Notes of Concern…
…. Jackson Blair
KEEPING UP WITH NEW INFORMATION
As all the schools were opening these past few weeks, and I encountered students walking, driving or being driven to their schools, I could not help but think about how much they will learn and grow in the next nine months.
That got me to thinking about schools.
Many of us went to high school forty or fifty years ago. In order to dramatize my point, I want you to think back to your United States history classes.
You went to school for nine months. During that time you had a survey course on U.S. history somewhere along the line.
The current youngsters go to school for that same nine months. They encounter a survey course on U.S. history along the line.
But they are doing it forty or fifty years after some of you. And they are doing it in the same nine months! But they have 40-50 years more of history to cram into that nine months!
When I was in school we studied U.S. history up to the second World War. So I had nine months from the landing on Plymouth Rock to Harry Truman to learn U.S. history. Now we have added to that same course: the Korean conflict, the Vietnam War, planning and executing a landing on the moon, Desert Storm, the current Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts and so much more.
The current group of students learns not only about George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams and the founders, as well as all the presidents and vice presidents and political movements since 1776 until 1952, but they now study Eisenhower, J.F.Kennedy, L.B.Johnson, R.M.Nixon, G.R.Ford, J.E.Carter, R.W.Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, W.J.Clinton, G.W.Bush and B.H.Obama.
They undertake to study so much more than we faced, and to accomplish it in the same period of time.
Obviously, something has to give!
I don’t intend to even try to get into how much more science, math, music and other areas of study have increased in their amount of knowledge over this same time period and subsequently how much more there is for our children to learn.
I do remember reading once, and I wish I could remember where so I could cite it for you, that within ten years of graduating from some colleges and universities, in certain specific fields of study, the material is outdated in a decade. In other words, without continuing education and constant updating of knowledge, your college education could be of little help to you later in life.
Rapid advancements in technology as well as new ways to deliver information has given today’s students an incredible amount of information. It has also required that they become life long learners.
Every student needs to know how to learn because once he leaves the comfort of the classroom, he must continue learning through his adult life if he is to succeed.
The way certain surgeries were done twenty years ago is no longer applicable. If the doctor who did surgery that way has not kept up with advancements in his field, you certainly don’t want him as your surgeon.
The medicines a pharmacist might recommend for a specific ailment today would be very different from the recommendations he might have made a decade ago (right after he got out of the university!).
The fellow who could fix the Ford Fairlane or the Buick LeSabre down at your local garage had better have been going to school or reading up on the automotive manuals. The last time I took my car to the garage the mechanic hooked up a laptop, laid it on my fender, and got all the readings he needed to know what to do.
Life is very fast paced. It is no longer enough to have attended school and earned a degree or two. Unless you have a commitment to continue to learn, the world will be leaving you behind.
The best thing we can tell our children is to be inquisitive, to be flexible, to learn to love to read, and to always look for new ways to do things.
In fact, that is not such bad advice for the rest of us, too.
