SNS: Scientific Revolution and Education, Part I

In This Issue
Week of 04/23/2018
Vol. 23 Issue 15

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.