The future of learning and teaching

Abstract

One of the reasons that providing instructional leadership will be so difficult in the future is that our concepts of schooling and teaching must change fundamentally. Just a few observations serve to give substance to this generalization. First, what the school does in educating the young appears to be less or, at best, no more potent than other factors determining what the child learns and becomes. What the child brings to school from his own home and what he encounters there from other homes seem to add more to learning than what the school itself puts in. Second, the incidence of nonpromotion, dropouts, alienation, and minimal learning in school is such that one is led to conclude that today's schools are obsolescent. They were designed for a different culture, a different conception of learners and of learning, and a different clientele. We do not plan for and deal with our clientele nearly as well as the Cadillac agent plans for and deals with his. Third, success in school, as measured by grades, appears to bear little relationship to good citizenship, good work habits, compassion, happiness, or other significant values in the larger human sphere. Fourth, a relatively new medium--television--has entered into the business of transmitting a major segment of our culture to the young. If the years before beginning school are taken into account, television occupies more hours than schooling during the eighteen years from birth to completion of high school. There are few signs that school and