题目内容
Passage TwoQuestions 21 to 25are based on the following passage.American schools aren’t exactly frozen in time, but considering the pace of change in other areas of life, our public schools tend to feel likethrowbacks (倒退). Kids spend much of the day as their great-grandparents once did: sitting in rows, listening to teachers’ lectures, scribbling(乱涂) notes by hand, reading from textbooks that are out of date by the time they are printed. A big gap separates the schools from the outside world.For the past five years, the national conversation on education has focused on reading scores, math tests. This article is about the big public conversation the nation is not having about education, the one that will ultimately determine not merely whether some fraction of our children get “left behind” but also whether an entire generation of kids will fail to make the grade in the global economy because they can’t think their way through abstract problems, work in teams, distinguish good information from bad or speak a language other than English.An assembly of Education Secretaries and other education leaders releases a blueprint for rethinking American education to better prepare students to thrive in the global economy. They finally reach a remarkable consensus on one key conclusion: we need to bring what we teach and how we teach into the 21st century.Right now we’re aiming too low. Competency in reading and math is the minimum. Scientific and technical skills are, likewise, utterly necessary but insufficient. Today’s economy demands not only a high-level competence in the traditional academic disciplines but also what might be called 21st century skills. Here’s what they are:Knowing more about the world. Kids are global citizens now, even in small-town America, and they must learn to act that way. Mike Eskew, CEO of UPS, talks about needing workers who are “global trade literate, sensitive to foreign cultures, conversant in different languages”Thinking outside the box. “Put an enormous premium on creative and innovative skills, seeing patterns where other people see only chaos,” Traditionally that’s been an American strength, but schools have become less daring in the back-to-basics climate.Developing good people skills. EQ, or emotional intelligence, is as important as IQ for success in today’s workplace. “Most innovations today involve large teams of people,” says former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine. “We have to emphasize communication skills, the ability to work in teams and with people from different cultures.”Can our public schools, originally designed to educate workers for agriculture and industrial-age factories, make the necessary shifts? It’s possible only if we add new depth and rigor to our curriculum and standardized exams, redeploy(重新分配) the dollars we spend on education, reshape the teaching force and reorganize who runs the schools.Q:By “Kids spend much of the day as their great-grandparents once did”, the author means that ______.
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