Curriculum that Matters

There are many current educational catchphrases--always going in and out of style, of course--but ensuring that students are competitive in the 21st Century Economy has been tossed around a lot. I agree that students need more technology access and more courses geared towards creativity, innovation, and information accessing and manipulation. Oh yeah, can't forget science and technology.

In addition to implementing this 21st Century skills mantra, state and national curriculums need to be reshaped to teach more things that matter. Traditional teaching required experts (teachers) who facilitated access to knowledge. This paradigm has shifted drastically, because everybody has access to almost unlimited knowledge and resources through the Internet. So if a basic access to knowledge is now available, we don't need teachers as much to "deliver" knowledge to students.

If curriculums changed to start promoting more civic engagment, service-learning, "green" problem solving, authentic student technology use, it could be incredible to see how young people reshape the world. After all, they have the same access to knowledge as us adults do nowadays.

I'm not feeling particularly coherent. Does this make sense?