January 4, 2010 
 

Exploring Education 
 

Ours is a technology driven society. Every day newer, better, faster, smaller, more powerful micro-gadgets hit the street, pushing yesterday's older, slower, less powerful, not-so-micro-gadgets aside. The advance is swift. Technology marches on.  
 

As a child, one of my most treasured micro-gadgets was a Sony Walkman. I could listen to an album's worth of my favorite music on a compact cassette tape; it was my own personal concert. The sound quality was fair. The music would speed or slow according to battery strength. But it was cutting edge technology and it was fantastic.  
 

Comparing the technology of the Walkman to today's is laughable. With no moving parts, today's digital music device can hold 40,000 songs and is a fraction of the size of the Walkman. And if that's not enough, it'll also store and display 200 hours of video. Incredible! 
 

So what happened to yesterday's micro-gadget maker? 
 

The answer lies in this famous quote by educator Dr. Laurence Peter: “Everyone rises to their level of incompetence.” 
 

Unfortunately, yesterday's micro-gadget maker, the expert in the technology of compact cassettes, is a master of a dying technology. We can hope his expertise advanced apace with the technology and he is today gainfully employed in a related field. If this is the case, and we hope it is, we can correctly assume his core competencies, his ability to study, to read, to mathematically compute and to reason, were fully achieved in his schooling as a child.  
 

But what of the micro-gadget maker lacking these solid academic basics? Without these components of competence in place, like yesterday's discarded micro-gadget, his ability to make his way in today's world has vanished. He has gone from king to pauper.  
 

How does the educator of the present prepare today's students to be competent with the unknown technologies of tomorrow?  
 

The answer lies in the teaching of the basic academics, the traditional core competencies: reading, writing and arithmetic. Beyond that the teacher must add still more competencies: the ability to study, to communicate, to research and to reason.  
 

All of these abilities, fully taught to a very high standard, give the young student a firm foundation upon which all future education can be built. And from there he can build his own kingdom no matter where the tides of technology and change carry him. 
 

For, as the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle said, “The king is the man who can.” 
 

Colin Taufer

Headmaster