It’s Time for an Education Revolution in K–12

Education in America is due for a revolution. While some of the tools of the trade may have changed in education, the restraints and inefficiencies of former best practices and educational models from yesteryear still hinder students from reaching their full potential, argue educators and IT leaders at the 2012 CoSN conference.

Sir Bob Geldof, musician and founder of Groupcall, a mobile application supplier and data extraction tool, believes that schools must prepare students for what he calls “the knowledge economy.”

“Capital is rare enough these days and labor is everywhere else in the world,” says Geldof, in an interview with EdTech: Focus on K–12 at the CoSN conference. “So what we need are energy and ideas … because if we don’t go into the knowledge economy, I don’t know where we go with this.”

The first step to making this generation of students more competitive is to expand the notion of what education is. Far too often, it means sitting inside a classroom and following a rigid curriculum. But students and schools could benefit from thinking a bit more outside the box, say educators.

“I think that schools need to lighten up a little bit. We’ve put so much focus on the outcomes of the education that I think that we’ve lost a lot of the process of learning — the serendipity, the discovery parts of learning,” says Dr. Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium.

For more updates from CoSN, follow EdTech: Focus on K–12's CoSN coverage here.