By Sarah Levy
Once, on the first day of class, my teacher gave us each a copy of a news story that discussed the death of a prominent fruit fly researcher. He explained to us that he started our class off with this story because it was about a man who had spent his entire life studying a very small insect, and when he died, he still had specimens of new species yet to be categorized. If he hadn’t been able to learn all there was to know about fruit flies in his lifetime, how could we expect to learn all there was to know about any subject after studying for a year or two years or even a lifetime? He told us, “You will never learn everything, but with the right skills, you can learn anything.”
There is a misconception held by some that, because Jewish day schools offer a dual curriculum, they provide a weaker secular studies program and are, therefore, less able to prepare students for today’s world. In other words, they do not cover “everything.” While it might be true that a school like Denver Jewish Day School spends less time on the content area of the Spanish-American war, for example, because students also focus on the rise of Zionism, teachers are really using the different content areas as a vehicle for fostering important skills among students that are applicable to all areas of learning and essential for 21st century success. The teachers are laying the framework so that the students can learn “anything.”
With the rise of technology, content is literally at our fingertips most of the time. Siri, Google and Wikipedia mean that we can access information faster than ever. As such, education has slowly moved from content-based to skills-driven. Even Bloom’s Taxonomy (a framework for categorizing educational goals) was revised to indicate this shift. The “revised” Bloom’s Taxonomy no longer lists “knowledge” as the foundational level and, whereas the highest level of the original framework used to be “evaluate,” the new taxonomy aims for students to “create.”
Gone are the days when we ask students to memorize the names of the 25 most recent leaders of what is now Russia (like I had to do in AP European History). Instead, we study different models of Biblical leadership and foster the skills students need in order to compare and contrast world leaders, evaluate them based on indicators of success, and create a potential platform for a candidate. These are the same skills that will later allow these students to be informed voters at the polls, forecasters of economic trends in the world of finance, and active contributors to the Middle East Peace process. These are the skills that will make them successful not only today, but into the future.
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