Industrial age education

A colleague who is a writer is fond of saying, "write things that are meaningful in your notebook, then browse through it to remind yourself what you know." Over the weekend, I took his advice, and found in one of my notebooks five assumptions about education that I expect have appeared in this blog before (I did not take the time to search), but it is good to remind ourselves of what we know.

R. Keith Sawyer (2006), a learning scientist from the University of Washington, suggested 20th century education was based on instructionist models which are informed by five assumptions about human learning and appropriate schooling, none of which are supported by scientific evidence:

1. Knowledge (including facts, procedures, and concepts) essential for one to be “educated” are well-known;
2. Instruction is an effective method for transferring that knowledge to students;
3. Essential knowledge has been translated into a curriculum, and instructional models are valid, reliable, and predicable for all populations;
4. Instruction should proceed from simple to complex;
5. Testing is an effective way to measure learning.