Foster City Islander Article - 05-16-2007
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Charter Public |
Phyllis Moore, President, Foster City High School Foundation |
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“An Inconvenient Truth . . . About Education”
Consider the remarkable “¼ similarities between climate change and education change. These seemingly unrelated crises on our planet and in our schools are, in fact, connected. Both have taken many decades to develop and ¼ both originated in an industrial economy built on manufacturing. The effects of global warming and school decline are difficult to detect year to year, but over several generations, their impacts accumulate — and are now converging to limit the future health of our economy and our society.” This insight comes from an Edutopia Magazine article, “An Inconvenient Truth ¼ About Education” (www.edutopia.org/1876), by Milton Chen, the executive director of the George Lucas Educational Foundation (www.glef.org) which encourages innovation in schools.
He also equates school change with climate change by lamenting “¼ our own government's lack of urgency to effect fundamental changes despite widespread recognition that we are mortgaging our future. John Gage, director of the science office at Sun Microsystems ¼ has spoken with education leaders from many nations. ‘Other nations view spending on education as an investment,’ he says. ‘We view it as a cost.’ Our complacency about the scale of the problem could prove costly indeed.”
With global warming, scientists estimate that it will take at least 10 yours to reverse the effects of carbon emissions. Chen believes that, “We may be facing the same time frame to make radical changes in our school systems.” He asks, “Can we afford to let today's eight-year-olds go through ten more years of schooling without giving them the skills they need to make a life and a living in the twenty-first century?”
The answer to Chen’s question is obvious to everyone who cares about education: we must bring what we teach and how we teach into the 21st century to give our young people the world-class skills and knowledge they need to compete in the swiftly integrating world economy.
The building of our public high school provides every Foster City resident with an extraordinary opportunity to make a critical investment in education, an investment that will help reverse the decline in our children’s schools and benefit everyone who lives in our town.
Contact me at phyllismoore1@comcast.net or 650-349-5676
