Multiple Pathways: Bringing School to Life

By Jeannie Oakes & Marisa Saunders

For all the rhetoric in education about “preparing students for the 21st century,” today’s schools are excruciatingly slow to leave the 20th. For a hundred years, our high school structures and practices have consisted of discrete courses divided into six or so time periods and confined to classrooms isolated from the outside world. That intellectual and experiential isolation was not optimal in the last century, nor is it today, and it will serve even less well in the future.

There are places, however, where this picture is changing. Consider the following vignettes.

Students in a San Diego 11th grade U.S. history class are comparing the environmental policies of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Barack Obama. At hand in the classroom is Mr. Obama’s Omnibus Public Land Management Act, but this is no rote lesson on “how a bill becomes a law.” The students care about the topic, and they want to understand how public policy can advance or fail to advance our stewardship of public lands. In their examination, the students use their questions about and knowledge of history, politics, environmental conservation, social responsibility, science, media, the dynamics of social...