Teach & Serve V, No. 4
We All Thought It Was Going to be Flying Cars
August 28, 2019
What does this have to do with us as educators? Only everything.
My wife is a high school teacher with almost two decades of experience in the classroom, in departmental leadership and in teaching adults about their own ability to be servant leaders in Catholic schools. She is also a former lawyer. Highly educated, incredibly smart, deeply gifted, she is the kind of person that I would listen to when she spoke even if she wasn’t my wife. The only lapse in judgment I can attribute to her is her choice of me as her husband. She could have done so much better.
One evening when discussing the state of technology in our world today and the rapid pace at which it changes, my wife remarked “we all thought it was going to be flying cars.”
She’s right.
Years ago, during my childhood, when considering technological advances, artists and thinkers and writers and filmmakers tended to suggest that the quantum leaps were going to be in transport and flying cars (The Jetsons, anyone?) were the perfect symbol of this.
But it wasn’t flying cars (although those are out there). No. As my wife pointed out during that evening conversation, the quantum leap was information access and distribution. That’s what’s changed the world you and I live in right now; it’s changed it much more than transportation technology.
What does this have to do with us as educators? Only everything.
Many of the students we journey with have, in their hand or their pocket or on their wrist at any given time, access to almost the entire knowledge base of the human race. In many cases we – the school administration and teachers – have not only put this access in their hands, we have mandated that they have it. Many of our students have direct and quick access to any content we can “teach.”
This has to mean everything.
It has to mean that we talk about how we deliver and discuss and invigorate and inspire. It has to mean that we understand that the how – teaching our students critical thinking and interpretation and application and analysis skills – is far, far more important than the what – the content we love that many of us were taught to teach.
If we are not engaged in this kind of conversation and teaching, we are not engaged in 21st century learning.
It’s 2019. I have access to the entire knowledge base of the human race. So do you. So do my students.
This has to mean everything.