Glory, glory! Sometimes, I read stuff and am amazed with how it resonates with what I’ve been thinking about.  That’s how I felt reading David Brooks’ op-ed piece in Friday’s New York Times. He argues that we need to be talking about the cognitive age, the thinking processes that ultimately drive decisions.  He talks about how politicians are spinning globalization and its impacts as a campaign issue.  He sees it globalization differently:

We’re moving into a more demanding cognitive age. In order to thrive, people are compelled to become better at absorbing, processing and combining information. This is happening in localized and globalized sectors, and it would be happening even if you tore up every free trade deal ever inked.

The globalization paradigm emphasizes the fact that information can now travel 15,000 miles in an instant. But the most important part of information’s journey is the last few inches — the space between a person’s eyes or ears and the various regions of the brain. Does the individual have the capacity to understand the information? Does he or she have the training to exploit it? Are there cultural assumptions that distort the way it is perceived?

The globalization paradigm leads people to see economic development as a form of foreign policy, as a grand competition between nations and civilizations. These abstractions, called “the Chinese” or “the Indians,” are doing this or that. But the cognitive age paradigm emphasizes psychology, culture and pedagogy — the specific processes that foster learning. It emphasizes that different societies are being stressed in similar ways by increased demands on human capital. If you understand that you are living at the beginning of a cognitive age, you’re focusing on the real source of prosperity and understand that your anxiety is not being caused by a foreigner.

It’s not that globalization and the skills revolution are contradictory processes. But which paradigm you embrace determines which facts and remedies you emphasize. Politicians, especially Democratic ones, have fallen in love with the globalization paradigm. It’s time to move beyond it.

Isn’t this what librarians have been claiming for years? Aren’t you glad you’re in a profession who put forth such visionary new standards that address this perspective so well?  Here are our new AASLfour guiding standards:

1. inquire, think critically, and gain knowledge;
2. draw conclusions, make informed decisions, apply knowledge to new situations, and create new knowledge;
3. share knowledge and participate ethically and productively as members of our democratic society;
4. pursue personal and aesthetic growth.

I love it when we’re ahead of the curve. Now if only I could get my classroom colleagues to tell jokes based on Dewey numbers.  Did you hear the one where the 636.7 met the 636.8 in a dark alley?  It was no 398.2, let me tell you.  But it was one for the 031’s.   Ouch.  Maybe not.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 at 12:28 pm and is filed under Learning Standards, Kids/Students 2.0, Global Economy, Role of the SLMS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.