By Tony Wagner Co-director of the Change Leadership Group (CLG), Harvard Graduate School of Education

The Desire to multitask and be constantly Connected to the net and to friends as well as the hunger for immediate results influence how young people today interact with the world -- whether in school or at work or at home or while traveling -- and must be taken into account by both educators and employers. However, the ways in which young people are different today as learners may be the most fundamental change we need to understand as we consider hot to close the global achievement gap. The use of the internet and other digital technology has transformed both what young people learn today and how they learn.

There is often a terrible stigma associated with special education- few people WANT their child in special education!  The reality is that special education exists because there are so many different abilities of children of the same age.  The American school system is set up so that all children of a certain age are placed together in the same classroom and are often expected to learn the same things at the same time at the same rate.  It is the assembly model/ agricultural model of education- in nine months time, a certain amount of information is provided to students, they are to learn it and at the end of the year, they take a break to help their families harvest the crops, and then progress to the next station, um, classroom, and new information is provided for the next nine months.  Public education was established in this country during the Industrial Revolution when we were learning to make cars more efficiently and many students were still working on farms.  That history is long past, but its cultural implications are deep in the very fabric of our schools.  Education is still often perceived as a process similar to making cars and traditional school systems follow this historical pattern.

By Kevin Lawrence 

After gaining the ability to understand language and to speak, a child's world becomes richer. Interactions with other kids begin to replace parallel play, and the child's intellectual life expands as detailed ideas are conveyed and absorbed. This growth opens up new possibilities for musical experience.