The Lootinent Aug 10, 2012 | Page 4

Although the schools are embedded in our culture and reflect its values, the technological changes that have swept through society at large have left the educational system largely unchanged. In the past two or three decades the gap between the process of teaching and learning and how children obtain information in society has widened substantially. Curriculum and teaching methods are often very much the same as 100 years ago. In the classroom, knowledge is presented in a linear, didactic manner that differs in many ways from children’s experience outside the school. In contrast with the vivid images and self-directed flow of the interactive home and society, schools tend to be rigid and conservative. This breach between schools and society may well be a product of the structure and practices of our educational system. Many methods of didactic education assume a separation between knowing and doing, treating knowledge as an integral, self-sufficient substance, theoretically independent of the situations in which it is learned and used. Recent investigations of learning, however, challenge this separating of what is learned from how it is learned and used.