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5.1.4 Applying SCANS
Unfortunately, in many situations if students are not diagnosed as college bound material, they are not pushed to excel like higher level students are. What this can lead to is disenchantment with school, boredom, and then becoming a drop out statistic. Our forgotten half in schools still need to have material presented to them in a fun and exciting way,possibly in even a more exciting way than higher motivated students. That is why adding stories about Chinese treasure ships or the "Scralings" can spark their interest. Even in math, there are concepts that students should be made aware of, even if they do not understand them. Being aware of them at least enables the student to understand what they are if they are ever referred to in conversation of daily life.
For example one of
my favorite mathematical fields is fractals. Most of you have never heard
of fractals, althoughfractals have been an important part of your life.
Fractals are the basis of all computer graphics. If you saw dinosaurs
running around the screen in Jurassic Park, why you were receiving the
benefit of fractals. It takes a computer to dealwith any kind of fractal,
so the concept of fractals was not discovered until 1977 and they have
not been around 25 years yet. Remember how long we said it takes information
to get into the curriculum? (about 25 years) There are
math majors in the United States who will graduate in mathematics never
having heard of fractals. Simply knowingthat they exist helps people think
about things they have never thought about before. Knowing little facts
about certain fields is part of having a well-rounded liberal education.
Listening skills are another important fundamental skill that is forgotten in teaching the forgotten half, but it is a skill that is important to our everyday world.
Let me tell you about when I really had my first big lesson in listening. It was down on the Indian reservations in Navajo land. This was at a Baha'i conference, and in the evening we were all sitting around campfires. At mycampfire I was the only non-Native, and I had three Navajo friends there. One of the things that is different between my talking and Navajo talking is that the Navajo's never interrupt anybody. I would talk and talk and talk and they would never interrupt. Eventually I would kind of run out of gas, and I'd stop, and there would be a little bit ofsilence, and then one of them would say something. About a sentence and a half into it I would start talking again. It was probably two hours before I figured out what was going on. I wasn't doing any of the listening. These are just skills that we as human beings in a modern society need to have to be productive and sensitive to others.
For the first time I see in the SCANS reports a list of basic skills that doesn't have a forgotten half. The report bringseverybody together in the same set of skills, but in different intensities and with different ways to apply them.
Another category of SCANS is personal qualities. These include human skills such as individual responsibility and self-esteem, sociability, self-management and integrity. Many educators may have a problem teaching self-esteem,due to a possible conflict with values and value clarification. To get around this teachers need not focus on a type of personal quality, but they should realize that they ought to teach other things and go from there.
The SCAN competencies would make a good basic curriculum. I don't mean that we shouldn't pay attention to the liberal arts, -- we should! These competencies would simply slide nicely into any liberal arts curriculum and create a real-world context for learning. My bias is that the SCANS report is probably one of the most powerful weapons that education has to deal with the forgotten half.
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