Several years ago I dropped my child off at college. I was all ready for the "let go" speech at orientation, but instead the speaker shared something even more alarming. He shared the Beloit College Mindset List with us. http://www.beloit.edu/~pubaff/mindset/2011.php . The "list identifies the experiences and event horizons of students" entering college, in other words, the world according to an 18 year old. What was striking about it was how many things an 18 year old has never experienced...from the obvious (they never “rolled down” a car window and have always had "bottled water"...) to the more subtle. Here are a few items from the Class of 2011's list: Tiananmen Square is a 2008 Olympics venue, not the scene of a massacre, Fox has always been a major network, Wal-Mart has always been a larger retailer than Sears and has always employed more workers than GM, and the World Wide Web has been an online tool since they were born.
Just thinking about the "mindset" of the average K-12 student gave me a shudder. Imagine walking into a school where everything from the textbooks to the technology is so much older than you are???
2 comments:
What I find striking about the list is how fast elements come on and off the list. Events that we might have recalled as anchors for memories from our past for ten or fifteen years have been replaced by events that come and go over a few years. It orients contemporary children, I suspect, to change in a very different way. Not sure that it's good or bad, just different from out orientation. In order to understand their world I believe we have to adjust using a more contemporary lens, not the other way around. The list is one tool that can help adults better understand this generation.
Thanks for sharing the list and your reflections on it.
I actually used this as a warmup activity for a districtwide kindergarten staff meeting. The teachers brainstormed a list of things that their students had never experienced and reflected on the new ways of learning and interacting with the world that we as teachers did not experience growing up. Very interesting conversation!
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