) didnt know what to tell his son; didnt know how the machine worked, how long it would last, how to fix it if it broke, how much would have to be harvested to make the machine pay for itself.

9 The world had changed. Old solutions, old answers, old facts, were no longer enough. New solutions, new answers, new facts were needed.

10 Educating, once a simple matter of transferring facts, needed to change, needed to switch from TRANSFERRING OLD INFORMATION TO DISCOVERING NEW INFORMATION

11 Thats a very big paradigm shift, an absolutely essential shift if were to survive. And it hasnt happened.

12 For proof that it hasnt happened, look at the thousands of standards for school subjects the fifty states have adopted, and the tests keyed to those standards.

13 The standards and tests have one main concern: What can kids remember? What they SHOULD care about is how successful kids are in dreaming up new knowledge when old knowledge doesnt work.

14 This outdated, simplistic idea Education: Dumping information into learner memory …creates educations biggest problems.

15 Real understanding grows only when learners identify relationships BETWEEN facts: lead paint exposure behavioral problems political corruption economic decline excessive antibiotic use resistant bacteria earths axial tilt seasons predation insect forms

16 Relationships, yes, but also links between relationships, to form networks of understanding:

17 If you think current education reforms are equipping the young to cope with change and the future that theyve made the big PARADIGM SHIFT think again. The proposed new national standards actually REINFORCE the old paradigm.

18 Caught up in efforts to make the old paradigm work,* were generations past due to shift to a new one. *More math, more science, more rigor, more AP courses, more IB programs, more days in school, more hours in class, more testing, more penalties for poor performance, more, more, more…

19 If we continue on our present course, catastrophe is inevitable.

20 An example of a curriculum that recognizes the need to shift from transmitting content to creating and processing it: Connections : Investigating Reality Its available without cost. Slideshows in this series: The World Has Changed Information Overload Passive or Active Learning? The Invisible Elephant All Aboard the Standards Express!

21 To encourage dialog, this presentation is offered free of charge, and may be used, duplicated and distributed in its original form without permission of the author. Excerpts must follow fair use rules, with proper credits. Copyright © 2009 by Marion Brady and Howard Brady. Marion Brady 4285 North Indian River Drive Cocoa, Florida