I came across the following article during the holidays and it highlighted to me the growing focus on children being able to think, be creative and to ask the right questions. Which I would suggest is a real strength of the PYP program. Whilst some will argue that knowledge is power, it is only powerful if you know how to use it (think and ask the right questions) and know how to add value to it (innovate).
Below is a snippet from the article and the complete article can be read by clicking HERE.
NEED A JOB? INVENT IT.
WHEN Tony Wagner, the Harvard education specialist, describes his job today, he says he’s “a translator between two hostile tribes” — the education world and the business world, the people who teach our kids and the people who give them jobs. Wagner’s argument in his book “Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World” is that our K-12 and college tracks are not consistently “adding the value and teaching the skills that matter most in the marketplace.”
This is dangerous at a time when there is increasingly no such thing as a high-wage, middle-skilled job — the thing that sustained the middle class in the last generation. Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job. Every middle-class job today is being pulled up, out or down faster than ever. That is, it either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the world or is being buried — made obsolete — faster than ever. Which is why the goal of education today, argues Wagner, should not be to make every child “college ready” but “innovation ready” — ready to add value to whatever they do.
That is a tall task. I tracked Wagner down and asked him to elaborate. “Today,” he said via e-mail, “because knowledge is available on every Internet-connected device, what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know. The capacity to innovate — the ability to solve problems creatively or bring new possibilities to life — and skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration are far more important than academic knowledge. As one executive told me, ‘We can teach new hires the content, and we will have to because it continues to change, but we can’t teach them how to think — to ask the right questions — and to take initiative.’ ”- Thomas Friedman, New York Times – Sunday Review, 30 March 2013
Disclaimer – I take no responsibility for the quality of the comments that others have left on the NY Times web link above, nor do I endorse, condone or agree with the comments that have been made. They simply reflect the feelings of individuals that have made them and do not reflect my views in anyway.