.1 Intro to Obselecance

Preview Question: How does new knowledge get from research laboratories and universities to textbooks and classrooms?

The fourth in our series of barriers to effective education is obsolescence.
The first barrier, as you recall, was equity or the lack of equity and, remember, that the main point of that lecture was that equality is not desirable let alone possible, but equity and fairness are. We need to make them more equitable, but we are not trying to make them more equal because that is virtually impossible. We want to make schools appropriate to the populations they serve. The second of the four barriers was accountability, and how, unfortunately, we don't have a lot of accountability because we don't have people who are paying attention to the results of our schools and rewarding or penalizing those results accordingly. This is true for students, for teachers, and for schools. The third barrier was mobility. The fact that we move around a lot without having much agreement as to a national curriculum causes some tremendous problems in terms of having people be able to review and catch up and spend as much as fifteen to 20 percent of the curricular time just reviewing because of the mobility of students.
Now we are going to talk about the fourth barrier, obsolescence. I would start by showing you that the New England Primer went for one hundred years without revision since its first edition in 1690. So, from 1690 to 1790 the New England Primer went without revision. I think that stands in really stark contrast to the world in which we live now when a textbook is three or four years old is viewed out of date. So the world really is different, but the educational practices we have are pretty much the same as the ones in 1690 and 1790. The format of education and the presumptions of education remain the same. The New England Primer is kind of a benchmark that suggests that the world has changed and education has not, this is what obsolescence is all about.

What is obsolescence in education?

Mrs. Keers is an eleventh-grade math teacher who has been using the same textbook for the past two years in her class. Her school system decides to purchase new books, and her new book contains much more material that she must present to the class. What hardships will this change present to Mrs. Keers?