Special Letter: Scientific Revolution and Education, Part I
Prologue: Education Today
Our View of Kids
The Emerging Alternative
Part I: The Structure of Scientific Revolution and Kuhn’s Concept of Paradigm Shift
Kuhn’s Concept of Paradigms
How Paradigms Change – The Kuhnian Model
Anomalies
The Kuhnian Crisis
The Heart of the Change
Part II: Applying Kuhn’s Ideas of Paradigm Shift to Education
“Normal Education”
“Helpless,” Unempowered Kids
Results
“But the Current Way Works!”
About Marc Prensky
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Publisher’s Note: It’s easy to have an opinion about today’s K-12 education systems. After all, like noses, everyone has one.
Unfortunately for our children, almost all of them are ill-informed, in the sense of offering the promise of better educational outcomes in the future. As with inferior healthcare, the US system seems imperfectly suited to perfection when it comes to establishing a theory and practice in curriculum, process, and teaching that would lift us and our children into even a high-mediocre global standing in STEM, much less creative problem solving.
Marc Prensky, a longtime SNS member and one of the founders of SNS Project Inkwell, is the kind of person who may someday be able to claim to have made a material change, for the better, in this system. I first met Marc many years ago in a top-security conference, but that is a different topic; what matters is that I learned on that day, and have since learned repeatedly, that he is brilliant, dedicated to truth, and will not give up.
In this week’s issue, Part I of his latest piece on the future of education, our members will discover the long-hoped-for rebel-with-a-cause, someone who deeply understands basic education, knows its patriotic and financial value to the country, and is willing to keep working on improving it. What could matter more? – mra.
