New Lesson Plans for High School coming in 2014 will Change the Way Children Think

In a popular piece in the New York Times earlier this year, the writer spoke of an ambitious project to reform lesson plans in India where young children would for the first time, be asked to write their own stories to help them think for themselves. While that has been something that's always been done in America, there are those who feel that we may be falling behind in our efforts to help high school children think creatively and on their own. A new experiment in lesson plans for high school in New York tries to address this concern.

Lesson plans for high school usually involve having children read something and then summarizing it on their own - an exercise in reading comprehension. While all that has been useful, one does have to admit that such a plan doesn't stretch the child too much. Everything the child needs to know is right before her and all she needs to do is to paraphrase. The new lesson plans involve assignments where students need to formulate complex thoughts on complex subjects drawing information from a variety of sources. Students, for instance, might find themselves faced with an assignment where they need to write about what it means to have freedom of the press. For this, the teacher asks them to watch Citizen Kane, read up about how in places as far apart as China and Egypt, the authorities clamp down on Facebook the moment they smell trouble, and watch a documentary about a public protest in the 80s against the intellectual Noam Chomsky, and his position on freedom of speech to do with ideas expressed that are deeply offensive to most people.

By the year 2014, if everything goes as expected with these experimental lesson plans for high school, this could be the way all children in America learn. A curriculum standard of this kind is called, the Common Core. Most states have signed up for the new standards - and one hopes that they will help students do a lot more than merely learn math formulas and so on.

The country now finds itself in a situation where the No Child Left Behind law, that punishes schools for failing its students, is seen to be completely inadequate. Schools merely lower their standards when they find that they can't educate their children adequately. President Obama plans to completely revamp the law, and the common core will be a big part of that effort.

The new lesson plans for high school will require that by 12th grade, students already work at college level so that colleges no longer need to impose any bridge courses on their freshman. If a student is asked to read a book, her job will not be to summarize what she's read; it will be to analyze what she's read and come out with new conclusions. If the student has to present something to a class, it won't be just about how she seems to understand what she's learned. She also has to find a way to present it so persuasively that she wins other students over to her point of view. Students will have to find out how when you read something, the writer could have biases.

As ambitious as all these are though, implementation is where everything usually falls by the wayside. Let's hope that the new common core system actually works.