By Zaldy Dandan – Variety Editor
PUBLIC School System officials believe that social media is “increasingly contributing to student mental health challenges, adding to the pressures schools are working to address across the CNMI.” Sure. But what about the effect of smartphones on students’ learning habits? While we’re at it, what about the current K-12 curriculum? Does it have any relevance whatsoever to today’s world, which continues to rapidly transform as you read this?
Even the kids themselves want to know why they are studying “stuff” they have no use for in “real life.” As I’ve asked before, why are we seemingly preparing our children for a trivial pursuit game instead of the world as it is now — the world they will inherit from us old geezers?
I’m referring to Artificial Intelligence, of course.
Our kids have to complete homework that, more or less, looks exactly like those we had to do back in the day — with the difference that today, they have devices that can “out-calculate, out-translate, and out-summarize a PhD.”
Surely many of us parents are realizing that we are preparing our children for a world that doesn’t exist anymore.
In “Think and Grow Rich” — which should be required reading for children and their parents — Napoleon Hill recounted that Henry Ford once sued a newspaper for calling him “ignorant.” During the trial, the newspaper’s lawyers cross-examined Ford to “prove” his ignorance by grilling him on historical trivia. Ford replied, “If I should really want to answer the foolish question you have just asked, or any other questions you have been asking me, let me remind you that I have a row of electric push-buttons on my desk, and by pushing the right button, I can summon to my aid men who can answer any question I desire to ask concerning the business to which I am devoting most of my efforts.”
Today, most of us, our kids included, possess what Ford had when it was still considered an unheard-of and pricey luxury — “push buttons” that can provide us information when we need it.
Today, what our kids should be learning is the importance of practical expertise over rote facts — and how to organize knowledge rather than just memorize it.
The “knowledge monopoly” is broken! Factual knowledge is now widely accessible and commonplace. And yet students are still spending most of the school day on content delivery (memorizing facts) instead of content application (using facts).
In today’s AI world, the value isn’t in knowing the answer; it’s in knowing how to verify the answer and what question to ask next.
In an era of powerful computers, why are we still training our kids to be human calculators? Why do they have to focus on what educators call “low-level cognitive tasks,” which AI does best? We are requiring kids to spend years mastering skills that a smartphone can do quicker and better. What they should learn instead: “high-level” skills such as ethics, empathy, complex cross-disciplinary problem solving, and AI prompting.
It’s often said that the K-12 system was designed during the Industrial Revolution to create reliable factory workers. They sit in rows, follow instructions, wait for the bell, and do repetitive tasks. With smartphones, our kids now live in a world of instant feedback and “hyper-personalization.” This requires non-linear thinking and constant adaptability.
We should stop forcing them into a “one-size-fits-all” curriculum that moves at the speed of the slowest student. It doesn’t just bore them; it fails to teach them how to manage their own attention in a world of infinite digital distraction.
Rote memorization, single-subject silos, standardized testing, individual “solo” work — these are not helpful for today’s kids. What we want them to learn instead is information literacy (how to sift truth from AI “hallucination,” for example); interdisciplinary thinking (connecting art, tech and ethics); adaptive learning (the ability to “learn how to learn” new tools); and collaborative intelligence (working with AI and humans).
The K-12 status quo isn’t just “falling behind” on tech. It is also “teaching” our children to be second-rate robots instead of first-rate humans. We need a curriculum that stops competing with the smartphone and starts teaching kids how to command it.
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Zaldy Dandan is the recipient of the NMI Society of Professional Journalists’ Best in Editorial Writing Award and the NMI Humanities Award for Outstanding Contributions to Journalism. His four books are available on amazon.com/.
