"Children are already accustomed to a world that moves faster and is more exciting than anything a teacher in front of a classroom can do"
About this Quote
Major Owens captures a core tension in contemporary schooling: childhood now unfolds inside a media ecosystem that is always on, gamified, personalized, and fast. The baseline of stimulation outside school sets expectations inside it. When the classroom is framed as a single adult speaking to many students for long stretches, it must compete with an environment tuned to deliver novelty every few seconds. Owens, a librarian turned congressman who fought for education equity, is not trivializing teachers; he is warning that a system built around the teacher as performer is mismatched to the cognitive habits that modern life cultivates.
The point is not that classrooms should out-entertain TikTok. Chasing spectacle is a losing game and misses education’s deeper aims. The response is to shift the teacher’s role from broadcaster to designer and coach. Students need work that is active, collaborative, and consequential: projects that make something real, problems whose answers are not already known, tools that let them simulate, test, and publish. Technology should be a medium for inquiry, not a substitute for thinking. At the same time, schools must teach the slow skills modern life erodes: sustained attention, patience with complexity, and the capacity to question what algorithms serve up. Hooks can be fast; learning can be deep.
Owens’s advocacy also implied structural change. It is unfair to fault individual teachers while maintaining oversized classes, rigid pacing guides, and high-stakes tests that reward compliance over curiosity. Professional development, modern infrastructure, and time to plan interdisciplinary work are prerequisites, especially in communities historically denied them. The larger challenge is to make learning feel as meaningful as the world outside, not merely as noisy. Relevance, agency, and purpose beat spectacle. When students help drive the questions and see how knowledge matters beyond the bell, the classroom’s tempo no longer has to imitate the feed; it can offer something rarer and more valuable.
The point is not that classrooms should out-entertain TikTok. Chasing spectacle is a losing game and misses education’s deeper aims. The response is to shift the teacher’s role from broadcaster to designer and coach. Students need work that is active, collaborative, and consequential: projects that make something real, problems whose answers are not already known, tools that let them simulate, test, and publish. Technology should be a medium for inquiry, not a substitute for thinking. At the same time, schools must teach the slow skills modern life erodes: sustained attention, patience with complexity, and the capacity to question what algorithms serve up. Hooks can be fast; learning can be deep.
Owens’s advocacy also implied structural change. It is unfair to fault individual teachers while maintaining oversized classes, rigid pacing guides, and high-stakes tests that reward compliance over curiosity. Professional development, modern infrastructure, and time to plan interdisciplinary work are prerequisites, especially in communities historically denied them. The larger challenge is to make learning feel as meaningful as the world outside, not merely as noisy. Relevance, agency, and purpose beat spectacle. When students help drive the questions and see how knowledge matters beyond the bell, the classroom’s tempo no longer has to imitate the feed; it can offer something rarer and more valuable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teaching |
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