For EDCI 336, Technology Innovation in Education, we were required to watch the film Most Likely to Succeed. This documentary, produced by Ted Dintersmith and Tony Wagner, walked us through a new education system that has been adopted by a California high school, High Tech High.

This film highlights that the school system in North America has not been upgraded to account for changes and developments in the 21st century. They claim that students need no longer study for knowledge, as all information and hard facts can be reached instantaneously through devices that are kept in our pockets. Rather, school should be a place for learning skills and motivation to drive learners to successfully pursue their passions.

In this model, students do not study the full range of the current curriculum. What they may lack in breadth, the will make up for in the depth of one or two core subject areas. For example, there were two groups of students highlighted in the film. One of these groups chose to write, produce and perform a play that demonstrated a social and cultural view into the Islamic movement, the Taliban. Contrarily, the other group focused on a large hands on engineering project, involving connecting gears and switches.

My question is this: How certain can we be that a grade 9 student will choose to be involved in the project that truly caters to their interests, rather than those of their peers? Personally speaking, had someone presented these two projects to me at the age of 14, I likely would have chosen to partake in the theatre project. For many, school is a chance to exercise one’s social muscles and groups are often formed based on social connections rather than content interest. For this reason, I do believe that schools must work to develop student’s individual sense of self, something that the BC curriculum is really developing with the Curricular Competencies. I would have then proceeded to spend the term focused on a theatre production, rather than using mathematics in a hands-on, engineering project.

The latter of these two projects identifies with who I am as a person today. But, maybe, if I had been given the chance to explore my inner actress during an impressionable time in my youth, my life could have been a lot different than it is now.