Time: Thursday, May 18, 10:00 am-noon

Place: Room 22, College of Education

Description: In a recent book, Why Knowledge Matters, E. D. Hirsch argues for a knowledge-intensive curriculum. Adopting a traditional stance toward learning, but one buttressed by recent cognitive science research, he sees knowledge as the key to becoming culturally literate and as the basis for learning more. In contrast, Sugata Mitra, best known for his "Hole in the Wall" experiment, is a leading proponent of  minimally invasive education. He claims that children in the rural slums of India could explore complex subjects in the absence of adult supervision and create a world of self-promoted learning. Essentially, learning is what matters, and the effort to transmit knowledge is unnecessary and counter productive.

Questions: What is knowledge? What is its role in education? Is that role changing due to the "worldwide cloud" of information? Are their alternatives to these extreme positions, or is one more correct?