What Would Iran Find if They Reverse-Engineered Our Schools?

The Iranians appear to have captured a U.S. intelligence drone aircraft and now claim they have finished a data extraction and are now in the process of reverse-engineering its capabilities.
What if they captured a school and tried to reverse engine our education system?
For starters, if they did a data extraction, our kids would be safe because they wouldn’t find much data on them.
About knowledge, they would find it broken up into artificial subjects sequenced in odd ways (e.g., geometry sandwiched between two chunks of algebra).
The Iranians would puzzle at why Americans have the sciences backwards with Physics at the end (and out of reach of most students).
They would have to presume that we believe age cohorts learned the same way and same time.
The would wonder at the infantilization of teenagers marched from classroom to classroom in 50 minute intervals.
They would assume that we had concluded that none of the cell phones that students bring to school could be utilized in the learning process and that computers should be kept turned off in the back of the room.
The outcome wouldn’t be much better if they tried to reverse-engineered a college, but at least they’d find most students learning online.  They might conclude we were on to something there.

Tom Vander Ark

Tom Vander Ark is the CEO of Getting Smart. He has written or co-authored more than 50 books and papers including Getting Smart, Smart Cities, Smart Parents, Better Together, The Power of Place and Difference Making. He served as a public school superintendent and the first Executive Director of Education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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