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The case for student-first curricula
Kevin P. Chavous
September 3, 2021
Real Clear Education
Originally Posted by brief excerpts from article
Ebbinghaus’s “Forgetting Curve” – a classic study that illustrates how much information students lose when there is no effort to retain it. Boiled down to the essentials, the study concludes that students lose more than half of what they learn within an hour; two-thirds within a day; and three-fourths within six days. Educators have been wrestling with these results since the study was conducted 140 years ago.
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Mitra sees technology opening the door to a new way of learning built for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. “This means we no longer have to teach students what they can learn by themselves with an Internet connection. Instead, we can facilitate problem-solving skills and encourage critical thinking by asking interesting questions and letting the students find the answer on their own.”
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... knowledge becomes obsolete faster than ever...
I am concerned for an educational foundation fully dependent on the internet, for when someone pulls the plug we may have a society of individuals unable to read and retain knowledge or perform routine mathematics themselves without electronic aids.

While the boundaries of knowledge may be expanding quickly, knowledge of mathematics, history, literature, languages, vocabulary, grammar, and more, does not become rapidly "obsolete."

Faced with a use-it-or-lose-it scenario, I do not agree that the alternative to lose it in favor of dependence on electronic aids is preferable to developing mental retention capabilities.

Here is a related link, from e-student.org - What is the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve?
I don't see anything in the quote above, which stresses problem solving rather memorization (the lack of which a number of people have moaned about for at least a century -- yes, I have vivid memories of my grandfather critiquing the educational standards of 40 years ago, back then it was the fact that we did literary analysis rather than memorizing pages and pages of poetry, ideally in Greek and Latin) that would preclude future humans from learning routine mathematical computations (or master reading and writing). And if you want traditional, the expectation that everybody should be able to is a fairly new development in the history of humanity and civilization.

But your worries are not new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power

My take on this: the ability of humans to extrapolate future from past and present has been (and remains) pretty poor.
Originally Posted by SiaSL
I don't see anything in the quote above, which stresses problem solving rather memorization (the lack of which a number of people have moaned about for at least a century -- yes, I have vivid memories of my grandfather critiquing the educational standards of 40 years ago, back then it was the fact that we did literary analysis rather than memorizing pages and pages of poetry, ideally in Greek and Latin) that would preclude future humans from learning routine mathematical computations (or master reading and writing). And if you want traditional, the expectation that everybody should be able to is a fairly new development in the history of humanity and civilization.

But your worries are not new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power

My take on this: the ability of humans to extrapolate future from past and present has been (and remains) pretty poor.
Thank you for your post. Although your observation and experience may not include those dependent upon electronic aids, there is more than a decade of articles describing this phenomena. Here is one example:
Why Johnny Can't Add Without A Calculator
Konstantine Kakakes
June 25, 2012
Slate

Although I did *not* mention "traditional", I do believe that a society in which few if any are illiterate... and all are provided with opportunities to learn... is a more just society.
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