It is well documented that new information is being created at the fastest pace in history. For much of history new information was developed at a pace where it was comparatively easy to disseminate the new ideas to students.
Today curating information is a challenge for which there are yet no really effective tools. Curators, such as text book writers, have a much greater challenge and responsibility. Abusing this responsibility has always been a problem (e.g. Japanese textbooks on WWII). As information proliferates the tendency toward abuse probably increases either purposefully or by accident. Given the power of lobbyists in Washington and at the state level, particularly in education matters, one becomes even more concerned about selective presentation of information.
The solution may be to give the students more autonomy in shaping their reading and experiences. Tools for students such as computers and Internet connectivity provide the access in real time to information. Learning to tell "truth from fiction" and critical thinking are important life skills and probably increasingly important in this age of Twitter, Google search and open access to government information. Teachers would become the guides to this student process of discovery.
This post was inspired by a quote from Seymour Papert in the Daily Papert:
“I do not suppose that all children were ever given full access to the ideas of any society. But at least in times of slower change, an equilibrium could be maintained between what society needed its members to know and the learning opportunities it offered (deliberately or mostly not) to its children. Since there is no reason to suppose that this is true today, and since, in any case, it is no longer acceptable that blind social forces be allowed to assign stations in life through differences in access to learning, deliberate effort is needed to bring to children knowledge that was not intended for them. School, even at its best, is too sluggish and timid to do this.”
Papert, S. (1993) The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer. NY: Basic Books. Page 180.
This quote from Friedrich Hayek's the Fatal Conceit appears to support the same point:
"Life exists only so long as it provides for its own continuance. Whatever men live for, today most live only because of the market order. We have become civilized by the increase of our numbers just as civilization made that increase possible: we can be few and savage, or many and civilized. If reduced to its population of ten thousand years ago, mankind could not preserve civilization. Indeed, even if knowledge already gained were preserved in libraries, men could make little use of it without numbers sufficient to fill the jobs demanded for extensive specialization and division of labour." Source: cafehayek.com
Yet another thought on the same theme comes from Harvard Business Review in the article "Are You Learning as Fast as the World is Changing?".
