Students today are expected to start school in their fourth or fifth year of life and continue until roughly the age of twenty two when they graduate from college with a bachelor’s degree from a university or college of their choice. With the eighteen or nineteen years of schooling they are expected to have a collection of skills capable of winning the experience of working for a living.
Over eighteen years of learning the students today have to work large volumes of knowledge into their information sets and be capable of applying them to their jobs at the end of their schooling career.
Imagine for a moment, a student from one hundred years ago, where they were required to learn and apply a set of knowledge and apply it to their jobs at the end of their schooling career. That student would have needed to learn about 28 presidents and could have neglected the concepts of spaceflight and wholly did not cover the theory of quantum mechanics as it began in its infancy during the Solvay Council in 1911.
The point I am driving at is that students today have a large body of knowledge they are required to learn. The information that exists today is at the largest it has ever been. Humanity has accumulated the largest and most diverse set of facts and figures that has ever existed in the history of humanity.
Each profession has been heightened by the masters of the trade and knowledge has been bound in books to be passed to each subsequent generation with the stack of texts growing larger and larger with each succession.
Roughly 50 years ago a close family friend of mine was attending high school in her hometown where the instructor introduced them to the concepts of “modern math” and heralded it as the best thing since sliced bread. The family friend finished high school by learning math that I began learning in 2010 as the start of my eighth grade algebra class introducing the concepts of solving for x within an equation and scratching the surface of raising numbers to powers of two or three.
While it may seem commonplace to know that as humanity advances students would learn more, to even grow more, as they become adults, I do want to ask the question of when does it become too much? How much knowledge can we expect a person to truly learn while only taking eighteen years to do it?
The volume of information available today surpasses every moment in history and we expect our students to have a grasp on the broad majority of it to develop them into well rounded adults. How can modern history which was recorded in such meticulous detail by scholars and historians be integrated into a history class that may only have fourteen weeks to cover everything from the cretaceous era to present day?
