“ I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” -Mark Twain
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it” -Alan Kay
Why do many students find school boring and irrelevant? Because school is mostly boring and irrelevant, that’s not just my opinion; that’s what students have told me over my 15 years in the classroom, and I am not just talking about students who have fallen through the cracks. Even our best and brightest, those matriculating to MIT, Princeton and Stanford have told me how mind-numbing school can be. If that’s what our model students think, you can begin to understand why our at-risk students do so poorly or drop out of school entirely. Why is this? Because in most cases, school does not do a very good job preparing students for the “real” world, or tap into student’s talents and interests. That is why kids don’t apply themselves, kids who do well, are not necessarily learning in a deep and meaningful way, they just become good at doing school. They know what they have to do in order to receive the grade they want, mostly memorizing and regurgitating information gleaned from reading the textbook or listening to a lecture, unfortunately this is the modus operandi of most Advanced Placement classes. Students who are “educated” this way usually are not required to think critically, creatively or required to solve problems.
What if kids went to school and actually developed a passion for learning about the things they want to know more about? What if we re-imagined school to be completely different from the factory model we have perpetuated for the last 160 years or so, and allowed the student to be the center of their own learning, stopped teaching subjects in isolation, regulated by arbitrary bell schedules. What if teachers became the “guide on the side” instead of the “sage on the stage?” What if we encouraged students to take risks and see failure as an opportunity to learn and not something to be avoided. What if we taught students to be entrepreneurs and innovators so that the next generation of creators become successful because of school not in spite of it? What if we taught our students to use the latest technology to effectively research, collaborate, and communicate ideas? Make learning relevant on their terms and not on ours.
Most schools today stress STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math). The implicit goal of the STEM movement is to recapture America’s lost prestige as a world innovation leader. The prevailing narrative among policy makers is countries like China and India have quickly outpaced our ability to produce students proficient in the STEM fields and are well on their way to technological and economic domination. International tests such as the Program for International Assessment of Students Achievement (PISA) reinforce this point. As a result, the United States has taken bold measures to ensure that it remain the economic leader of the free world by emphasizing STEM education as evidenced by the proliferation of career and technical academies and magnet programs that specialize in these subjects. I believe that STEM education is a good thing, but I don’t believe that schools exist solely to train students for the workforce and that is what STEM education seems to do. The reality is that we are preparing our students for jobs that don’t even exist today. The technological revolution has affected every aspect of our personal and professional lives, yet we continue to “school” our students for a bygone era. I believe that the best way forward to is train students to think like artists and entrepreneurs, it is one thing to be able to learn STEM, but it is a much better approach to teach our students how to use their education to create something original and new, think of it as the Steve Jobs approach to design. For this reason, I propose a new acronym, one that will prepare students to be creators, innovators, and collaborators. My school will be built upon the TEAMS acronym, Technology Entrepreneurship, Art Math and Science, STEM education with a purpose.
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