Article: Everything You Know About Curriculum May Be Wrong.

 http://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/everything-you-know-about-curriculum-may-be-wrong-really/

I totally agree with what the author is stating here, suggesting that the learning content through lecture rather than through practice is archaic and doesn't necessarily suit our needs in the modern education system. My kids now quote me when they ask, as I'm explaining rules of a new game or activity in PE, "Can we learn by doing?" Rules can be explicitly detailed, however they mean very little until the learner actually engages themselves in the activity. One element in my personal philosophy of education is "Process (of learning) versus Product." I believe this because, as students are learning about the Renaissance, they are not entirely responsible to memorize for life the events that happened. Rather they are engaged in a process of connecting events, people, and places. They are learning to decipher the written message, how to research, how to extract the important information in a given text. All these tools are then applied to other subjects, as they read the newspaper or now articles on the internet, they can better sift through the gamut of information available to them, yet they may not remember what the feudal system is. I know very little about it, yet it was part of a unit I TAUGHT 9 years ago as a student-teacher. Kids suffer this same predicament, but the tools engrained will never be lost.

"So, suppose knowledge is not the goal of education. Rather, suppose today’s content knowledge is an offshoot of successful ongoing learning in a changing world – in which ‘learning’ means ‘learning to perform in the world.’"

I wholeheartedly agree, now, if I can find someone to fix this for us while I am busy teaching, perhaps we can make some progress!