The Capacity to Learn

This post concludes the theme begun in The (Overturned) Model of Standard Education

and continued in Alternatives to the Standard Model of Education

A dominant theme in the literature on the future of work is that workers—all workers, white collar, blue collar, in the services, information field, and trades, and yet to be discovered fields—will have to be active learners. They will spend their careers learning to use new technologies and adapting new technologies and adapting their work to new technologies.

Students develop the capacity to learn through applying academic skills (reading, writing, thinking, mathematics) are applied in natural situations (where the complexities of the real world exist rather than the sterilized situations of textbooks) and students create meaning around their work.

illustrating the capacity to learn

Schools must purposefully design all three components into each classroom if students are to develop the capacity to learn.