American Schools Are Training Kids for a World That Doesn’t Exist.

This story is not primarily about climate change, but it is about knowledge, something we will need on copious amounts if we are to avoid the worst effect of Earth’s damaged climate system.

Designer Neri Oxman sits in her “Gemini” chaise,
which uses cutting-edge technologies to simulate being
 in the womb. It was 3D-printed by Stratasys, CNC milled
by SITU Fabrication and designed with Prof. W. Craig
Carter of MIT. The chaise is part of the interactive learning
 environment at the author’s Le Laboratoire in Cambridge, Mass. 

Our math skills are falling. Our reading skills are weakening. Our children have become less literate than children in many developed countries. But the crisis in American education may be more than a matter of sliding rankings on world educational performance scales.

Our kids learn within a system of education devised for a world that increasingly does not exist.

To become a chef, a lawyer, a philosopher or an engineer, has always been a matter of learning what these professionals do, how and why they do it, and some set of general facts that more or less describe our societies and our selves. 

We pass from kindergarten through twelfth grade, from high school to college, from college to graduate and professional schools, ending our education at some predetermined stage to become the chef, or the engineer, equipped with a fair understanding of what being a chef, or an engineer, actually is and will be for a long time.

Read the story by Duncan Edwards on Wired - “American Schools Are Training Kids for a World That Doesn’t Exist.”