How teachers have to change to prepare our kids for the 21st century
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Watch Joel Pelcyger's video on How teachers have to change to prepare our kids for the 21st century...
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The role of an educator, the role of a teacher, needs to change. In the olden days, the teacher was the sage on the stage, the person imparting knowledge to the children. The children were a receptacle. The teacher thought of their job in terms of what information do I have to give these kids? What skills do I have to impart to them because they can't get them anywhere else except from me?
That time is long past. Once kids learn how to read, they can get all the information they want from the internet. The teacher as the one who imparts knowledge is not the most important.
The society that we live in now is information rich and experience poor. The society that many of us consider ourselves adults now, regardless of the range of ages that we might be, is that we grew up in an experience rich, information poor world. So the teacher's role was to impart knowledge because there wasn't a knowledge base to draw upon.
In order to oil the wheels of an industrial-based society, there was certain information the children needed to learn. The teachers were charged with the responsibility to do that. That's not the world we live in. We live in a post-industrial age right now. We're in an information age now.
And in that information age, we need to cull down from that. We need to develop media literacy skills. We need to look critically at information and figure out what's right and what's wrong for ourselves.
It's a much more dynamic type of process. But children now lack the personal experience, the interrelational experience. So that's what schools need to be giving to kids. When you think of the skills that the kids need to have to succeed in the business world today, they are interpersonal skills. They are things talking about collaboration and flexibility and thinking outside the box and coming up with new ideas and developing new ideas and relating to people in different kinds of ways and networking with one another.
If schools are not part of the solution, they're part of the problem. And that's exactly what's happening in our society today. We're still trying to teach the same old way and the same old way does not pertain any more.
Watch Joel Pelcyger's video on How teachers have to change to prepare our kids for the 21st century...
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Joel PelcygerHead of School
Joel Pelcyger is the Founder and Head of PS1 Pluralistic School, an elementary school for grades K-6. PS1 was founded in 1971 and is a family-oriented, independent, and non-profit school located in the heart of Santa Monica, CA.
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