Yesterday Tomorrow and Us.

     When I took 11^th grade physics I recall that the days where the teacher popped in a copy of James Burke’s Connections were the days least related to content knowledge. For those of you who have never seen the series, most episodes deal with the pinball effect of change throughout history, showing how someone trying to create a better horseshoe, ended up with the invention of the telephone or something like that. The final episode of the 1978 series was titled “Yesterday, Tomorrow, and You” and dealt mainly with the question of how man will be able to live in the coming era of intense knowledge specialization, where the things that we depend on, depend on so many things that we have only the most shallow knowledge of, if we have any real knowledge of them at all.

     The episode itself ends, as you can see for yourself, with a prophetic nod to the coming revolution in information sharing which I lived through for the last thirty years.  This revolution will continue to affect all information, in every area of content we teach today in our schools. However, the fact that dates events and the rules related to my field social studies have become more accessible to my students, does not reduce the amount of information to be learned. Nor does it do anything about the continued specialization of knowledge even within a subject as simple as say, Geography. With any luck, by 2025 the raw information shared will become less important in the eyes of educators as the skills necessary to put that raw information to work for students in their everyday lives, and I’m not just talking about how to read Google maps to get home avoiding traffic.

     As  Burke demonstrated in his series, events and change in all parts of the world have always had connections to us, even in when the change caused by those connections proceeded at the pace of an nineteenth century railroad. Today however, waiting to see what changes may come is a luxury that few nations can afford. The revolution in communication is here to stay and with it, the challenge of reactions that take place in minutes rather than weeks.  Information about events unfolding in all corners of the world is now the low hanging fruit waiting to be plucked. It is rather, the skill of analysis that becomes the true content knowledge that we need students to graduate with.  Students need to understand basic political and especially economic reactions that occur on this stage. 

     This is not to say that a shared foundation of information has no place in our national standards. There are after all a certain slate of seminal events that serve as starting points for comparisons and breakdowns of events today. Recent developments in Egypt for instance have drawn wide comparisons to popular demonstrations of Iran’s overthrow of the Shah. Those who have previous knowledge of this event are certainly in a more advantageous position to arrive at their own conclusion on the matter more quickly (this is regarding the question of the likelihood of an Islamic theocracy arising in Egypt).  Being quick however is not the same as being right and with background on this event easily available from several trusted sources, the real skills become choosing the sources, assessing the information, deciding on a valid and well reasoned position and taking action.

     This last step may be the most crucial for the future of our nation, and it is particularly important to those who teach social studies. Are we as educators preparing our students to be able to act effectively on the information they process?  I’m not just talking about voting, although that is certainly a minimum. To be “productive” users of the information, the content they acquire in their classes, they have to know how act to bring about change when it is needed, and not merely to rely on others to advocate for them.