Dale Wallace

Bob Dylan’s song lyric, The times they are a changin’, has been repeated so often that it’s almost a cliché, and perhaps what keeps the lyric from becoming clichéd is that it is true. In schools times change, whether teachers, parents, and governments want them to change. Ironically, students seem much more adaptable to change than older people.  In fact it is good that change happens in schools.

After all schools, just like any other institution, must keep up or become irrelevant. If schools today operated liked they did in the last century, students would be the ones who suffered the most.

Yet in schools, just like in any institution, there are people who resist change. It seems that the teacher, Michael Zwaagstra, is resisting change as evidenced in his article published in SECN on December 10th. In the article Mr. Zwaagstra argues that Ontario schools are in big trouble because they are not going to be teaching students as much content in their courses and instead teach student how to use modern technology to access content instead.

Right now there is a problem with school curriculums, in Alberta at least. They are, metaphorically speaking, a mile wide and an inch deep. In other words students learn lots of content, but they don’t do enough with the content to ensure deep learning. What happens when there is too much content in a course, learning becomes as shallow as the curriculum itself. Plus, the learning tends to be rote, lockstep, and prescribed, and, most tragic, easily forgettable.

Interestingly, Mr. Zwaagstra reference a website and studies done by E. D. Hirsch Jr. to support his argument. The website and Mr. Hirsch argue that educational reform be very ridgid,plus outlines specific and detailed curriculums to be used with students. In many ways coreknowledge.org treats educating students like teaching kids Sunday school lessons. These kinds on curriculums and lessons might work in a church, where the content must be strictly controlled, but they don’t work so well in schools.

In fact, schools need to be places of wild discovery where students use their brains, bodies, and hearts to discover new ideas and new ways of being. Schools are not factories; they are living and changing places. They should be places where young people remember them as the most exciting and invigorating time in their lives.

Sure there is important content to be taught to students. For example, teaching specific formulas for solving specific mathematical questions or how to structure an essay properly; however, learning is not reciting content back to teachers but to use content to properly to solve problems, to write, and to discover new thoughts.

It is with the use of computers and cell phones that some of the greatest changes are happening in schools right now. Students are increasingly using their laptop and hand held computer in school. It is no longer the teacher that is the only source of information in school. Students have a world of information literally in their hand.

Therefore, in schools, now the challenge is to teach kids how to use the technology properly to access content plus to discern which is the better or more reliable content.

Yet there are teacher that will continue to be Luddites. Luddites were British workers in the early 19th century who destroyed machinery that was used in the textile industry and had put people out of work. Now the term Luddite has morphed to refer to people who are resistive to technological change.

Unfortunately, there are Luddites in schools today. There are teachers who rarely use modern technology. They teach from the text book and rarely vary their lesson from year to year. In the first year of their teaching career they studied the play A Streetcar Named Desire with their students, and in the last year of their career they are still teaching A Streetcar Named Desire. In fact, some teachers even use the same notes and assignments that they used twenty-five years ago.

Could a teacher like Mr. Zwaagstra be referred to as a Luddite?

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