Where can you get a 21st century education?

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the future of education.  My 5 1/2-year-old daughter recently started public kindergarten.  Her classroom, teacher, schedule and school set-up reminds me a lot of my own kindergarten experience.  At first blush this was comforting; then quickly downright scary.  Maybe it’s just the feel and smell of the 1930s school building.  I truthfully don’t have enough experience as the mom of a student to know yet.  Regardless, it’s gotten me thinking a lot about the education through which I want to guide my children.  I know this much: it cannot–it must not–be the same 20th century education that I had.  I was fortunate enough to grow up in an upper-middle-class town in southern Connecticut that attracted good teachers, had sufficient resources and yielded pretty well-educated kids.  Times have changed and so must education. 

I was speaking with a friend of mine last Saturday at a bridal shower.  She told me that her 12-year-old son had recently gone through testing for a potential learning disability because he was a smart student who had scored below average on a standardized test.  The special testing found that her son did not have a learning disability, but rather a visual processing lag compared to his peers.  My friend and her husband had prided themselves on limiting how much TV their children watch and discouraging video games in their home.  Basically, this was the problem: their son had not learned to process visual information as quickly as his game-playing, TV watching peers and therefore, was scoring below average on tests that compared him to his peers!  Had her son been compared to his parents’ generation, he would have been right where he should have been, but today’s students are growing up in a faster-paced world that is jam-packed with visual stimuli and multi-tasking.  97% of today’s teens game.  My friend’s son is the minority 3%.  To paraphrase Ferris Bueller “things move pretty quickly around here.  If you don’t pay attention, you’re bound to miss something.”

Then on Sunday, I met the wife of a friend of mine. She works for ISTE, the International Society for Technology in Education.  We got to talking about the future of education and how to prepare out children for the 21st century.  She lamented about not really practicing with her own children’s educations what she preaches daily to her members and other professional contacts because she’s had other educational priorities for them.  It’s not too late for me to practice in educating my children what I preach about the cultural shifts of 2.0: my eldest is in kindergarten, just embarking on her academic career. 

Our discussion prompted me to go online this afternoon and search for charter schools in DC that are actively and consciously embracing the cultural changes that are being spurred by new and social media tools and technologies and reinventing curriculum accordingly.  It’s not to say that my daughter’s current elementary school can’t appropriately prepare her… I just wanted to see if anyone in the DC Public Schools system is actively taking on this challenge.  So I found a list of charter schools that could not be sorted by topic.  I found one arts and technology charter, but that’s not really what I’m seeking. 

I went back to Google and searched for combinations of “technology,” “21st century,” “education” and other related terms.  As I searched, the quote from Did You Know 2.0 replayed in my head, “how can we prepare today’s students for jobs that don’t even yet exist?  I came across a neat advocaty organization called Partnership for 21st Century Skills that “infuses 21st century skills into education. There is currently no DC district/state initiative. 

I feel torn on how deeply to approach this challenge.  At one end of the spectrum, I could immerse myself in the quest for creating a 21st century educational system in DC.  I’d like to hope that there are like-minded parents, teachers and administrators out there.  At the other end of the spectrum, I could do what most parents do: just try to proactively manage their own kids’ education.  It’s not about teaching my daughter technology or computer science as topics or skills, it’s about the finding a school that acknowledges that our society is changing and embraces these changes by evolving its content and processes accordingly — this is the mindshift that I try to spark in my clients every day.

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