In the new issue of Edutopia Milton Chen, the Executive Director of the George Lucas Foundation, explains the theme of his essay:
I was at a meeting recently when a colleague told a story of being in India, where an educator there asked her, somewhat skeptically, “In America, you test your students a lot, don’t you?” She replied, “Well, indeed, the United States has a national policy that requires testing of all students in certain grades.” The Indian educator said, “Here, when we want the elephant to grow, we feed the elephant. We don’t weigh the elephant.”
Dr. Chen then discusses this learning dynamic: “New research demonstrates that teaching children to appreciate their brains actually motivates them to learn and expend greater effort — with particular improvements in mathematics learning.” The improvements, apparently, are indicated by higher test scores.
Dr. Chen’s logic assumes that kids have available at school content in the language arts, science, and math for them to consume and get more intelligent — that our potentially bright little elephants don’t learn because they don’t think they can. What though, if the youngsters are turned off to learning because they are bored by pablum and by the tests to prove pablum consumption?
The comprehensive, compelling, interconnected content for language arts, science, and math has moved online and is now beginning to show up in the mobile phones the kids all have. A powerful motivation for the new generation to feed on knowledge is to let them do it from their own digital media. Schools need to understand that the Internet is now the primary resource of learning content. To allow youngsters to feed intellectually, education must expend greater effort to engage the open digital world into which the kids have focused intelligence often starved in schools.
