Rethink: Chapter 6

This chapter really helped me understand the overall shift from where education started and to where it is now. The other chapters were building up to this and I felt like this chapter was just tying everything together and helped me understand everything prior to this a lot more. This reading has led me to believe that education isn't points on a line but rather a continuum, things are constantly evolving and changing. But sometimes this change is happening so slowly we don't ever realize it until way after the fact. The three phases that were highlighted in "Rethinking" took a long time to get to the way they were. As a future teacher I wonder what types of trials and tribulations lie ahead of me my first year teaching, my 5th year, my 25th... Will the greatest amount of good for the most amount of people keep changing? And if so, what will I do to stay caught up? What if this technological shift does have an ever increasing amount of students being home schooled or being involved in distance/online education? If we're individualizing instruction (which I have no arguments with) and allowing students to pick the topics that interest them or that will enhance their career choice, I feel like we're going back to the ways of apprenticeships in some sense.

From this reading, I feel that the best I can do is to keep an open mind to the world around me. Not every one thing is suited for every one person and this holds true in education. Not every student will learn best in a regular classroom set up with the general curriculum, while others can greatly excel at it. I feel also that too much individualization without precedent might allow students to "slack off" or only want to learn about subjects the they find interesting. I'm not saying you can't further your knowledge about a particular topic, but if I had my choice I wouldn't really have to deal with science unless it involved looking at animals. There are some things that we have an obligation to teach our students and I just hope that we don't completely veer away from that.