Definition of Classic Education for the 21st Century: The use of principles of learning to adapt and extend what is known for use in the 21st Century.
THE TERM CLASSIC EDUCATION stands for conveying the accumulated procedures and descriptions of their results, including of learning, across generations of people for thousands of years. In this way, classic education grounds current social life in enduring accomplishments and their refinements of the past the same way it grounded previous eras that resulted in the life we have today. In so doing, learning as part of classic education breaths meaning into social life beyond the urgencies and emotions of the moment.
Education and Learning
Education exists as the only social institution that gives priority to learning in the same sense that the social institution of religion gives priority to practices of faith and belief. People use the practices and results of learning, and more generally education, to benefit themselves and others today and tomorrow. Arguably, this priority remains constant over time, cultures, and other social institutions.
Learning in the 21st Century
The use of principles of learning in the 21st Century provides efficient passing along of practices and results that the most informed people today use. This efficiency allows social continuity across generations and cultural as well as technical eras. Application of these principle of learning also provide reliable ways to expand what people know to do.
Principles of learning give priority to describing what a person sees, hears, touches, etc. to meet learning criteria. Scientists established these principles through experimental empirical studies conducted over more than 100 years.
These studies used some of the most rigorous designs known. These studies resulted in elegant, simple, and lucid descriptions of what people do and of what we can observe as they learn.
Standard for Comparisons
In short, people choose to what they attend during trial-and-errors to solve a problem called learning. Principles of learning provide an authoritative empirical standard against which to assess the efficiency of lessons and other classroom activities, educational software, as well as other guided learning practices and material.
No other scientifically based standard exists for describing choices learners make to expand what they do. Top rated public and private schools rely on the use of these principles. Their alumni rank among leaders of most fields of daily social activity. They, as do other learners, use these principles to learn more in and out of schools any time, anywhere, and for any purpose.
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