"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."
Norwich takes great pride in its schools and in the achievement of its students and, as measured by the Connecticut Mastery Tests (CMT) and progress reports that underpin No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the city has continued to be successful even as the costs to achieve that success continue to escalate.We have learned well the lesson that public education doesn't merely educate a public, but also creates one, as our schools have become the centerpiece of their neighborhoods, regarded the same way the fingers of the hand look to the thumb. We may have thirty-plus languages in our community, but we all only have one school.
A hundred and fifty years ago, in the Industrial Age, mill operators looked for rivers to power their factories. Fifty years ago, in the Age of Technology, companies sought rail and highway connections to ship raw materials and finished products to and from markets.
A hundred and fifty years ago, in the Industrial Age, mill operators looked for rivers to power their factories. Fifty years ago, in the Age of Technology, companies sought rail and highway connections to ship raw materials and finished products to and from markets.
Today, in the Knowledge Age, with the convergence of technologies and applications, business, be it government, art, commerce, or science, can be conducted from anywhere, and a successful education becomes essential in creating agile, life-long learners who can constantly and consistently adapt and adopt.
If this doesn't sound like the schoolhouse we attended as children, that's because it isn't. In our day, schools and the communities they served were separate worlds, but today, everything, in many ways, has become everything else.
If this doesn't sound like the schoolhouse we attended as children, that's because it isn't. In our day, schools and the communities they served were separate worlds, but today, everything, in many ways, has become everything else.
Our children enter schools designed for a different world and a different time, where events happened sequentially and not simultaneously; where rote learning was group learning and progress could be precisely mapped and measured.
Today's students bring different learning styles that require flexibility of instruction and classroom interaction as a minimum. What else is needed will be discovered as all of us across the community sit together, and with educators and other key members of our city, to build the next school system, not just from bricks and mortar, but from skills, tools, techniques, and opportunities that both reflect and simultaneously shape the world in which our children and theirs will live.
We have both a new City Council and Board of Education, whose members will grow into their roles and responsibilities. There will be discussions, dialogue, and probably no small amount of acrimony in developing the budgets both for the city and for our school system. Happens all the time.
Today's students bring different learning styles that require flexibility of instruction and classroom interaction as a minimum. What else is needed will be discovered as all of us across the community sit together, and with educators and other key members of our city, to build the next school system, not just from bricks and mortar, but from skills, tools, techniques, and opportunities that both reflect and simultaneously shape the world in which our children and theirs will live.
We have both a new City Council and Board of Education, whose members will grow into their roles and responsibilities. There will be discussions, dialogue, and probably no small amount of acrimony in developing the budgets both for the city and for our school system. Happens all the time.
There will be a lot of hard work because tomorrow cannot be built in a day, but rather, will be lived one day at a time for the rest of our lives. We all want it to be tomorrow today, but none of us wants it to start at this moment.
-bill kenny
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