On Fri­day the Texas State Board of Edu­ca­tion made some deci­sions that have the poten­tial to effect stu­dents in every state in the union for the next decade. If you are not aware, Texas is one of the biggest text­book mar­kets in the coun­try. Because of the high cost to print and to develop text­book con­tent, when the Texas Board of Edu­ca­tion decides what will go into their text­books, or be left out, it has a direct impact on what text­books will look like in every state. The Texas State Board of Edu­ca­tion cur­rently has a major­ity of right winged con­ser­v­a­tive lay peo­ple who con­trol those deci­sions. After a tremen­dous amount of recent debate and crit­i­cism, the Board decided to move ahead with planned revi­sions that reflect the con­ser­v­a­tive ide­ol­ogy of the major­ity of the Board. There are many items that will be deleted from the social stud­ies text, but here are a cou­ple that have drawn con­sid­er­able criticism:

·   Injus­tice any­where is a threat to jus­tice every­where.” — Mar­tin Luther King, Jr., Let­ter from a Birm­ing­ham Jail, April 16, 1963.

·   The word “cap­i­tal­ism” has been deleted and replaced with the more Republican-centric “Free Market.”

The deci­sions by the board drew crit­i­cism for all over the coun­try and most notably included the Amer­i­can His­tor­i­cal Association.

His­to­rian John Fea (from a Chris­t­ian col­lege, I might add) is another major critic of the board’s deci­sions. He recently posted on his blog:

“…the world “impe­ri­al­ism” has been replaced with “expan­sion­ism” when ref­er­enc­ing the Spanish-American War and the United States acqui­si­tion of Guam, Hawaii, the Philip­pines, and Puerto Rico.”Expan­sion­ism,” of course, implies the spread­ing of Amer­i­can ideals and val­ues to these places. “Impe­ri­al­ism” is a bit more omi­nous term that implies a some­what “forced” expor­ta­tion of Amer­i­can ideals to these places. Any­one who has stud­ied this period in any detail knows that the actions of the United States in these parts of the world have not always been commendable.”

You may be angered by the actions of the board, just as I ini­tially was. I real­ized, how­ever, that my real issue is not with the con­tent of text­books, but more impor­tantly that schools are still using text­books as the cur­ricu­lum. Why would schools allow text­books to drive the cur­ricu­lum any­way, when they are out­dated as soon as they are pub­lished? Even the text­book com­pa­nies are begin­ning to real­ize that dig­i­tal con­tent may soon replace the more tra­di­tional printed text. In the cur­rent dig­i­tal age why wouldn’t schools at least opt for some­thing that is more dynamic in nature?

I think part of the answer lie in people’s belief sys­tems about teach­ing and learn­ing. There is a divi­sion in edu­ca­tion between peo­ple that believe stu­dents should con­struct their own mean­ing and those that believe that every stu­dent should know spe­cific infor­ma­tion. I per­son­ally believe that a good edu­ca­tion includes some of both. We know, how­ever, that because of the way the brain learns, every­one must con­struct their own mean­ing. With this basic con­struct in mind, shouldn’t we be pre­sent­ing stu­dents with a vari­ety of per­spec­tives, teach­ing them how to objec­tively eval­u­ate the mer­its of each, and then allow them to make up their own minds? Fea also seems to mir­ror this sen­ti­ment in his com­ments about Texas using the word “expan­sion­ism” rather than “impe­ri­al­ism.” He states:

“Expan­sion­ism” and “impe­ri­al­ism” are both words that can describe the way the shapers of U.S. for­eign pol­icy in this period saw their mis­sion. If a wide array of pri­mary doc­u­ments are used here, stu­dents will see that both “expan­sion­ism” and “impe­ri­al­ism” were at work here.”

Many of the 1:1 schools I work with have already moved beyond the text­book. Don’t get me wrong, some still use text­books, but the books have become one resource within a vast array of con­tent avail­able to stu­dents and teach­ers through con­tin­u­ous access to the Internet.

The world has def­i­nitely changed, and it is no longer about acquir­ing infor­ma­tion. We have more content/information than we could read in a hun­dred life­times and it increases expo­nen­tially every day. The chal­lenge in the dig­i­tal age is to dis­ag­gre­gat­ing infor­ma­tion. How do stu­dents, teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tors find cred­i­ble infor­ma­tion, under­stand­ing the influ­ences and moti­va­tions of the author, make sense of the infor­ma­tion, and then apply the infor­ma­tion in new and inno­v­a­tive ways.  Some 1:1 pro­grams have been oper­at­ing in this student-centric way for a decade now and more come online every year. Vail Uni­fied School Dis­trict, AZ, for exam­ple, is one dis­trict that has com­pletely aban­doned the tra­di­tional textbook.

 I have made the com­ment many times this year that if schools don’t wake up and start inte­grat­ing the tech­nol­ogy that peo­ple are using in all other aspects of their lives into every aspect of school­ing, they run the risk of becom­ing irrel­e­vant. They will become irrel­e­vant because par­ents will have many great options to edu­cate their chil­dren out­side the tra­di­tional school set­ting. More impor­tantly, how­ever, is that stu­dents already have access at their fin­ger­tips to almost all of the infor­ma­tion known to man and will even­tu­ally learn to usurp the text­book, the teacher and even the school system.

I’ll repeat myself, because this point is so impor­tant. IT IS NO LONGER ABOUT INFORMATION. It is about teach­ing stu­dents to think for them­selves so they can make sense of the sea of infor­ma­tion avail­able at their fin­ger­tips. The risk we run if we con­tinue down our tra­di­tional path is the cre­ation of a gen­er­a­tion that is pre­pared for the past and won’t be able to com­pete in the future.

Michael Giel­niak, Ph.D., Direc­tor of Pro­grams & Devel­op­ment, One-to-One Insti­tute