Why School?: How Education Must Change When Learning and Information Are Everywhere

by Will Richardson

I look at how he’s learned Minecraft and totally understand why school is becoming more of a struggle. First, he has a passion for learning the game. That’s crucial. He creates his own, constantly updated curriculum based on what he knows and needs to know next. He cobbles together his own multimedia texts using YouTube videos. He finds his own teachers, both local (his friends who tutor him via ooVoo) and global (the other players he interacts with on the Massively Minecraft server, hosted in Australia). He’s engaged in assessing his own work, scrapping it and starting over when something fails, building or refining when he gets new ideas, and offering feedback to his peers on a regular basis. Contrast that with how his study might look in a classroom operating under the assumption that Minecraft content and coaches are scarce. He would receive the same text as everyone else, be assigned the same readings

at the same pace, be asked to achieve the same goals in the same way as all the other students, and then be assessed in ways that would likely tell us little about how he has developed as a learner.

It said 21st-century readers and writers need to: • develop proficiency with the tools of technology • build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally • design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes • manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information • create, critique, analyze and evaluate multimedia texts • attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

that we absolutely know what every child needs to learn, when they need to learn it, and how they’ll learn it. That’s the way we think when information and teachers are scarce,

These “corporate reformers” consistently cite the relatively low performance of U.S. students on international tests as a way to drum up support for reform. (What they don’t tell you, by the way, is that if we just looked at test results from U.S. kids living in high-income homes, we would be first in the world in just about every category. Our scores reflect our very deep issues with poverty, not inherent problems with schools.)

Each child does a whole curriculum’s worth of learning online, at the computer. Most of the time he follows canned courses on-screen. But for an hour every day, he deals directly, one-to-one over phone or videophone with a tutor. Ideally there’s a teaching assistant on an open phone line throughout the day, each assistant dealing with a few dozen students.

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”

Imagine walking into a huge library, sitting down at a work table in the middle, and waiting for someone to bring you only the materials they consider important reading. Despite the library’s hundreds of thousands of books and magazines and journals and recordings, you just get to read (and perhaps learn from) a very, very, very small segment of those — the same tiny segment everyone else who visits the library gets to read and learn from. All the rest sits quietly in the stacks, untouched. Now imagine how large the library would be that we’d have to build if we only stocked the materials included in the typical K–12 curriculum.