Mead observed that rapid change makes yesterday's knowledge useless, requiring education to teach coping with change rather than fixed content¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · review r2 · q1
Currency · newest study 1992 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person
Evidence quality · No study behind this claim is a peer-reviewed article with a DOI: it rests on an ERIC document (a report, conference paper or thesis). It is kept because 2 design pages cite it; treat it as a lead to check, not an established finding.

Subclaims¶

q1 i? In The School in American Culture (1950), Mead identified the major problem in education as teaching young people to cope with rapid change, since technological and scientific change renders prior knowledge useless. → Monroe 1992

Evidence¶

Monroe 1992¶

Monroe, Suzanne S. (1992). Margaret Mead: Anthropological Perspective on Educational Change. ERIC Document ED 356 168. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED356168

q1 · i? · review · r2

The report's summary of Mead's 1950 Inglis Lecture at Harvard, in which she argued that post-war children growing up in the atomic age faced a world where "yesterday's knowledge" would be made useless by technological and scientific change. Interpretive, not empirical.

"Mead was adamant that the major problem in education was how to teach young people to cope with rapid change.The children of the post-war years were unique in that they were growing up in the atomic age, an experience in which technology and scientific change would make yesterday's knowledge useless."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Mead holds that the process of acquiring changes the thing acquired, making change of subject matter the rule — related
• Mead argued education functions as a mechanism of social and cultural change, not only cultural transmission — a broader claim this one bears on
• Mead holds that a method of thought cannot be transferred but must be gained through the learner's own abstractions — related
• Mead argued that treating the mother tongue as inferior impedes movement between home and school language structures — related