What is a "21st Century Curriculum"? (Part 3 of 9)

The current tagline of Christian Heritage Academy is "A 21st Century Curriculum. An Eternal Perspective." This post continues a nine-part series explaining what we mean by the first half of that phrase.

3. Conceptual thinking rather than information delivery. We have been moving away from the need for memorization for years and will continue to do so at earlier and earlier grades as ever younger students learn to obtain information from databases rather than their memories. This will become ever more essential as the amount of information available increases geometrically while our memory capacity does not. I’m sure you already do this in many ways. For example, I used to have all my friends’ phone numbers memorized. Now I have a cell phone contact list. The skill set I need now is wisdom in when and how to appropriately contact people: when do I call, text, email, tweet and who should be included. My database cannot make such conceptual decisions and our children will need help to understand such concepts rather than memorizing facts. Problem solving, group projects, portfolio assessment and student facilitated discussion (in class or online) should increasingly be used in the place of lecture and fill-in-the-blank testing. We also need to help students to understand how to determine the value and validity of information they retrieve, rather than accepting all information at face value. Again, many of these concepts are inherently part of an integrated Christian worldview focus that challenges every student to view any information in light of God’s truth and not man’s opinion.