The Seymour Board of Education meeting Tuesday began with this video — a five-minute argument from a college drop-out highlighting the problems with education today.
It’s only the beginning of what Superintendent MaryAnne Mascolo is calling “Curriculum 21.”
The goal is to keep Seymour educators thinking about what students will need to know, and how they will need to learn, in order to compete with their peers.
“We have to remember we’re educating kids for their future, and not our past,” Mascolo told the Board of Education before the meeting. “We have to keep up to date with what’s happening.”
So Mascolo plans to give a little new-age education to the board, school staff and anyone else who might be in the audience at the start of each Board of Education meeting.
“I’m planning to have the first five or ten minutes of each meeting to review current info about what our students need and deserve,” Mascolo told the board.
The quick presentations — like Tuesday’s video — will come before any recognition or public comment so that members of the public who are at the meetings for those reasons will also be presented with the information.
The presentations will broach topics of technology and education culture.
“We need to do better,” Mascolo said. “There’s an urgency to change what we’re doing inside our school walls.”
An Open Letter to Educators
Tuesday’s video talked about the need for institutional education to be more reactive to the changes — or face extinction.
A discussion among the board members after watching it acknowledged that things have changed.
Board member James Ward remarked that when he was in school, almost 80 percent of what he learned was memorized.
That’s different now, Ward said.
But, Ward said, “the elementary core is still very relevant.”
He questioned if the high school curriculum was as relevant.
“Information is free,” said board member Yashu Putorti. “The kids these days feel the internet is an extension of their bran. There’s a lot of information they don’t need to store. They can get it in a matter of seconds.”
