Education Archives • Outliers Academy

Mathematics

‘The Dance of Number’ Is the Way Forward for Teaching Mathematics in the Classical Christian Tradition

By Terence Gillespie August 13, 2019

I’ve been pouring over James Nickel’s work for the past two months and began vetting his new math curriculum three weeks ago. Since the first four books of his “Dance of Number” arrived I’ve been exploring its structure and going through the lessons. It wasn’t long before deciding it will be the centerpiece of the math education for our boys. I’ll explain why and also present an argument for the title of this article: Nickel’s curriculum is the way forward for teaching mathematics in the classical Christian tradition.

Not Your Father’s Math Textbooks, Please!

My relationship with math textbooks has been no love affair. Whether mathematicians can’t write or clarity is anathema to the profits of their publishers, the words in my books were as clear as mud. That mud trained me to skip right to the examples in the solutions manual (often written by someone else and purchased separately.) Whoever wrote the solutions manual couldn’t play games; they had to list the steps of the derivations. Whatever concepts I managed to grasp were incidental to the derivation steps in the solution manuals.

My “learning process” was devoid of historical context and practical application. Some of the science — made possible by the math — seeped into physics class. However, the only thing beautiful in the whole experience was a GPA that made it possible to get a job.

The Beauty of Math, Revealed

In contrast, Nickel teaches math thoroughly and takes pains to reveal the logic behind the concepts. Math is presented alongside the science, history, theology, and practical applications related to the lesson; and the integration is seamless.

None of the leading contenders for the precalculus stages of mathematics even attempt to do what Nickel has done.

I want our boys to have that keen sense of number you sometimes see in carpenters and engineers. The best way to do that is to provide context, application, and meaning to each building block. James Nickel has done this in beautiful sequence. I’m as excited to teach my sons as to relearn mathematics, myself!

The Way Forward

With the perspective imparted this summer by a slow read of David Hick’s “Norms & Nobility”¹ it seems no risk at all to support Nickel’s curriculum as “The Way Forward.” I also thank Andrew Kern for his distillations of the many terms surrounding the pursuit of Classical Education.²

Hicks defines a classical education as “a spirit of inquiry and a form of instruction concerned with the development of style through language and of conscience through myth.”¹ These are penetrating words but require the context of Hick’s book to unpack and grasp fully.

On the other hand, Kern’s definition is a one-stop-shop:

“A Christian Classical Education is the cultivation of wisdom and virtue by nourishing the soul on truth, goodness, and beauty by means of the seven liberal arts and the four sciences so that, in Christ, the student is enabled to know, glorify, and enjoy God.”²

The Argument for “The Dance…”

On the jacket cover of “The Dance of Number,” Nickel makes lofty promises. He claims his curriculum:

“Teaches mastery of number sense and algebraic syntax.”
- It does. The student also learns how to use an abacus and an improved version of Stoddard’s speed math (having already mastered the abstracts of number.)
“Integrates math themes with history, science, and personalities.”
- It plainly does.
“Coordinates beauty, truth, and goodness with rigor and heuristics.”
- In a math curriculum? Yep.
“Structures mathematics as an interconnected framework, and explores the dynamic interrelatedness of Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, and Science.”
- This is one of Nickel’s passions. He laments of so many students beginning Algebra before mastering Arithmetic. The error is compounded by attempting geometry and trig before learning Algebra. Problem solved in “The Dance …”.
“Brings to light the multiplicities of the perichoretic nature of creation and mathematics.”
- Perichoretic refers to the mutual indwelling nature of the Trinity and is the word that inspired the curriculum’s title. In “Mathematics: Is God Silent?” Nickel traces how impasses in mathematics were overcome by the Christian revelation of the Trinitarian nature of reality. The distinction between Creator and Created — when widely accepted — broke the Platonic spell and paved the way for the technological achievements of the middle-ages (which were anything but “Dark.”)

In short, Nickel’s “Dance” does what no other on the market does; and the classical integration (or interpenetration as James might say) is seamless.

Flipping the Argument

Has any math curriculum you know of even attempted to do what Nickel’s has done?

How do the accomplishments, listed above, compare with the math curriculum deployed at your classical school?

A Whole New World

Do western students know how to use an Abacus? Why not? And what’s the harm in teaching Stoddard’s “Speed Mathematics” (which Nickel further streamlines with Vedic methods) as long as the student has a firm grasp of the fundamentals? These and a seemingly endless stream of surprises are in store for the student. Nickel draws from his 40-year teaching experience and 1400 volume library to show the student the context of the mathematical insights that shape our lives and unify our impression of the Divine Creator.

Nickel’s approach to teaching mathematics can impart that intuitive sense of number you sometimes see in carpenters and engineers. That’s not to say that mathematics is any less abstract than it always has been. But Nickel explicitly reveals its poetry and the stunning natural beauty upholding “The Dance.”

Those with a gift for math will be lit up at the beginning of their study like never before possible. Those less gifted can learn at rest, knowing that a logical and inspiring presentation is in store.

Thoughts on Implementation

This is not an assign-and-forget curriculum; it’ a “hands-on” journey for Teacher and Student to embark on, jointly.

The curriculum is recommended to start at age 12 (through 16). Therefore, a bridge is needed for younger students. Our 11-year-old is ready though we’ll be going through each lesson in tandem.

Nickel recommends the student read through each lesson with the teacher joining in when the student begins the exercises. The lessons are quite accessible but also what one might expect from a curriculum integrating mathematics with history, theology, science, and the beauty of practical applications: Deep with a capital ‘D’.

Until our youngest is ready for “The Dance of Number” we’ll be using Math U See. However, since dad is going through “The Dance …”, in advance, I’ll be able to verbally fill in gaps per Nickel’s framework.

Conclusion

Nickel seems to have used Kern’s definition of a Classical Christian Education as a specification. More surprisingly, his curriculum delivers on that specification. What do you do with something like this and whose first paragraph defines the word “Elohim”?

You’re reading my answer: adopt it as the centerpiece of the mathematics curriculum for your school and tell everyone you know about it!

James Nickel has given us the way forward in Mathematics! For imparting the subject in the classical tradition, there’s not even a close second out there to this monumental achievement.

David Hicks, Norms & Nobility, a Treatise on Education, University Press of America, 1999 ↩
Andrew Kern, Circe Institute’s “Definition of Terms.” ↩

Creativity

Mathematician James Nickel on ‘The Unrelenting Issue of Intelligibility’

By Terence Gillespie August 1, 2019

James Nickel explains why mathematics work. Or, as scientists put it: “The Unrelenting Issue of Intelligibility.”

He also describes why most mathematical breakthroughs (and mathematicians) are driven by the pursuit of beauty rather than utility.

How could it be that mankind is able to predict behaviors in the universe based only on abstract mathematical principles “invented” in his mind?

Could it be that mathematics is the language of God’s creation?

Nickel expands on this theme and topics in his excellent book, Mathematics: Is God Silent?

Even better, he’s finally fulfilled his life-long ambition to create a math curriculum that inspires the student by tying math with wonder, meaning, applications, & philosophy. He calls it “The Dance of Number.” Perhaps the myth of mathematics having no applicability to life and daily inspirition are finally over!

Communication

“Wikipedia is…broken,” controlled by special interests and bad actors, says co-founder

By Guest Post June 5, 2019

by Sharyl Attkisson

I’ve done quite a bit of reporting about how Wikipedia is definitely not “the encyclopedia anyone can edit.” It’s become a vehicle for special interests to control information. Agenda editors are able to prevent or revert edits and sourcing on selected issues and people in order to control the narrative.

Watch Sharyl Attkisson’s TedX talk on Wikipedia and other Astroturf tools

My own battle with Wikipedia included being unable to correct provably false facts such as incorrect job history, incorrect birth place and incorrect birth date.

What’s worse is that agenda editors related to pharmaceutical interests and the partisan blog Media Matters control my Wikipedia biographical page, making sure that slanted or false information stays on it. For example, they falsely refer to my reporting as “anti-vaccine,” and imply my reporting on the topic has been discredited. In fact, my vaccine and medical reporting has been recognized by top national journalism awards organizations, and has even been cited as a source in a peer-reviewed scientific publication. However, anyone who tries to edit this factual context and footnotes onto my page finds it is quickly removed.

What persists on my page, however, are sources that are supposedly disallowed by Wikipedia’s policies. They include citations by Media Matters, with no disclosure that it’s a partisan blog.

Another entity quoted on my Wikipedia biographical page to disparage my work is the vaccine industry’s Dr. Paul Offit. But there’s no mention of the lawsuits filed against Offit for libel (one prompted him to apologize and correct his book), or the fact that he provided false information about his work and my reporting to the Orange County Register, which later corrected its article. Obviously, these facts would normally make Offit an unreliable source, but for Wikipedia, he’s presented as if an unconflicted expert. In fact, Wikipedia doesn’t even mention that’s Offit is a vaccine industry insider who’s made millions of dollars off of vaccines.

Meantime, turn to Dr. Offit’s own Wikipedia biography and– at last look– it also omitted all mention of his countless controversies. Instead, it’s written like a promotional resume– in violation of Wikipedia’s supposed politics on neutrality.

Watch Sharyl Attkisson’s TedX talk on Fake News

These biographies are just two examples of ones that blatantly violate Wikipedia’s strict rules, yet they are set in stone. The powerful interests that “watch” and control the pages make sure Offit’s background is whitewashed and that mine is subtly tarnished. They will revert or change any edits that attempt to correct the record.

This, in a nutshell, exemplifies Wikipedia’s problems across the platform as described by its co-founder Larry Sanger.

Watch “Wikipedia: The Dark Side,” a Full Measure investigation

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Children

The History and Results of America’s Disastrous Public School System

By Guest Post May 16, 2019

by Mike Margeson, Justin Spears

While it’s almost universally understood that the American school system is underperforming, “reform,” too, is almost universally prescribed as the solution. Yet in other walks of life, bad ideas are not reformed—they are eliminated and replaced with better ones. Our school system is rarely identified as a bad idea.

The motivations at the origins were not pure; they were never to educate but to nationalize the youth in a particular mold.

The system is reflexively left alone while the methods are the bad ideas that get cycled in and out: open concept schools, multiple intelligences, project-based learning, universal design for learning, merit-based pay, vouchers, charters, and most recently, educational neuroscience. Every decade or so we are told by the pedagogic experts that they have found an answer to our school’s problems. The trouble is, they’re looking right past the problem.

Schooling Monopoly

The problem is the monopoly that schooling has gained over education. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, approximately 97 percent of kids go through traditional schooling (as opposed to homeschooling or unschooling), and just over 90 percent of those attend government schools. That is to say, there is basically one accepted way to educate kids today: school them.

Given the relatively poor performance of American students on international achievement tests, you would think schooling might receive a second look. Quite the opposite, actually. It is instead made mandatory, and taxpayers are forced to subsidize it. This begs the question: Why would the government continue to propagate a system that produces such questionable results? The answer lies in their motives, and their motives are best understood by reviewing a brief history of compulsory schooling.

Roots in Germany

The earliest ancestor to our system of government-mandated schooling comes from 16th-century Germany. Martin Luther was a fierce advocate for state-mandated public schooling, not because he wanted kids to become educated, but because he wanted them to become educated in the ways of Lutheranism. Luther was resourceful and understood the power of the state in his quest to reform Jews, Catholics, and other non-believers. No less significant was fellow reformist John Calvin, who also advocated heavily for forced schooling. Calvin was particularly influential among the later Puritans of New England (Rothbard, 1979).

Considering compulsory schooling has such deep roots in Germany, it should be no surprise that the precursor to our American government school system came directly from the German state of Prussia. In 1807, fresh off a humiliating defeat by the French during the War of the Fourth Coalition, the Germans instituted a series of vast, sweeping societal reforms. Key within this movement was education reform, and one of the most influential educational reformers in Germany at the time was a man named Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Like Luther before him, Fichte saw compulsory schooling as a tool to indoctrinate kids, not educate them. Fichte describes his aim for Germany’s “new education” this way:

Then, in order to define more clearly the new education which I propose, I should reply that that very recognition of, and reliance upon, free will in the pupil is the first mistake of the old system and the clear confession of its impotence and futility.

But actual education is an organic process and requires free will; this was not an attempt at education. Schools were to be factories that would churn out the type of obedient, compliant workers the state preferred. Here’s Fichte again explaining the desired interaction between teachers and students:

[Y]ou must do more than merely talk to him; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than you wish him to will.

Fichte understood full well that a statist vision could most easily be realized if governments were given kids’ minds early on:

Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished … When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.

If such a totalitarian vision were quietly isolated in Germany, or even Europe, it might be of very little consequence. But it would be this Prussian model of control-by-schooling that 19th-century American politicians would bring to our nation—and the one that is still with us today.

Horace Mann’s Evaluation

Image Credit: NPS Photo by John Tobiason

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Creativity

8 Things You Don’t Know about Leonardo

By Guest Post April 18, 2019

This year marks the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death. Widely considered one of the greatest polymaths in human history, Leonardo was an inventor, artist, musician, architect, engineer, anatomist, botanist, geologist, historian, and cartographer.

Though his artistic output was small, Leonardo’s impact was great, reflecting his deep knowledge of the body, his extensive studies of light and the human face, and his sfumato (Italian for “smoky”) technique, which allowed for incredibly lifelike images. Leonardo regarded artists as divine apprentices, writing “We, by our arts, may be called the grandsons of God.”

Twenty-first-century scholars at MIT ranked him the sixth most influential person who ever lived. Like Rembrandt and Michelangelo, he is so renowned that he is known by only his first name. Yet despite his fame, there are things about Leonardo that many people today find surprising.

1. Shady Parentage

Leonardo was born out of wedlock on April 15, 1452. His father, Piero, was a wealthy notary, and his mother, Caterina, was a local peasant girl. Although the circumstances of his birth would place Leonardo at a disadvantage in terms of education and inheritance, biographer Walter Isaacson regards it as a terrific stroke of luck. Rather than being expected to become a notary like his father, Leonardo was instead free to develop the full range of his genius. People surmise that it also imbued him with a special sense of urgency to establish his own identity and prove himself.

2. Physical Beauty

Leonardo created some of the world’s most beautiful works of art, including the “Last Supper” and the “Mona Lisa.” In his own day, he was known as an exceptionally attractive person. One of Leonardo’s biographers describes him as a person of “outstanding physical beauty who displayed infinite grace in everything he did.” A contemporary described him as a “well proportioned, graceful, and good-looking man” who “wore a rose-pink tunic” and had “beautiful curling hair, carefully styled, which came down to the middle of his chest.” Leonardo is thought to have entered into long-term and possibly sexual relationships with two of his pupils, both artists in their own right.

3. From Scraps to Notebooks

One of his best-known notebook drawings is the ‘Vitruvian Man.’ Leonardo da Vinci/Wikimedia Commons

The paintings generally attributed to Leonardo number fewer than 20, while his notebooks contain over 7,000 pages. They’re the best source of knowledge about Leonardo, housed today in locations such as Windsor Castle, the Louvre and the Spanish National Library in Madrid. Their diverse content ranges across drawings—most famously, Vitruvian Man—notes of things he wanted to investigate, scientific and technical diagrams and shopping lists. They comprise perhaps the most remarkable monument to human curiosity and creativity ever produced by a single person. Yet when Leonardo penned them, they were just loose pieces of paper of different types and sizes. His friends bound them into “notebooks” only after his death.

4. Outsider’s Education

As a result of his illegitimacy, Leonardo received a rather rudimentary formal education consisting primarily of business arithmetic. He never attended university and sometimes referred to himself as an “unlettered man.” Yet his lack of formal schooling also freed him from the constraints of tradition, helping to instill in him a determination to question authority and place greater reliance on his own experience than opinions expressed in books. As a result, he became a firsthand observer and experimenter, uninterested in serving as a mouthpiece for the classics.

5. Prolific Procrastinator

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Culture

Getting Libertarianism Right

By Guest Post April 15, 2019

by Lew Rockwell

Getting Libertarianism Right by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Mises Institute, 2018. 126 pages. Introduction by Sean Gabb.

The title of Hans Hoppe’s wonderful new book has a double meaning. We need to get libertarianism right—to understand libertarianism correctly. How can we do this? By realizing that if we want a libertarian society, we need to embrace the values of the Right.

Why is that true? Isn’t libertarianism just a commitment to rules for peaceful relations among people? Hans says: “Knowing libertarian theory — the rules of peaceful interactions — is like knowing the rules of logic — the rules of correct thinking and reasoning. . . just as every logician who wants to make good use of his knowledge must turn his attention to real thought and reasoning, so a libertarian theorist must turn his attention to the actions of real people. Instead of being a mere theorist, he must also become a sociologist and psychologist and take account of ’empirical’ social reality, i.e., the world as it really is.”

How does this bring in the difference between the Left and the Right? Hans takes the fundamental difference between these two worldviews to be simple. The Right accepts the reality of human differences but the Left does not. Because Leftists try to make everyone equal, they favor massive interventions by the State to abolish human differences.

Hans demolishes the Leftist view with mordant sarcasm: “The egalitarian worldview of the Left is not only incompatible with libertarianism, however. It is so out of touch with reality that one must be wondering how anyone can take it seriously. The man-on-the-street certainly does not believe in the equality of all men. Plain common sense and sound prejudice stand in the way of that. And I am even more confident that no one of the actual proponents of the egalitarian doctrine really, deep down, believes what he proclaims. Yet how, then, could the Leftist worldview have become the dominant ideology of our age? At least for a libertarian, the answer should be obvious: the egalitarian doctrine achieved this status not because it is true, but because it provides the perfect intellectual cover for the drive toward totalitarian social control by a ruling elite”

Unfortunately, so-called “left libertarians” don’t get the point. They are “misfits,” Hans says, who share the Left’s commitment to forced equality. But don’t they have a problem? How can they say they are libertarians if the free market leads to inequality? They resort to a trick. They emphasize, correctly, that today’s titles to property can’t be traced back to a first act of appropriation that has been passed on to the current property owner. Aggression by the state has distorted things: ”They point to the fact that all current private property holdings and their distribution among various people have been affected, altered, and distorted by prior State action and legislation and that everything would be different and no one would be in the same place and position he currently is had it not been for such prior State-interferences. Without any doubt, this observation is correct.”

The left libertarians draw the wrong conclusion from this observation. As Murray Rothbard pointed out, if you challenge a current property title, you have the burden of proof to show that you are the rightful owner. If you can’t do it, the current owner doesn’t have to do anything. Certainly, he doesn’t have surrender his property to satisfy the latest fashionable group of “victims” that the Leftist bleeding hearts champion.

Hans’s response to the Left is magnificent in its un-PC character: “Why not the ‘victims’ giving special respect to their ‘victimizers’? Why not bestow special honor to economic achievement and success instead of failure, and why not give special praise to traditional, ‘normal’ lifestyles and conduct rather than any abnormal alternative that requires, as a necessary condition of its own continued existence, a pre-existing dominant surrounding society of ‘normal’ people with ‘normal’ lifestyles?”

Because “left libertarians” do not recognize human differences, they embrace a suicidal ‘open borders’ policy that would destroy Western culture. “A million more Nigerians or Arabs living in Germany or a million more Mexicans or Hutus or Tutsis residing in the US is quite a different thing than a million more home-grown Germans or Americans. With millions of third- and second-world immigrants present when the crisis hits and the paychecks stop coming in, it is highly unlikely that a peaceful outcome will result and a natural, private-property-based social order emerge”

As you read the book, you will soon discover that Hans is also a master historian. The “original sin”, as he calls it, was to establish a supreme judicial authority to resolve legal disputes. “Predictably, the monopolist will use his position as ultimate decision-maker not only to resolve conflict between contending property owners, but increasingly also to initiate or provoke conflicts with private property owners, in order to then decide such conflicts in his own favor, i.e., to expropriate the just property of others to his own advantage on the basis of his own made-up laws. And on the other hand, the price to be paid for justice will rise. In fact, the price of justice will not simply be a ‘higher price’ that justice seekers may or may not be willing to pay (as would be the case for any other monopoly), but a tax that justice seekers must pay whether they agree to it or not.”

He defies the conventional wisdom that sees the rise of mass democracy as way to control the State. Exactly the reverse is true: “Only with democracy, however, i.e., the free and unrestricted entry into the State, are all moral restraints and inhibitions against the taking of others’ lawful property removed. Everyone is free to indulge in such temptations and propose and promote every conceivable measure of legislation and taxation to gain advantages at other people’s expense. That is, whereas in a natural order everyone is expected to spend his time exclusively on production or consumption, under democratic conditions, increasingly more time is spent instead on politics, i.e., on the advocacy and promotion of activities that are neither productive nor consumptive, but exploitative and parasitic of and on the property of others.”

Democratic politicians know that they will be in power for only a fairly short time, so they will grab what they can. Why should they care about the future of society? “Moreover, owing to regularly recurring elections, the politicization of society never comes to an end but is constantly reignited and continued. Legal uncertainty or lawlessness is thus heightened and social time preferences will rise still further, i.e., increasingly shortening the time horizon taken into consideration in one’s action-plans. And in the process of political competition, i.e., in the competition for the position of ultimate decision-maker, such politicians and political parties will rise to the top who have the least moral scruples and the best skills as demagogues, i.e., of proposing and propagating the most popular assortment of immoral and unlawful demands from a near limitless supply of such demands on offer in public opinion”

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Children

How Learning Works: 10 Research-Based Insights

By Guest Post April 11, 2019

By Babe Liberman

10 Insights from Learning Sciences about How Learning Works

1. Learning is a process that involves effort, mistakes, reflection, and refinement of strategies.

2. Thinking deeply about the to-be-learned material helps students pay attention, build memories, and make meaning out of what they are learning.

3. Communicating high expectations and keeping learners at the edge of their mastery helps each student reach their potential.

4. Retrieval practice strengthens memory and helps students flexibly apply what they learn.

5. Spacing out learning, and interweaving different content strengthens learning.

6. Students are more motivated to learn when they are interested, have a sense of autonomy, and understand the purpose behind what they are learning.

7. Students learn well when they feel safe and connected.

8. Collaboration and social interaction can be powerful learning experiences because they encourage deeper processing and engage the “social brain.”

9. Students’ physical well-being, including nutrition, sleep, and exercise, impacts learning.

10. The entire environment, from space to temperature to lighting, can affect learning.

How You Can Apply These Findings in the Classroom

Knowing how learning works is all well and good. But how do you take these research findings and apply them in your classroom? Below are a few tips based on research from the Institute for Applied Neuroscience, for providing your students with the best learning experience.

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Apprenticeship

Preparing Learners for the Uncertain Future of Work

By Guest Post April 10, 2019

By Katherine Prince

Continuous learning, cultural awareness, change expertise, adaptable and effective communication and the ability to learn from failure. These are just some of the capabilities that participants in KnowledgeWorks’ convenings on the future of work identified as being important for graduates. Finding resources to solve problems, time and project management, reflective leadership and a sense of responsibility to the broader community also promised to help all young people thrive no matter what future of work emerges.

That question – what future of work will emerge – is unanswerable, making it critical to help young people, along with other education and employment stakeholders, plan for multiple possible futures. From today’s vantage point, we can identify two critical drivers of change shaping the future of readiness for further learning, work and life: the rise of smart machines and the decline of full-time employment. But we cannot yet know what extent of technological unemployment we will face or how much support individuals will have in navigating the changing employment landscape.

A New Foundation for Readiness

In the face of such uncertainties, stakeholders need to help people develop our uniquely human attributes along with developing flexible skills that we can apply across settings. Putting social-emotional skill development at the center of learning promises to help individuals develop the foundation necessary to navigate uncertainty throughout their lives. The new foundation for readiness shown below illustrates how redefining readiness from the inside out – focusing on human development rather than attempting to prepare learners for any particular future of work – can provide a platform for future success.

This new foundation for readiness is grounded in the human qualities that are most central to our relationships with one another and which are most difficult to code. Social-emotional skill development will need to be supported in integrated ways alongside the mastery of content and the application of skills and knowledge to specific contexts. Education institutions will need to balance supporting learners in preparing for their first-careers while also helping them develop the adaptability and resilience needed to navigate the changing economy and the ways of thinking necessary to address complex problems.

Flipping Education’s Focus

Establishing a new focus on feeling and relating will help education institutions and systems align with a future of readiness in which foundational skills and practices will be more important and enduring than specific content or job- and task-related skills.

For K-12 education, flipping the focus of learning to whole-person development could mean that:

Curriculum needs to be inverted, with core social-emotional competencies shaping the design of inquiry projects and the school and classroom rituals that anchor the learning climate and culture.
Students need to be grouped in new ways to follow flexible learning pathways.
Classrooms need to become more fluid and open, enabling new ways of structuring learning.
School schedules need to be transformed to allow for more interdisciplinary collaboration, deep reflection, and personalized learning.
Educators’ roles need to be reconfigured to focus less on content or grade specialization and more on foundational skills and practices, as well as on interdisciplinary, phenomenological or challenge-based learning.
Community partners need to become key assets for introducing new kinds of learning experiences that stretch students’ comfort zones and expand their aspirations.
K-12 schools and districts need to explore where and when it may be more appropriate for them to serve as brokers, rather than direct providers, of learning experiences.

At the postsecondary level, institutions might need to:

Focus more on supporting deep personal development as well as context- and discipline-specific skills and knowledge.
Diversify offerings and business models, with a multitude of formats and structures engaging learners and increasing access.
Contribute to student-driven and student-designed ecosystems of support that evolve over time and reflect students’ strengths, weaknesses, and needs.
Help students plan for both their careers and their lives and respond to changing conditions.
Enable learners to weave in and out of learning experiences as their career development needs dictate.
Collaborate more extensively with workplace partners.
Shift the focus of faculty professional development toward supporting students’ development of foundational skills and practices and attaining ongoing learning related to relevant workplace skills.

Strategies for Redefining Readiness

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Culture

Leave Confederate Statues Alone

By Guest Post March 14, 2019

by Philip Leigh

In 1965 Texas novelist William Humphrey wrote:

If the Civil War is more alive to the Southerner than the Northerner it is because all of the past is, and this is so because the Southerner has a sense of having been present there himself in the person of one or more of his ancestors. The war filled merely a chapter in his… [family history] … transmitted orally from father to son [as] the proverbs, prophecies, legends, laws, traditions-of-origin, and tales-of-wanderings of his own tribe…. It is this feeling of identity with the dead (who are past) which characterizes and explains the Southerner.

It is with kin, not causes, that the Southerner is linked. Confederate Great-grandfather…is not remembered for his (probably undistinguished) part in the Battle of Bull Run; rather Bull Run is remembered because Great-grandfather was there. For the Southerner, the Civil War is in the family.

Clannishness was, and is, the key to his temperament, and he went off to war to protect not Alabama but only those thirty or forty acres of its sandy hillside, or stiff red clay, which he broke his back tilling, and which was as big a country as his mind could hold.

Statue critics say he fought for slavery. But fewer than 30% of Southern families owned slaves. In truth, according to historian William C. Davis, “The widespread Northern myth that Confederates went to the battlefield to perpetuate slavery is just that, a myth. Their letters and diaries, in the tens of thousands, reveal again and again that they fought because their Southern homeland was invaded. . .”

Few today appreciate the magnitude of their sacrifice. About 300,000 Confederate soldiers died when the region’s population was only nine million. If the United States were to suffer proportional casualties in a war today our losses would total 11 million, which would be twenty-six times greater than our dead in World War II.

Given such oblations, the Confederate soldier’s surviving family members wanted to memorialize them. Memorial Day evolved after Federal occupation troops observed Southern women spreading flowers upon the graves of their husbands, sons, and brothers during the war. A year after the war the ladies of Columbus, Mississippi strewed flowers on the graves of both the Confederate and Union dead in the town’s Friendship Cemetery. Their gesture started a movement that spread and in the North May 30th became selected as National Memorial Day in 1868.

Since the war had impoverished the South, the Southern ladies could do little more than lay down flowers. There was no money for statues and Union veterans opposed permanent Confederate memorials. But when the sons of Confederate veterans eagerly joined the U.S. Army thirty years later to help win the Spanish-American War, the aging Union Civil War soldiers concluded that their former rivals were also Americans, deserving of memorial recognition.

Thus, the twenty years from 1898 to 1918 witnessed the installation of 80% of the signature courthouse square Confederate statues still standing in many Southern towns. During that period the typical surviving Confederate soldier aged from 58 years to 78 years. Memorial placements—North and South—surged between 1911 and 1915 because it was the war’s semi-centennial and the old soldiers were fading away.

Today a vocal minority holds the Confederate soldier in contempt, much like the many Americans who sneered at returning Vietnam veterans in the 1960s and 70s. Amid chants of “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many babies did you kill today?” some civilians insulted the soldiers. Today most Americans old enough to remember cringe with shame when recalling such episodes.

As reported in The New York Times, for example, in 1968 a one-armed vet was accosted at a Colorado college.

Pointing to the missing limb another student asked, “Did you get that in Vietnam?”

The veteran said yes.

“Serves you right,” said the student.

It took years, but eventually, the public abandoned the mockers and gave Vietnam vets due credit thereby underscoring the maxim: “Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.” Thus, we should be aware that decisions to tear down century-old monuments put us at risk for unassuageable remorse in the future. Dishonoring such monuments demeans later generations of American warriors who were inspired by the courage of the Confederate soldier.

Consider, for example, that post-Civil-War Southerners consistently came to our nation’s defense more readily than did other Americans. Presently, 44% of our military are from the South even though it represents just 36% of the nation’s population.

spin was put on their history. In response, George Orwell warned:

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
George Orwell

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Apprenticeship

Patent Education Buys Time and A Foundation for Financial Rewards

By Guest Post March 8, 2019

by Clare Donovan

Meaningful innovation education exposes kids to this vital element.

I love watching the rise of makerspaces in schools. More and more students have access to 3D printers, kid-friendly coding programs, and other great technical tools. This investment in STEM project-based learning means that students with all kinds of learning styles are directly engaged in issues critical to their future.

But there’s a key ingredient missing. When you give students access to awesome tools and the freedom to design, what happens when they hit on something great? Most often, that’s where the project stalls. In the business world, that’s when a patent comes in.

Teaching patenting concepts at a young age is not only feasible, but I believe it’s a way to help women and other underrepresented groups play a bigger role in tech.

Tinker While You Learn

At the Future of Education Technology Conference in Orlando, Fla., I saw some amazing curricula and technology demos [Ed. note: Clare spoke there]. Schools have a huge selection of tools to teach engineering to young students.

Engineering, however, is only one component of the innovation process. Creativity, business and the law also play a critical role. Patents motivate people to invest in the arduous process of inventing by giving them economic ownership for continued development. For a startup, a patent buys you time to do the hard work of bringing your idea to life. Patent education is an important ingredient in helping kids become real-world problem solvers.

Patent education also lays a foundation for financial rewards in the workplace. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office finds that wages in patent-based industries are 74% higher than other verticals, and this premium is growing. This is according to the USPTO’s latest update to “Intellectual Property and the U.S. Economy.”

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