What are the biggest obstacles to changing education? Some are economic. Others are infrastructural. Few are technological. The most significant challenges are philosophical. We are wedded to particular ways of thinking about school and learning and life that are limiting our ability to best serve our children.

The way we live in the world is changing. Therefore, education also needs to change. Don’t believe the popular rhetoric, our schools are not “failing.” But they are also not preparing kids to be adults (in the world we are rapidly creating) as effectively as they could. Mostly this is because we are struggling to untangle fashionable thought paradigms from essentially human ones.

Some of our ideas are specific to the times in which they appear, others are enduring. Good education involves framing persistent knowledge within current structures. When we can’t untangle the timeless from the contemporary, we mask our confusion with easy arguments about technology or content delivery. But the efficacy of distribution is irrelevant if we’re not clear about what we want to teach.

Here are five tangled ways of thinking that are in the way of educating today’s children.

1. We have an information fetish that causes us to confuse education with media. Better digital ‘interactive learning content’ is great, but anyone who says it’s a fix-all is trying to sell you something.

There is “interactive learning content” everywhere you look. But we generally don’t use the word “learning” to describe the information we discover, experience, and comprehend while browsing Facebook, or buying jelly donuts, or walking down the street. Instead, we call it learning when we’re talking about the process of incorporating and understanding intentionally structured data sets—data sets that have transitioned from being raw sensory experience into being “information.”

First there’s data. And data, once it’s defined and organized and categorized, it becomes information. And then, after that, it becomes meaningful knowledge. Think, for instance, about the random light from the setting sun reflecting and refracting. Blue wavelengths scatter away as the red ones are filtered through the thickest part of the atmosphere. This phenomenon inspires all the romantic poetry and the beauty and the emotion that we associate with sunrise and sunset. Data becomes information. And then information, once it gets incorporated into our collective meaning systems—described scientifically in terms of light and refraction—it becomes “knowledge”

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