Language, Learning, and Science: The Coming Crisis
James Paul Gee
University of Wisconsin
Thomas Friedman's widely read
book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of The Twenty-First Century
(2005) argues that the United States is facing a looming crisis. While
popularized by Friedman, this crisis is at the heart of reports like
Science and Engineering Indicators-2002 from the National Science Board
(2002). Young people in the United States today are being prepared--in
school and at home--for "commodity jobs" in a world that will, very
soon, truly reward only people in developed countries who can do
innovative work, and punish those who can't. The future of many
commodity jobs, whether these be low-status jobs in call centers or
high-status ones reading X-rays, is to be outsourced overseas to the
lowest cost centers.
Though our schools have gotten
better and better at basic skills education, they have not come close
to eradicating the gaps between rich and poor children and have not
begun to truly enhance innovative science learning for all children,
including middle-class children. If we are to discuss the innovation
crisis for all children, we need to rethink our ideas about how
language and literacy work in the content areas, especially in science
and mathematics. Current schooling and theories of learning in the
content areas are based on outdated ideas about language, as well as
outdated ideas about thinking, especially at a time when multimodal and
digital representations play such a big role in different technical
knowledge domains.