School of Epicurus

In fact, fourth-century Greece passed much the same judgment on the school of Epicurus, whose students avoided public service and chose to live in obscurity. One of the school’s harshest critics was Epictetus. Like other Stoics, he prized civic duty, and he thought the Epicureans needed to get real: “In the name of Zeus, I ask you, can you imagine an Epicurean state?…The doctrines are bad, subversive of the State, destructive to the family…Drop these doctrines, man. Y...

 Learned VS Common Culture

In many private schools and academies, we find several things taught now which were never made the subjects of systematical instruction in former times; and in those of our universities in which it is the interest of the tutors to make their lectures of real use to their pupils, and where lectures are not mere matters of form, the professors find the necessity of delivering themselves in English. And the evident propriety of the thing must necessarily make this practice more general, notwiths...

 A 2030 Vision for Gaming Culture

Young gamers are having fun, learning from each other, and learning to be good citizens of gaming and online communities. They are able to transfer some of their skills and citizenship sensibility to other aspects of their lives. They are connecting and mentoring each other in online gaming spaces that are safe, mixed age, and centered on creation, exploration, inquiry, and friendly competition. Youth and their parents have a deeper understanding of digital citizenship, supported and taught...

 Fluid Intelligence has Made the Most Gains

So which kinds of intellectual performance have been pushed upward by the better environments of recent decades? Surprisingly, the steepest gains have not been found in the concrete skills that are directly taught in school, such as general knowledge, arithmetic, and vocabulary. They have been found in the abstract, fluid kinds of intelligence, the ones tapped by similarity questions (“What do an hour and a year have in common?”), analogies (“BIRD is to EGG as TREE is to what?”), and ...

 There is No "Pokemon Gap"

While educators debated whether children learn to read best through drill-and-practice phonics or "whole language" instruction, Nintendo was, quite informally, teaching a generation of children how to read. Pokemon also taught children how to analyze and classify more than 700 different types of creatures through trading cards that were dense with specialized, technical, cross-referenced text. Gee would later call Pokemon "perhaps the best literacy curriculum ever conceived." He offered the o...

 Games are Patient and Know You

What this small group of tinkerers found is that games focus, inspire, and reassure young people i; in ways that school often can't. Then as now, they believed, if you are a young person, games give you a chance to learn at your own pace, take risks, and cultivate deeper understanding. While teachers, parents, and friends may encourage and support you, these natural resources are limited. Computers work on a completely different scale and timetable. They're "infinitely stupid and infinitely p...

 Children's Attention Spans are Short, and Education Deman...

The 2016 paper, “Off-task behavior in elementary school children,” was published in the peer-reviewed journal Learning and Instruction, and was funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, an arm of the Department of Education. The researchers also kept track of how the teachers were instructing students during these observations. Not surprisingly, students went off task more frequently during whole-group instruction than during small group or individual work. Length of lesson matters...

 The Role of the Educator In Regards to the Future

The world is changing -- it is getting both smaller and bigger at the same time. Our world shrinks as technologies now allow us to communicate both synchronously and asynchronously with peers around the world. Conversely, the explosion of information now available to us expands our view of the world. As a result of the ability to communicate globally and the information explosion, education must change. Most educators might not want to change, but the change is coming -- it is a matter of whe...

 Discussion Rhythm to Promote Student Participation

Teachers are partnering with students to establish a new rhythm in classroom questioning. This rhythm provides teachers and students with a silence for thinking at two crucial junctions in the questioning process: • Wait Time 1: After a question is posed but before a student is called on to answer. • Wait Time 2: Directly following that student’s response. Almost 50 years ago, Mary Budd Rowe (1969) famously discovered multiple benefits associated with intentionally pausing at these tw...

 Emergent Curriculum

Whereas teachers and school boards typically decide in advance what knowledge children should receive based on their age, emergent curriculum is the technique of letting topics for study arise out of student interests and actions. Curriculum becomes what actually happens, rather than what was planned to happen. After all, children design their own “curriculum” all the time, simply by playing in, exploring, and studying the world. In schools inspired by the Italian Reggio-Emilia approach, ...