"Policymakers and educators in Israel, like their colleagues in the Western world, are gradually realising that traditional schooling has run its course and that trying to improve it by a policy of "more of the same" is senseless.  Indeed there are growing signs that the traditional "factory school" is on the verge of a radical change.  Though schooling is far more tenacious than has been assumed by those who have hastened to proclaim its demise . . . . .”

There are many other educators who, having reflected on the quality of the education that is on offer to our children, have acknowledged it’s incompatibility with the skills that they require in order to be "successful" in the 21st century.  In last month's essay we discussed the huge paradigm shift that was necessary but did not become technically possible until 2001.  In this month's main article we would like to investigate the implications of this inevitable transition and also some insights gained from people such as Yoram and other notable educators from around the world.

Initially let us look at the present model for education, and to do this we would like to return to the lecture presented by Yoram, as it portrays 20th-century education quite succinctly and relatively accurately (though somewhat generically).  In 20th-century education learning was about listening, and by default then teaching was about telling.  To re-enforce this concept, 20th-century education treated knowledge as an object which could be gifted from one person to another, and to be educated was to know valuable content (knowledge).  This concept was the overarching model for education in the 20th-century.  This does not mean that educators did not attempt to model clever questioning; to provide good contextual material on occasion; to promote both intrinsic and extrinsic thinking skills where possible; and to try and provide a broad-based education program for all students: it just means that the focus of education, via a complex set of atomistic assessments was about "knowing content". 

This model was forced on secondary schools by tertiary (universities, poly-technics, training colleges et all), institutions whose criterion for entering their hallowed halls was specific prior knowledge to demonstrate academic rigour.  Educators in the k-12 years have become increasingly frustrated over the past 25 years, by set examinations and an imposed structure based on historical content.  The needs of the 21st century are quite obviously very, very different from those of the 20^th Century let alone the 16^th, so surely our education system should reflect these changes. 

Many teachers, parents and students greet with bemused disbelief the fact that not all students enjoy their schooling because basically they are being sold something they simply don't want,.  The fact that virtually nobody seriously questions what actually happens in schools shows the depth of the cultural "normality" which has become school and schooling.  This school and schooling culture is held in place by a wide variety of cultural pressures.  These include the notion that a good teacher is a teacher who disciplines children well, who’s students gain good test scores/grades, are well- mannered and are educated in an environment where individuals within the class work quietly on their own creating neat work---a regimen that was perceived to produce the ideal pre-adult for the 20th-century workplace, where employees would do as they were told, unquestioningly and politely; and aspirations for personal fulfilment gave way to the importance of place in the societal jigsaw puzzle.

Teachers also were trained to acquire knowledge.  A knowledgeable teacher was assumed to be clever teacher no matter how poor the quality of the teaching.  20 years of training and classroom practice automatically enabled teachers to accumulate a huge body of knowledge which could be used to empower, not purposefully but rather, guided by the examples and encouragement of their peers and society they were able to show their cleverness by displaying their knowledge.  To not air all their knowledge to students would have meant sacrificing the power that their knowledge gave them; to sit within the class and let students discover for themselves what the teacher already knew would require considerable humility.  In the notes provided by Yoram he quotes John Piaget: “Each time I teach my students something, I rob them of the possibility to discover it by themselves."

The idea of students constructing all of their own understanding independent of any teacher intervention is a nonsense, an ideal that belies human nature.  In our human-ness we are silly, irrational and passionate and that's what makes us so intriguing, frightening and wonderful as well as complicating the ideal teaching and learning world we inhabit as educators. 

It is only in the last few years that we have started to comprehend fully the complexities of the brain, and the truly extraordinary nature of the brains of developing young children. We are now at last beginning to realise it’s plasticity and  it’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances and pressures both biological and environmental. 

This tends to imply that the capacity for learning prior to the age of10 is potentially far greater than possible after a child reaches 10.  But recognition of our dual role of both assisting students to make sense of their world and accepting our responsibility for ensuring that they learn to create and build their own understanding independently, focuses us as teachers on finding a balance between these two tasks.  Prior to 2001 providing sufficient resources to allow students to tackle open- ended clever questions proved almost impossible.  With communication and information technologies now developed to a point where they are predominately intuitive and facilitate creative applications, we can actually resource open ended, clever, as well as fertile (Harpaz) questions.  The task at hand for both policymakers and the educators that constitute the institutions that put in place the policies, is to

• Find this new balance between being “the guide on the side” and the “sage on the stage”.
• Reduce the amount of content that students are expected to deliver in any given year, thus ensuring that sufficient time is allocated so that these clever and open -ended questions can be fully explored and developed.
• State our educational objectives in the context of both the necessary foundational skills that students require and the skills required to be lifelong learners.
• Educate our society and our educational communities to realign their expectations with the changing requirements of the 21st century.
• As teachers, adopt and encourage the new teaching and learning culture; reduce historical curriculum content, improve the contexts that we use, appreciate cognitive developmental theory based on recent neuro-scientific discoveries, and re-examine the validity of/necessity for examination based assessment, thus ensuring that teaching really is a sustainable and rewarding vocation.
• Provide students with the necessary skills to be critical learners, effective and succinct communicators, have the capacity to decide which information and communication technologies to use in each circumstance in which they find themselves, and to be fluent in a wide range of media types
• Ensure that students understand what it means to think and learn, have strategies and toolsets on which they can draw, and know how to use these strategies and tools appropriately.

• Thinking is talking to oneself
• Thinking is dreaming while awake
• In more “adult-speak” thinking can be defined as a process which modifies our worldview

Good questioning facilitates and allows knowledge creation to become a fascinating pursuit for all children.  It is becoming increasingly obvious that the type of question that we set depends entirely on the objectives that we are trying to achieve.  There are questions that build core knowledge, there are questions that use knowledge and create conceptual frameworks, and then there are questions that free the mind, presenting environments where students can create their own unique knowledge, invention and wonder.  We have described the two former question types in previous papers and in this paper will focus on the latter type.  Once again we reiterate the point that a balance of questioning types is necessary so that foundations can be laid down and skills built up, enabling children to learn how to build their own knowledge frameworks independently and creatively.

To quote Yoram “the aim of the subject (maths, science et all), is to impart existing knowledge, whereas the aim of the discipline is to create new knowledge.”  The fertile questions are aimed at allowing students to create their own new knowledge. In general fertile questions do not have a right or wrong answer but rather they require research and investigation using a wide array of resource people, institutions and technologies in order that the investigators may present an opinion/decision on a certain topic based on their research. Examples of fertile questions include:

• Should the United Nations be the ultimate governmental system for all countries?
• Can poverty realistically be eliminated?
• What will the role of the family be in 2050?
• Are the sexes equal?
• Is there a limit to what science can discover?
• Is the price of free speech too high?
• Should (insert country name) limit the number and type of people that can emigrate and settle in our country?

The setting of fertile questions demands a wide range of skills from the students concerned.  Not only will they need to manage the research process effectively and efficiently but their very first task will be to set themselves a whole range of questions that will guide them through their research process.

The implications here for skill development are considerable, and schools that choose this pathway, (which we would encourage), must do so strategically and ensure that students have the requisite skills in order to fulfil the ambition behind the provision of the fertile question , otherwise it is more than possible that they will be set up for failure.  Once again, we are seeing that content oriented curricula do not allow the necessary time, pedagogical approach or culture essential to the provision of suitable frameworks for fertile questions.  Yet fertile questions/debate centred on such issues as genetic research, use of atomic energy, environmental management, health and education funding . . . . . . confound entire populations to the point where they choose leaders who present absolutes, and see this as good leadership. People choose authoritative figures when they are confused and lack the skills to work their way through fertile questions. Therefore in order to substantiate all the good intent behind 21st-century education the prime ingredient must be wisdom; wisdom defined as being "the capacity to independently create knowledge and build understanding in order that these can be used to benefit self and community"