Via Jajuna.
The video seems to be a testament to the notion that if you just put a few sappy piano chords behind images of sad faced children you can pretty much rally people to any cause no matter the content. Here we have the now standard cliche that children must be prepared to become “global 21st century learners”. This goal is somewhat nebulous. However, the overarching meaning circulates around a variety of other cliches that almost all have their basis in workforce discipline. Why must students become global 21st century learners? The answer, no matter how it is dressed up in nice sounding jargon about connectivity or creativity, always seems to come back to economic competition. Education is thus reduced to a chess piece in a global labor war between American kids and India and China. Who are the internal villains in this war? The teachers. How do we win? Through technology, of course. Our educational dilemmas can be solved if we just get those anachronistic teachers and their professional knowledge and stupid books out of the way and “empower” kids to push around text and video on their Ipods. Then we can then give them a test and if they get most of the answers “right” then we will know that they have done something that we can call learning.
@paaitken