Pick a Vendor: Apple/P21 Leader to Dept of Education
EdWeek reports that Apple’s Karen Cator, who chaired the Partnership for 21st Century Skills’ board in 2007, will become head of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Education Technology. The office oversees several major Department programs, including its grants for developing longitudinal data systems and new digital learning strategies.
Will Cator use her new office to promote P21’s discredited ideas? Cator’s boosters are encouraging her to do so. Ann Flynn, the National School Boards Association’s director of educational technology, comments: ”[Cator] has a fabulous national perspective from the work she’s been doing, and the ability to articulate the importance of 21st-century skills for learning.” That’s interesting. Because “learning” didn’t seem to be a major concern of Cator’s when we heard her speak at P21′s National Summit last June. Then she was just talking about how the 21st century skills agenda can save business money. She explained, for example, that P21 added “health literacy” to its skills framework because employers “need ‘health-literate’ people to keep down health care costs.” Apparently those sick days just eat in to the bottom line.
The purpose of education – the mission of our schools – should be to produce knowledgeable American citizens. Not merely productive workers. But 21st century skills proponents are so in thrall to the idea of schools as a vehicle for selling more technology that “learning” sort of becomes a secondary concern, at best. Flynn aptly describes this worldview: “We cannot do any of the technology initiatives that need to happen in schools without a robust infrastructure, the appropriate devices, secure networks, and everything else….At some point, schools have to enter into partnership with a selected vendor to deliver a piece of the plan.”
P21 helpfully provides a list of acceptable vendors.
Lynne Munson and James Elias
November 4th, 2009 at 5:43 am
I think there’s a real danger in displacing liberal arts courses with a technical education. I’m speaking more directly about college courses, and in particular engineering, but I think it applies equally to high school.
As one example of the effects of a lack of liberal arts education can be found with low female participation in the field of engineering. I’ve been an electrical engineer for twenty years and I’ve found the data showing female underrepresentation to be a constant source of frustration. The engineering field has only about a 12% female representation. This should not be tolerated, but the data consistently show no signs of improvement.
To try to find out the causes of this, one place to look is at the college curricula. The institution which governs college curricula this is the ABET, which is voluntary, but it appears to not govern a liberal arts content. The liberal arts content is apperently left to the discretion of the individual school. Therefore the cirricula are subject to the immediate needs of industry rather than the overall needs of society. Since colleges are funded in part by corporations, who have a vested interest in displacing liberal arts courses in favor of science classes.
I have personally witnessed what I believe is a deficiency of social and historical understanding in engineers throughout my career. I think political historians might describe it as a “personal exceptionalism”, similar to the U.S. exceptionalism, meaning engineers have a hubris, a grandiosity that permiates their being. This, in my opinion, indicates a lack of understanding of history, as described, for example, in Shelley’s poem “Ozimandais”. It leaves one open to despotism. This phenomenon was predicted by Herbert Weisinger in his 1943 paper titled “The Role of the Liberal-Arts College”.
November 4th, 2009 at 10:35 pm
As an engineering-degreed, ex-soldier now mathematics instructor, I often share with my students that my true pursuit of an aero engineering degree was to satisfy my curiosity about flying machines. As a teacher my goal is not my students ‘getting a good job,’ but learning and growing through the knowledge, skills, and reasoning of mathematics. When students can read, write, compute, and reason, they can do anything. The same way I’m wary of educators who don’t understand mathematics I’m worried about policy makers who think they know what’s more important for citizens in the 21st century. Even as a Macolyte
I’m still worried about Cator. ‘Health Literacy?’ If you paid attention in Biology, Chemistry, and PE class you’d have all the ‘health-literacy’ you need.