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Volume 8 |
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Strategies Fostering Thinking |
The bright, smiling students who bring "gifts" to you as you prepare the classroom for traditional science curriculum experiences are part of the first human generation to enter a world in which work has nothing to do with perspiration. They are to be twenty-first century adults, and their world will be as different from yours as sunrise is from sunset.
Your students will be the first citizens of post-industrial America. What you select as appropriate science concepts, processes, and attitudes for their attention must respond to what their world is becoming...not yours. All teachers, including science teachers, must develop curricula that are tempered by our best guesses about what challenges and opportunities lie ahead.
You can acquire some clues about appropriate content for the science curriculum by simply observing modern society. Ask yourself, "What changes will affect today's students, and how can the science classroom help them prepare for adulthood?" The most important societal phenomenon of our time (aside from the potential for total nuclear destruction fifteen minutes from now) is that heavily industrialized societies such as ours are divesting themselves of the responsibility for manufacturing products that require an abundance of human labor. We are quickly learning that it is cheaper to purchase manufactured items from countries that have low labor costs---typically, the Far East and South America---than to continue to be involved in labor-intensive industries. The careers that your students will eventually have will probably be related to the production, management, and transfer of information and the provision of services.
What is bringing about this change from a "goods-oriented society" to an "information-and-service-based society"? There is one simple answer---the computer.
One of my favorite sources of absurd humor is a group of performers collectively known as Monty Python. A phrase that recurs in their television skits is: "Now for something completely different." The best example of something "completely different" that I can think of is the computer. Its appearance in the midst of industrial society marks the end of the Industrial Revolution and the end of our now old-fashioned views of what the students in our classrooms can and will become.
Perhaps Herbert A. Simon said it best:
Nobody really needs convincing these days that the computer is an innovation of more than ordinary magnitude, a one-in-several-century innovation and not a one-in-a-century innovation, or one of these instant revolutions that are announced everyday in the papers or on television. It really is an event of major magnitude.
The computer is changing more than industry. It is changing the very character of everyday life and our most fundamental ideas about what should be included in a quality education.
Teachers and books traditionally have been thought of as the ultimate repositories of information. This is now less true, since technology now gives individuals power to get information without having to go to a book or a teacher. We are becoming a nation in which each individual has access to information about himself or herself, others, and events that is a source of potential power, opportunity, and challenge. If you wish to , you can use a computer and a telephone to acquire information on the amount of money in your checking account, the behavior of female mosquitoes in Southwest Africa, or the price of tin in Tokyo.
Those individuals who know how to use computers are likely to have twenty-first century lives that are both full and productive. A science teacher who has access to a computer, but is reluctant to provide students with opportunities to use, is contributing to the development of a handicapped adult. A young person who is computer illiterate in post-industrial society will have a handicap that will be difficult, if not impossible, to overcome. All teachers, including science teachers, must develop their computer literacy so that they can, in turn, help today's children and youth survive and flourish in our postindustrial society.
Shouldn't the study of computers take place just in the mathematics classroom or special computer laboratories? The answer is, unequivocally, "NO." The computer must be viewed as a tool that is both understood and used in every portion of the elementary, intermediate, and secondary school curriculum---including science. We must provide learning environments in which children and youth become the masters of the tool, not its servant.
Successful, happy, confident twenty-first-century adults will be those who know how to use computers to acquire information, sharpen reasoning skills, and most important, help solve human problems. There is no better place to learn these skills than in a science classroom.