Content vs Stuff that actually matters

Is it important to know stuff?

Of course it is but how does knowing stuff help when looking through thousands of lines of computer code because a program crashes without any error messages? How can knowing stuff help you manage a financial crisis at your company? If I read Shakespeare, will that allow me to work effectively in a team to brainstorm ideas to improve productivity of my company's manufacturing line? By the way, two of the members live in China and one lives in Europe and we collaborate using the latest Web 2.0 technologies. If I can factor a polynomial using the complete the square technique or be able to simplify a trigonometric expression using the identities, will I be able to sift through tons of information on the internet to make an informed decision on who I should vote for in the next presidential election?

Now, I have nothing against the old Bard or trigonometry but it seems that in education we believe that if all children are given the same content, somehow that creates equal opportunity. For the sake of the argument, let’s assume that all children are well fed and never abused. Let's take those children and put them in the same classroom in the same school with the same curriculum and give them the same tests and then graduate with the same piece of paper. Consistency must be the vehicle of opportunity...or is it? What about the child that sees the world with color and shape but has no art class? What about the child that can solve any logic puzzle but can't find the speed of train A traveling at 50mph? And more importantly, what about the child that just isn't interested in poetry but loves to read and write science fiction?

Consistency seems to be our society's rationalization for being too apathetic or preoccupied to think about the education problem. The pitfall is that it actually is important to know stuff…but it's pointless to teach STUFF without the context. To give the context you must start with the thinking. And to inspire critical thought, you must engage. Out of all those, content is the only measurable criteria. Unfortunately, educators are trained in such a way that they must be a master of their content and they must inspire their students to be as enthusiastic about their content as they are. I don't know about you but there are some things that just don't interest me (poetry, classical literature, advanced mathematics). There is nothing a teacher can do to inspire me to be a poet or read Charles Dickens. If we are to be sincerely empathetic we need to understand that young people have similar feelings toward content. However, whenever I say things like, "Do they really need algebra 2 right now?" it's heresy among mathematics teachers, and yet I have never come across a problem using matrices or determinants.

My point is this...if we want to build the School of the Future, we need to ask ourselves fundamental questions about what education is as an abstract, philosophical idea and what it means to manifest that idea in a classroom. There must be a veil of ignorance when answering the question, how should we educate young people? We must forget what and how we learned and also what and how we learned how to teach.

Knowledge is the cornerstone to an intelligent, well-rounded citizen, but it is only a cornerstone to a structure that is large and never complete. To use content to drive education is like watering a plant without soil. It might grow for a while but it will never reach its potential unless it is potted first. Content is almost incidental to the real vehicles of education. Without an initial focus on leadership, ethics and critical thinking, education is nothing more than a really expensive game of trivial pursuit.