Running with Robots: The American High School's Third Century

Running with Robots: The American High School's Third Century

by Greg Toppo, Jim Tracy
Running with Robots: The American High School's Third Century

Running with Robots: The American High School's Third Century

by Greg Toppo, Jim Tracy

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Overview

How the technological changes that are reshaping the future of work will transform the American high school as well.

What will high school education look like in twenty years? High school students are educated today to take their places in a knowledge economy. But the knowledge economy, based on the assumption that information is a scarce and precious commodity, is giving way to an economy in which information is ubiquitous, digital, and machine-generated. In Running with Robots, Greg Toppo and Jim Tracy show how the technological advances that are already changing the world of work will transform the American high school as well.

Toppo and Tracy--a journalist and an education leader, respectively--look at developments in artificial intelligence and other fields that promise to bring us not only driverless cars but doctorless patients, lawyerless clients, and possibly even teacherless students. They visit schools from New York City to Iowa that have begun preparing for this new world. Toppo and Tracy intersperse these reports from the present with bulletins from the future, telling the story of a high school principal who, Rip Van Winkle-style, sleeps for twenty years and, upon awakening in 2040, can hardly believe his eyes: the principal's amazingly efficient assistant is a robot, calculation is outsourced to computers, and students, grouped by competence and not grade level, focus on the conceptual. The lesson to be learned from both the present and the book's thought-experiment future: human and robotic skillsets are complementary, not in competition. We can run with robots, not against them.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780262365727
Publisher: MIT Press
Publication date: 09/28/2021
Sold by: Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format: eBook
Pages: 288
File size: 379 KB

About the Author

Greg Toppo, a journalist who has covered education for more than twenty years, is the author of The Game Believes in You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter

Jim Tracy, Ph.D., has been the Head of several independent schools and also President of a teacher training college founded in collaboration with MIT.  He has held many senior advisory positions, including Senior Advisor to the Executive Team at Jobs for the Future, Board Member at LearnLaunch, and member of the MassRobotics Advisory Board.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Welcome to THAMES Academy
1 History Comes in Waves
2 Schools Come through, or "Higher School"
3 The Illusion of Humanity, or Maybe It's Beautiful
4 The Trust Machine
5 Centaurs in the Newsroom and in the Classroom
6 What if School Were Real Life?
7 Don't Tell Me What You Want To Be When You Grow Up
8 The Pyramids Are Closed for Revolution
9 "Festina Lente," or Change Management at Rocky Hill School
10 Gimme Shelter
11 Written in the Soul: Oration vs. Writing
12 A Post-Work World of Spiritual and Artistic Renaissance?

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Mixing history with storytelling, prediction with fact, this gem of a book creatively stimulates the reader to think about what an ideal education is going to look like in the years and decades ahead. Every educator will read it with pleasure and come away with new and useful perspectives.”
Stephen M. Kosslyn, President, Active Learning Sciences, and Chief Academic Officer, Foundry College; author of Active Learning Online
 
“Delightful! A smart take on the future of school, presented with style. I can't remember the last time I had this much fun reading a book about education reform.”
Jordan Shapiro, author of Father Figure and The New Childhood
 
“A fascinating odyssey from the birth of the American high school in the nineteenth century to today, and beyond. If you are looking for a different kind of book about the schools of tomorrow, this one is for you. Once you’ve begun it, you won’t be able to put this down.”
Pasi Sahlberg, author of Finnish Lessons 3.0: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?

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