The Internet has delivered an explosion of learning opportunities for today’s students, creating an abundance of information, knowledge, and teachers as well as a starkly different landscape from the one in which our ideas about school were born. Traditional educators, classrooms, and brick-and-mortar schools are no longer necessary to access information. Instead, things like blogs and wikis, as well as remote collaborations and an emphasis on critical thinking skills are the coins of the realm in this new kingdom.
The education system has been need of a complete overhaul for some time now. I believe that it needs to be looked at from a backward planning perspective. When I enrolled in college I was not the traditional 18 year old student. However, many of the students entering right out of high school had to be put into remedial learning classes to bring them up to the college level. I always thought that was the purpose of K-12 education. Unfortunately, on a large scale K-12 is failing to provide students with the basic essentials to enter college. Moreover, critical thinking has been removed from K-12 learning. It focuses on teaching you what to think and not teaching you how to think. The difference is you are taught facts and specific equations and for every student's exam there is only one right answer to each question. When you are taught how to think, you understand that there is always more than one way to complete a task. Your mind expands a bit more when you learn how to critically think. If we re-introduce critical thinking in the school system I believe that the young minds of the upcoming generations will be able to better solve the problem and they will tell us how to best educate them.
