Part One: Technology and the Internet: The Necessary Springboards for Curriculum
Integrate technology and the Internet into the American curriculum now. In the real-world "global village" of today our students must process hyperbolic information communicated in extremes of repetition and speed. The new world order is a cognitively dissonant place, replete with conflicting meanings and valueless values. "Driven to distraction" (Hallowell, Driven to Distraction) by explosions of quick-cut lightening-jolt images, students try to make sense of a marketplace of ideas where no single bit of communication seems to be any more relevant than another. The children before us have brains that are different from the brains of children who sat in those desks fifteen years ago. We need to adapt to our changed audience by appealing to the modes of learning to which they are most attracted (or in the terminology of brain science, “for which they are wired), as well as help them make sense of the barrage of information that they are exposed to in our modern media. Our students need to be able to “read” and critically evaluate the most influential “literature” of our day—the Internet. In the same way that the Gutenberg printing press changed the way human beings processed information—from a more oral society to a written society—we need to help our students adapt to the current digital and image-laden world community. A focus on Media Literacy and the idea of “reading the Internet,” should be our first priorities in education. The age of print media, whether we like it or not, has been replaced by the age of digital and electronic communication via the World Wide Web. We, as educators, need to re-vision our mindset and our approach to instruction. Education needs a pedagogical revolution.
Our “old” literacy is no longer as effective as it was prior to the Internet Revolution. For example, in English class, a textbook entitled Language of Literature simply does not engage students in the ways that new media does. Students’ eyes glaze over as we, the teachers, direct them to open up their books. The solution to getting student attention is staring us in the face. Any teacher can attest to the fact that we are repeatedly saying, “Put the cell phones away.” Why aren’t we instead saying, “Take out your smart phone to do a search on <fill in the blank>?” Why aren’t we using the Internet, the most influential medium of our day, as the source/starting point/springboard for learning? We need to teach our students critical thinking skills by reflecting on timely (in today’s fast-paced world that could mean the last hour) events across the globe; then help our students to synthesize and to evaluate the information culled from the Internet by connecting that information to ancillary and supplementary material in the textbooks. In other words, current events across the globe should be the springboards for teaching our subject matter. We need to connect the real world that students live in (and are exposed to via the Internet) to the traditional curriculum, not the other way around.
For example, the Arab Spring is a wonderful starting point for a discussion of a range of issues about the Middle East. For the World History teacher, this could mean first reading a timely article on the events in Libya, Tunisia, or Egypt, (projected on a screen using the iPad and an LCD projector), then connecting and supplementing that learning by referring to the appropriate chapter/lesson in a textbook; in other words, the textbook should not be the starting point of learning, but should instead be utilized as a supplement to the valuable, practical, timely lessons in the real world media. This pedagogical technique should be facilitated across our curriculums, in various disciplines, in a variety of ways. It seems to me, in our present educational system, we are putting the cart (textbooks) before the horse (timely, relevant, news items <lesson plans> via the Internet). The Apple ecosystem offers a wide range of excellent applications (too many to list in this overview) that could easily be incorporated into our lessons. Using iPads would be cost-effective and environmentally sound (saving paper). Textbooks are out of date before the cartons are even opened. The Internet is a free curriculum! We need a re-visioning of pedagogy and instructional techniques so that teachers can facilitate learning through the medium of our day, the Internet. We need to teach our students how to synthesize information from the Internet with the variety of disciplines in our school curriculums. In doing so, we will not only be teaching students about the different subjects/disciplines in a way that is more appropriate for a digital native (a person who was born after the general implementation of digital technology), but we will also be teaching our students about timely, relevant world issues, expanding their minds so that they develop a “global” consciousness/awareness that is a necessity for their futures.
Part Two: Context/Rationale/Research
“Schismogenetic Schooling”: Fixing the School/Real-World Split through Internet Synthesis and Open Pedagogies
Inspired by the words of Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson, Dickinson, and other patron saints of American literature, I tell my students, in whatever ways I can, that they contain multitudes, that the real business of life is to live in the present and find eternity in a moment (the future can wait), and that nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of their own minds. We dwell in possibilities, I remind them, and those possibilities are endless. As an English teacher, I believe the most important way to help my students recognize possibility is modeling for them, and teaching them, how to synthesize. Through synthesis, students are challenged to become reflective individuals who think deeply and creatively about the world of ideas. As a result, they will be more able to appreciate the exciting opportunities that the world has to offer them. “The more you link, the better you think, the smarter you become,” I tell them.
Regrettably, English class just can't compete with the stimulating real-world culture that my students are exposed to before and after the school bell rings. Their educational experience has become schismogenetic. Schismogenesis, a term coined by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson in the 1930s, explains the interaction between two social groups who exhibit complimentary rituals or behaviors. The interaction between them is such that behavior X from one side elicits behavior Y from the other side, often resulting in an even more exaggerated rift or split.
Many teachers, particularly at the high school level, can attest to the challenge of teaching in the school environment (X) that pales in comparison to the vibrant, complex dynamism of the real world (Y) with its ever-changing media and technologies. The rituals of classroom experience are sterile compared to the "bling" of the real world. The more we use the "traditional" teaching methods, the less interested our students become. And while we try hard to get them interested in the rituals of school, we must accept the fact that we are teaching in an environment that is less relevant. The current educational system is anachronistic, a poor substitute for the media-blitz "real world" of our students. We need change.
The naysayers in education blame the students: "They're stupid." "Students just don't want to learn." "They won't take the information that I have to give them," I’ve heard teachers say. "They refuse to learn." "Why should we have to dumb down the curriculum?" When students act out because they are utterly bored, teachers point fingers and label them "disrespectful," "rude," or even worse. Administrators shake their heads over the dramatic decline in reading skills and standardized test scores. There is talk of teacher accountability; classrooms are micro-managed. Teacher planning days are filled with stale "professional development" workshops where the same ideas are refurbished and relabeled. Teachers smile and pretend to listen, administrators worry about the next school grade, parents are frustrated, and our students are left in the lurch. I've read a variety of educational journals and books, culling through articles with all that “teacher-speak”--terms like "scaffolding," "frontloading," "graphic organizers," "K-W-L charts," "Two-column Notes," "Raft," "Rubrics," "Bloom's taxonomy," "cooperative learning," "Think/Pair/Share." I'm bored, you're bored, and we all fall down. Is it any wonder that our students' eyes glaze over when we introduce these terms and strategies?
I don't mean to suggest that the strategies are ineffective; on the contrary, many of them work quite well. But here's the rub: we are trying to utilize them in a system that is no longer effective. It's not the product itself that is flawed; it's the process. Marshall McLuhan, the "Oracle of the Electronic Age," was prescient with his proclamation in 1964 that the "medium is the message" (Understanding Media). He believed that individualistic print culture would be brought to an end by "electronic media," creating a future dominated by the "global village." Thirty-plus years later, the global village has arrived. The implications of the ever-changing media and technologies in our postmodern culture are immense for the children seated before us, particularly when we consider both our teaching methods and our content.
In the real-world "global village" of today our students must process hyperbolic information communicated in extremes of repetition and speed. The new world order is a cognitively dissonant place, replete with conflicting meanings and valueless values. "Driven to distraction" (Hallowell) by explosions of quick-cut lightening-jolt images, students try to make sense of a marketplace of ideas where no single bit of communication seems to be any more relevant than another. In the morning, the host of NBC’s “Today Show” sits down to interview the cast of “The Real Housewives of New Jersey”; in the evening, Anderson Cooper discusses a border fence to stop illegal immigrants from entering our country. Interjected during these "news" programs are commercials extolling the good life--cars, office products, personal care items, computers, apparel/fashion, and travel. What are our young people to make of this chaos of incongruities?--a “serious” news anchor discusses the peccadilloes of housewives in New Jersey; "illegal immigrants" are lumped en masse--faceless, anonymous, and seemingly insignificant; stylized, sexy commercials tout the good life--makeup, Mazdas, and a zillion gigabytes of memory for your hard drive.
Our youth are struggling to find coherence in crazy juxtapositions that tumble topsy-turvy into everything else. Lady Gaga receives more attention than a busload of people being blown up in Iraq. What's important? Who's important? And why? The rhythm of American life has become faster with each technological innovation, and students are multitasking in a whirlwind of inanities. The Medusa Media rears her serpentine head, student prefrontal cortices (the loci of critical thinking) crash; cognition turns stone cold. Critical thinking needs a reboot.
At 7:35 am every weekday morning, teachers struggle to elicit wisdom in front of a classroom of stone-faced students as we read from a literature textbook, sexily titled The Language of Literature. We teach them the art of essay writing in a classroom where paper is the innovative technology and a colored dry-erase marker is the special effect. Writing, reading, speaking, and listening, the province of English class, are skills that require time, patience, and the prefrontal cortex.
We are competing with television, movies, and other visual media that have dramatically changed our culture, and, as the emerging field of neuroscience tells us, have also changed the way our brains function, particularly the brains of children whose neural pathways are more plastic than those of adults. We have moved from a culture where alphabetic print was dominant to one in which images play the most important role. "Iconic information has superseded alphabetic information as the single most significant cultural influence" (Shlain 409). Consider the impact of MTV, advertising, movies, and celebrity culture, all those hours students spend mesmerized by the screens in front of them, whether they are watching television or the larger-than-life images of the cinema, or surreptitiously glancing at the camera phone hidden behind the book bag on their desk. Books function as makeshift walls; words have become trivialized. The image culture of our modern world is vastly different from the print culture of former centuries.
Cognitive neuroscience has much to teach educators about the effects of the new media on our children. In his book, The New Brain, Richard Restak quotes Todd Gitlin: "Speed is not incidental to the modern world--speed of production, speed of innovation, speed of investment, speed in the pace of life and the movement of images--but its essence" (51). As a result, Attention Deficit Disorder, according to Restak, is the "brain syndrome of our era." Daniel H. Pink, author of A Whole New Mind, differentiates between two modes of thinking, what he calls L-Directed Thinking and R-Directed Thinking. Certain tasks depend on the left hemisphere of the brain, and vice versa. The left hemisphere of the brain controls the right side of the body, is sequential, specializes in text, and analyzes details. The right hemisphere of the brain controls the left side of the body, is simultaneous, specializes in context, and synthesizes the big picture. An alphabetic culture, where text is the predominant medium, relies more on the left side of the brain. An iconic culture, where images have begun to supersede the print medium, relies more on the right hemisphere of the brain. Traditional learning, Robert Ornstein posits in his book The Right Brain has been too "left-brain" oriented (linear and sequential), with a lack of attention to the innate synthesis ability of the right brain. Daniel Pink concurs, making the case that as we move into the future, it’s the Right-directed thinkers who will be most successful.
There is a direct correlation between our students' behaviors in the classroom and the larger culture, which I call "Amygdala America." Joseph LeDoux, who has done research on the emotional underpinnings of the brain, elaborates on the way we process arousing words or pictures. There are two separate pathways for information processing. "One path goes directly to the amygdala" (an area of the brain that processes emotions). "The second pathway--LeDoux calls it the 'high road'--involves the cerebral cortex, the part of our brain where we formulate reasons" (qtd. in The Naked Brain, 44-45). In our image culture, provocative images and sound bytes cause a pile-up on our students' "low road," while traffic on the "high road" is light.
Northrop Frye once said that advertising is a "judicious mixture of flattery and threats," a concoction custom-made for the amygdala. The average American sees over 3000 advertising messages a day, and as Jack Myers, CEO of The Myers Group and publisher of The Myers Report, said in his address to the National Television Summit (March 2005) the focus of media persuasive techniques should always be through "emotion and passion." We know from brain research that impulse control, planning and decision-making are largely frontal cortex functions that are still maturing during adolescence. Because hardwiring for planning and other executive functions is still under development in adolescent brains, students are more prone to impulsivity and have less facility with higher-level thinking skills. These physiological changes are occurring at the same time students are exposed to an abundance of emotion-laden messages from advertising and other media domains.
In Amygdala America our students are being over-stimulated by an array of intoxicating imagery. Consequently, they "zone out," become resistant to the information that they have to process, especially when that information is delivered to them through the bland black-and-white technology of a book. We watch helplessly as students "shut down," or seem distracted and bored. David asks for the bathroom pass, just to get the heck out of class, if only for three minutes. Rosa, over-stressed and always falling asleep, says, "I can't concentrate." Richard asks if he can listen to his Ipod while reading, so he can tune the selection out. The paradox is that students demand even more stimulation to get information past their emotional thresholds in order for learning and retention to take place. Consider the insights by Daniel Goleman in his books, Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence; or Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. Emotional engagement is crucial to learning.
The children before us have brains that are different from the brains of children who sat in those desks fifteen years ago. Scientists have discovered that there is a direct relationship between plasticity, the brain's organization of its neural pathways, and the world around us. Daniel Stern, an American psychiatrist working at the University of Geneva, says that we can no longer "see our minds as so independent, separate, and isolated" (qtd. in Social Intelligence 43). Our minds are "permeable," reacting constantly to the stimuli around us--changing in real ways, adapting to the information that engulfs us. The world has changed significantly with the advent of the Internet and other technologies. The influence of the media has never been greater.
The attention of our students, engulfed by two very different cultures--the culture of the real world and the culture of education--is split. Our global village is becoming more complex, and time only accelerates these changes, reconfiguring our relationship with the world around us. Mark Taylor, the Cluett Professor of Humanities at Williams College, writes in his book The Moment of Complexity: "We are currently living in a moment of extraordinary complexity when systems and structures that have long organized life are changing at an unprecedented rate. Such rapid and pervasive change creates the need to develop new ways of understanding the world and interpreting our experience" (Taylor 19). Our job as educators is to understand the ways the world has changed and adapt our teaching styles. Cries to return to the educational "rigor" of the past, "to get back to basics," or "to return to the Three Rs" are futile. The world will never be the way that it was. We must accept this fact, not complain about it.
The challenge for educators is how to adapt the school environment to the needs of our students. Is it possible to bridge the school/real-world divide? Can we make school less schismogenetic and more harmonic? The short answer is yes, but as with any major schism, resolution will take time. There are long-term solutions that will depend on leadership from our administrators, and more importantly, our legislators.
As Daniel Pink points out in his book, A Whole New Mind, standardized tests measure "what is essentially undiluted L-Directed Thinking. They require logic and analysis--and reward test-takers for zeroing-in, computerlike, on a single correct answer. The exercise is linear, sequential, and bounded by time" (29). Certainly the ability to use logic and analysis is essential to learning and critical thinking; however, there are other learning styles that resonate more with students today. The renowned Pulitzer-Prize winning biologist Edward O. Wilson, writes, "The answer is clear: synthesis. We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely" (294). A reductionist approach to teaching, with its compartmentalization of knowledge, is no longer effective. I encourage my students to relate everything that they are learning in English class to what they are learning in other classes, as well as to what they are learning about in the "real world." As Wilson writes, "A balanced perspective cannot be acquired by studying disciplines in pieces but through pursuit of consilience among them. Such unification will come hard. But I think it is inevitable" (14).
As teachers we need to assist our students in their understanding of how everything relates to everything else. We need to develop in them an ecology of mind (Bateson, Ecology of Mind) and an understanding of "the pattern that connects" (Mind and Nature 7). Bateson writes, "Why do schools teach almost nothing of the pattern which connects? Is it that teachers know that they carry the kiss of death which will turn to tastelessness whatever they touch and therefore they are wisely unwilling to touch or read anything of real-life importance?" (7). I believe that most teachers can develop "taste" and inspire students by the connections we encourage. Teaching and learning should be collaborative, not authoritative. I am thrilled when a student links something in the literature in a way that is novel to me. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us." In the words of Emerson, we must encourage students to "deserve thy genius: exalt it." My students continue to astound me with their brilliance.
Standardized tests, which hardly foster creative ways of thinking, are not going away any time soon. And, yes, we do need to help students master linear, sequential thinking that such testing requires, but we also need to consider alternative teaching strategies. Slowly, over time, the larger educational system will adapt; it has no choice. The larger culture is changing, and eventually everything else follows suit. In the long run, exciting technologies will infiltrate our schools in significant ways; there will no longer be such a disconnect between the outside world and the world of the classroom. Disciplinary boundaries will become more permeable as classrooms become global, and we take greater advantage of the network culture of the Internet. Applications like Blackboard.com and Desire2Learn, which facilitate online learning, will literally, and figuratively, occupy our educational institutions as well as the “mind space” of our children. Unfortunately, the access to online applications and technologies in our secondary schools, especially in the current economic climate when states are slashing education budgets, is limited. By contrast, in the tertiary institutions of college and the work place, access to and use of these new technologies is more pervasive. We must prepare our high school students as best we can, given our limited resources (few computers, and outdated ones at that), for the skill of synthesis that the current technological revolution demands.
A common refrain from students is "Why are we reading this stuff?" or "Can't we read anything from today?" So the Puritans become weird people from way back then--as plain and one-dimensional as the page in the bulky boring textbook. And Beowulf is just another monster story, one of those old legends that have nothing to do with real life. To make these selections more relevant, textbook companies, and teachers, should utilize the Semantic Web technology that enables the Internet to function as an intelligent agent capable of analyzing data from websites the world over. Meaningful content, links, and transactions can, and should be made. Current textbooks are irrelevant and outdated before the cartons of books are even unloaded. For example, the artful use of meaningful content links will help students connect the Puritan sensibility of a theistic God who is manifest in everyday life to a news story about a state senator who sues God (http://www.ketv.com/news/14133442/detail.html) or an in-depth special from CNN on Afghanistan under the Taliban (http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/taliban/). The notion that all cultures need monsters (i.e., Beowulf) would make more sense to students who are cognizant of the reciprocal demonizing of America and El Qaida.
Editorials, op-ed pieces, magazine articles, and news stories should be culled in order for students to make these vital connections. Students would come to realize that knowledge is not something kept in a vacuum or "boxed in"--within the mundane classroom of "school world." Instead, our students will become synthesizers, actively engaged in learning in and out of our classrooms, applying skills of analysis, synthesis, and persuasion in whatever venue they find themselves. Today's high school students demand, and need, more immediate exposure to relevant issues, the types of information that can be googled, scrolled, and clicked instantaneously. The Internet’s Semantic Web technology facilitates immediate, interesting thematic connections to the literature that we teach in our classrooms. The Internet is the most influential media of our day, more relevant, as far as the kids are concerned, than the dusty textbook in the back of the room. We need to take full advantage of its capabilities.
Again, access to technological innovation within our high school classrooms will not happen overnight. In the meantime, teachers should develop concrete strategies to facilitate synthesis as a critical thinking skill, and move beyond what I call a "closed" pedagogical approach, when educators fail to make connections beyond their own disciplines. An "open" pedagogy encourages links among all domains that students encounter in their daily lives, and the English curriculum is particularly well suited for such an approach. As teachers get beyond the mindset that the textbook is the definitive tool for helping students master the skills needed for the Conceptual Age (Pink 49), they will open their curriculums to texts from other influential domains. Some of these domains include Newspaper/Magazines, Internet, Celebrity Narratives, Movie Plots, Song Lyrics, Television Sitcoms/Dramas, Art/Advertising, Science, Philosophy, and Politics. Teachers need to take the initiative to do their own "surfing" of the Internet and other domains in order to make salient connections among these texts or "cultural artifacts"; then model for students how to discover these connections during small-group or whole-class discussions.
An open pedagogy should be holistic, encouraging an awareness of the interconnectedness and simultaneity of ideas across domains, time, media, and disciplines. An overarching concept of our teaching should be "I link, therefore I am" (S. J. Singer, as quoted by Edward O. Wilson in Consilience). By incorporating other non-traditional domains into the classroom experience (those from everyday life), students will make connections to "real-life" happenings that occur contemporaneously with the lessons they are learning in school. Themes, images, and ideas will achieve a resonance that is not possible by curriculums that are limited by reading texts of "traditional" literature. Content will be reinforced, ideas will be developed, and critical thinking skills will be enhanced, especially the ability to synthesize information and make meaningful connections. Student metacognition will increase as discussions of relevancy become par for the course, literally. Our students will become the innovative “creative creators.” (Friedman) that our globalized world demands.
Words such as "interdisciplinary," "consilience," "coherence," "concurrent," "simultaneity," "connectedness," "relational," "holistic," "conjoining," "permeability," "interweaving," "dynamism," and "process" should become a part of our classroom thinking as we take risks and break away from outmoded teaching methods. Student learning, as well as our own learning, will become more dynamic and plastic; and we will begin to make significant headway in mending the School/Real-World split.
Works Cited
Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1972.
______. Mind and Nature. Cresskill: Hampton Press, Inc., 2002.
Friedman, Thomas. That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011.
Gardner, Howard. Frames of Mind. New York: Basic Books, 1993.
Goleman, Daniel. Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam Books, 1994.
______. Social Intelligence. New York: Bantam Dell, 2006.
Hallowell, Edward and John J. Ratey. Driven to Distraction. New York: Touchstone Books, 1995.
LeDoux, Joseph. The Emotional Brain. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994.
Ornstein, Robert. The Right Mind. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1997.
Pink, Daniel H. A Whole New Mind. New York: The Berkley Publishing Group, 2005.
Restack, Richard. The Naked Brain. New York: Harmony Books, 2006.
______. The New Brain. New York: Holtzbrinck Publishers, 2003.
Shlain, Leonard. The Alphabet Versus the Goddess. New York: Viking Penguin, 1998.
Taylor, Mark C. The Moment of Complexity. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Wilson, Edward O. Consilience. New York: Vintage Books, 1998.
Part Three: Plan for Implementation
BEST SITE—Building Educator Skills for Today: Synthesizing the Internet/Instruction/Ideas to Transform Education.
Schools should establish communities of teachers within individual schools, across districts, across the country, and even, across the globe. Innovative teachers from each major discipline, and/or grade level could search for Internet articles and create lesson plans that are linked to the textbooks and current Instructional Focus Plans for individual districts. These lesson plans could be posted on school web sites or blogs labeled “BEST SITE.” Teachers would then have timely, relevant lesson plans based on what is happening in the real world. One of the major critiques of Americans over the years has been our penchant for solipsism, our utter lack of knowledge of world geography, history, and important events, beyond the confines of our country’s borders. Teachers complain that students do not have an understanding of the larger issues going on in the world, and become frustrated because, as learning theory tells us, individuals need to have some rudimentary knowledge of ideas in order to build and expand upon learning and content. Creative teachers culling the Internet and developing meaningful context and links to our curriculums would, in my opinion, achieve remarkable learning gains because the material would be timely and relevant. In addition, our students would become broader, contextual thinkers with a larger understanding of the world of ideas, who begin to discern the relevance of our traditional content areas. School blogs would facilitate online interdisciplinary planning and meaningful synthesis among disciplines. Teachers would less often hear, “Why do we need to know this stuff anyway?” if we began our lessons with information that was timely, relevant, and “happening." If what students were learning in one class connected to what they were learning in another class and the outside world, ideas would be reinforced and content knowledge would more easily "stick" through the coalescing of information.
In addition, our BEST teachers could also create lessons based on the Common Core State Standards Initiative, which is soon approaching. School districts across the country could collaborate, create, and innovate together; the Internet, blogs, twitter, and the burgeoning array of communication technologies could be utilized to cross interdisciplinary, state, and even national boundaries, coalescing and streamlining curriculum across the nation and the globe. Regardless, essential planning and integration of CCSSI would begin as BEST teachers produce lessons at the level of individual schools that would help facilitate student engagement with the higher-level thinking skills of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, essential components of the CCSSI exam. Our BEST teachers could develop practice CCSSI questions by synthesizing our current curriculum with salient articles from the Internet, as well as content from other disciplines. Professional development and better engagement with one’s subject matter would naturally result as a consequence of the BEST SITE Program.
Part Four: Fostering a Culture of Learning in Our Communities
Another major benefit of BEST SITE would be that parents and guardians could become more involved with their student’s learning. They could look at the posted lesson plans on school web sites or blogs, and perhaps engage in discussions that extend the school day beyond 2:45 in the afternoon. BEST SITE would also be a way to showcase the innovation and creativity of American public education, enhancing the reputation and quality of schools through healthy collaboration. Students, too, could be encouraged to submit their own lessons to BEST teachers, and their outstanding lessons could be posted online. Perhaps school-wide competitions could be encouraged. And lastly, parents and other community members might be inspired to participate in the educational process as well.
Through BEST SITE, in the words of the American philosopher and educational reformer John Dewey, our teachers, students, parents, and larger communities would come to realize that “education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”
