Developing Knowledge Farmers

While work­ing on my model class­room pre­sen­ta­tion for this after­noon, I dis­cov­ered a metaphor that helped me crys­tal­lize one of the things that makes learn­ing today rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent than it was when I was in ele­men­tary school, and gave me a bet­ter grasp on how and why teach­ing and schools need to be different.

In the 1970s, writ­ing a report was like buy­ing fast food. I remem­ber writ­ing reports on many top­ics in ele­men­tary school: Morse code and Iraq are two that specif­i­cally leap to mind. (When we were select­ing our coun­tries to report on, I picked Iraq because I thought it was cool that the name ended with a Q. Yeah, I know.) I selected my topic, went to the library, found a book, read it (or more likely, skimmed it), then sat down to write my own ver­sion. Report writ­ing really wasn’t research then, it was more like retelling. Like fast food value meals, some­one else had really done all the work of tak­ing the infor­ma­tion ingre­di­ents, pro­cess­ing them, and putting them together into sty­ro­foam con­tain­ers and paper car­tons. All I had to do was pick meal #2 and con­sume it.

School today is still set up for our kids to be fast food knowl­edge con­sumers. State and fed­eral gov­ern­ments have already done the work of select­ing what kinds of things are on the menu. School dis­tricts and text­book pub­lish­ers have already cho­sen the ingre­di­ents, devel­oped the recipes, and pre­pared the food, ready to deliver to the stu­dents. And just like fast food, it all looks and tastes pretty much the same every­where. A Whop­per in Den­ver is iden­ti­cal to one in Philadelphia.

Sim­ply being a con­sumer is no longer suf­fi­cient. In the sev­en­ties, kids (and most adults for that mat­ter) couldn’t access infor­ma­tion directly. We only had lim­ited sources, and all of them had been pre­processed for us by oth­ers. Today, on the Inter­net, we can tap directly into the raw data. The prob­lem is, many of us still just con­sume it the same way we used to. We’re get­ting fresh pro­duce and meat, but we are eat­ing it raw.

We must teach kids not how to pick a good value meal, but what do do with the ingre­di­ents they have. We have to teach them how to cre­ate their own meals. We’ll begin by fol­low­ing recipes, but we have to also teach them the prin­ci­ples behind the recipes, the think­ing that went into cre­at­ing them, and even­tu­ally how to develop their own recipes. They need to know how to select qual­ity ingre­di­ents, and which ones go together well. They need to develop their palates so they can expe­ri­ence the enor­mous vari­ety of ideas and rela­tion­ships that exist in the world. This will involve skills like crit­i­cal think­ing and prob­lem solving.

Even this isn’t enough, though. I believe we need to get kids out of the gro­cery stores and into the fields. Teach them not just to select the right foods, but to grow them. We need to give kids the seeds, the tools, and the tech­niques for becom­ing their own knowl­edge farm­ers, to cre­ate knowl­edge and share it with the world.

And of course, all of this means that teach­ers have to get out of their own value meals and learn how to shop, how to cook, and how to farm. I sus­pect that at least for a while we’ll all be learn­ing these things just half a step ahead of the kids, but that’s okay. What mat­ters is that we rec­og­nize that there’s a world of cui­sine out­side of the food court and that we’re will­ing to live there.