“The hard fact is that our minds hold on only to knowledge we have occasion to use in some corner of our lives,” Perkins writes. Unfortunately all of that test knowledge, all of that accumulated knowledge we thought was worth knowing, becomes useless if not used. But too often, we tend to focus on short-term successes - scoring well on a quiz, acing a spelling test. “Knowledge is for going somewhere,” Perkins says, not just for accumulating. “It seems not to have been thought through very carefully.”Īnd simply having a vast reservoir of knowledge isn’t helpful if it’s not being used. Curriculum suffers from something of a crowded garage effect: It generally seems safer and easier to keep the old bicycle around than to throw it out.”Īs a result, “the lifeworthiness of the multitudinous facts and ideas in the typical curriculum is spotty,” he says. Why aren’t my children learning it?’ The enormous investment in textbooks and the cost of revising them gives familiar elements of the curriculum a longer life span than they might perhaps deserve. “It sits solidly in the minds of parents: ‘I learned that. “Conventional curriculum is chained to the bicycle rack,” he says. Educators are “fixated” on building up students’ reservoirs of knowledge, often because we default to what has always been done. The information in textbooks is not necessarily what you need or would like to have at your fingertips.” Instead, even though most people would say that education should prepare you for life, much of what is offered in schools doesn’t work in that direction, Perkins says. “But there are issues of balance, particularly in the digital age. INFORMATIONįor starters, most education has become a mastery of a very large body of information, even if it’s not what Perkins calls lifeworthy - likely to matter, in any meaningful way, in the lives learners are expected to live. As a result, as educators, “we have a somewhat quiet crisis of content,” Perkins writes, “quiet not for utter lack of voices but because other concerns in education tend to muffle them.” These other concerns are what he calls rival learning agendas: information, achievement, and expertise. There’s also much we aren’t teaching that would be a better return on investment. These days, he says we teach a lot that isn’t going to matter, in a significant way, in students’ lives. That’s why Perkins decided to devote an entire book, and many lectures and discussions, to how that question gets answered. “When that ballistic missile comes from the back of the room, it’s a good reminder that the question doesn’t just belong to state school boards, authors of textbooks, writers of curriculum standards, and other elite,” he says. (It’s also one he admits having asked once or twice himself.) Yet, he admits, the question is actually a good one - an “uppity version” of what’s worth learning in school. Teachers work hard at what they do, and the question is disrespectful. “The student: ‘Why do we need to know this?’”Īs a teacher, Perkins says he hates that question. You gesture toward the hand, Let’s hear it. “You’ve been teaching long enough to be pretty sure that hand is going to go up as soon as you got started on this topic, and so it does, with an annoying indolence. “In the back of the class, there’s that idly waving hand,” Perkins writes. What’s worth learning in school? It’s a question that students have been lobbing at teachers for years, in a slightly different form. They need to start asking themselves what he considers to be one of the most important questions in education: What's worth learning in school? By throwing that sandal, Gandhi had two important insights: He knew what people in the world needed, and he knew what to let go of.Įducators, Perkins says, need to embrace these same insights. And so it is, on a small scale, seizing a singular moment.”īut as he also points out, and as he told an audience at the Future of Learning institute held this past summer at the Ed School, it was more than that: It was also a knowledgeable act. Asked by his colleague why he did that, he said one sandal wouldn’t do him any good, but two would certainly help someone else.Īs Perkins writes in his new book, Future Wise, “People cherish the story as a marvelous example of a charitable act. Without hesitation, Gandhi took off his second sandal and threw it toward the first. The train was moving, and there was no time to go back. One of his sandals slipped off and fell to the ground. Professor David Perkins likes to tell this story: Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi was getting on a train.