One of the great fallacies in modern educational thought is the baseless assumption that the present generation – with its limited knowledge of the past and understanding of the present – can accurately forecast what skills and knowledge will be useful to a younger generation moving toward an inscrutable future.
By now, most Americans who don’t live in a cave have heard something - however vague – about MOOCs. MOOC is short for “massive open online course”. Several consortia offer these courses – Coursera being perhaps the best known.
Inevitably, within 24 hours of Oklahoma’s monster tornado, one of my very good friends posted to Facebook, deploring the descent of the news media on the scene of the disaster.
We all make mistakes. Approaching nine years of writing this column, I have the greatest sympathy for the earnest souls who’ve had the task of proof-reading my weekly 828 words.
Four years ago, the Commonwealth Book Club read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers - a book which surveys some of the latest research on the factors contributing to human success.
A few weeks back, as duly reported in this space, I finished John Milton Cooper, Jr.’s brilliant biography of Woodrow Wilson - and plunged directly into James Chace’s history of the Election of 1912.
The Obama administration is engaged in the sort of mental gymnastics it usually adopts before making a big decision. The administration is “discovering” the shocking fact that Syria’s ruthless autocrat, Bashar al-Assad, has been using chemical weapons against his own people.
In the past, I have argued that our educational establishment – and the public at large – have lost sight of why we have schools. It seems strange to ask the question, but only because we all take the answer for granted.
Five weeks ago, America passed the centennial of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration as America’s 28th President. Remarkably, no one made much of a fuss.
Understand, I’m not going to get on my high horse about this. I’d be ashamed to.
Earlier in this series, I urged that Chesterfield invite neighboring jurisdictions to join in creating a regional governor’s school for highly-gifted students in mathematics, science, technology, and engineering.
