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Education Week--Special Report: The Changing Face of Literacy
There has never been a generation of young people more immersed in digital media than this one, many of whom learned to use a mobile device before they even started school. This special report examines how literacy instruction is changing in the digital age, from learning to sound out words in elementary school to grappling with “Macbeth” in high school.
It finds that, while experts quibble over what it means to be digitally literate, they agree on one thing: even the youngest children should be learning literacy with a mix of print and digital texts.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/collections/changing-literacy/
Liana Heitin, Benjamin Herold, Brenda Iasevoli, Kate Stoltzfus, Madeline Will| November 9, 2016
The Atlantic--Ignorance Does Not Lead to Election Bliss
Perhaps the country’s political state owes itself to the failures of its education system.
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While there surely are many varied causes for the current American political situation, one among those is the relative ignorance of basic American history, scientific, technological knowledge, and what some refer to as “civics” among a large sector of our population. It is testimony to the failure of the country’s education system that a high percentage of the voting-age population is simply ignorant of basic facts—knowledge that is necessary to act reasonably and rationally in the political process.
This void isn’t limited to those with little education or those without significant professional achievements. It is telling, for example, that in 2009, 89 percent of those who took a test on civic knowledge expressed confidence they could pass it; in fact, 83 percent would have failed.
In short, as I’ve written in the past, the public’s limited knowledge—or even what the psychologist William James called “acquaintance with knowledge”—is neither monopolized by the poorly educated nor found only among certain social classes.
Jonathan R. Cole| November 8, 2016
