[sandworm]

As someone who teaches young adults (part time, local college) I find this approach unsettling. Being able to work in groups and bounce between topics is all well and good, but I'm running into adults who have trouble reading. I don't mean people with learning troubles. I mean functional, intelligent, adults who cannot get through more than a dozen pages without lapsing into a fog.

When I was at school we were forced to read. Not exercises. Books. Entire books. Not over months. Days. The ability to sit down and focus on a topic for hours is a skill that should not be forgotten.

From the OP:"...easily discoverable knowledge makes classic school subjects seem archaic, slow-paced and inapplicable to daily life."

No it doesn't. It makes them seem all the more important.

[saraid216]

> but I'm running into adults who have trouble reading.

Yes, but unless you're in Finland, what this suggests is that you should move to Finland's model, not away from it. Finland has a 100% literacy rate.

> The ability to sit down and focus on a topic for hours is a skill that should not be forgotten.

Which has absolutely nothing to do with Finland's initiatives.

[sandworm]

I don't teach reading. I teach adults in years 3/4 of a 4-year degree program. They are all literate. That have issues when confronted with large amounts of "dry" text.

Finland wants to move towards skill-based rather than fact-based learning. They want students who know how to find and organize information rather than those who simply know facts. I'm saying that the oldschool skills of reading and remembering apparently useless facts is important. It gives you the necessary reading abilities to handle topics beyond highschool.

[saraid216]

I might be reading you incorrectly, but what you appear to be saying is that the ability to "find and organize information" doesn't give you the "necessary reading abilities to handle topics beyond high school". Can you substantiate this claim at all? Are any of your students significantly capable of "skill-based learning" and yet require your particular instruction?

And can you experimentally control for this outside of your own particular students? In other words, can you say that there's no correlation between their ability and your teaching skill?

[sandworm]

Well I probably should have said "necessary reading abilities to acquire topics through available means."

They are capable of understanding the topics. They have problems with sitting down and learning the topic through reading vast amounts of text. It is all well and good to have professors or search engines boil things down to bullet points for easy absorption, but some topics (law, literature, medicine, physics, religion, history) require the reading of original text. That text could be 100 years old and cover hundreds of pages. Understanding it sufficiently to discuss and debate with others means spending hours, days, doing nothing but reading. No cooperation, no building teams, just you and a book/screen. The students I see, products of modern highschools, lack that skill.

[philtar]

Maybe I'm being presumptuous, but children in schools aren't the same as 40 year olds in college.