My series on WYPR continues here

If we want our new technological society to be more inclusive, we will need a new model of education geared toward a learning economy, where learning continues aftergraduation. Good teachers have always known that our job is to make ourselves obsolete. If we do our jobs well, then our students will move into the future, able to learn and integrate new knowledge by themselves, without teachers telling them what is important. It is like the old saying that you can either give someone a fish, or teach them how to fish. If college is really about creating self-regulated learners, then we need to focus more on that process and less on content.

You remember the old three Rs, reading, writing, and arithmetic. These content areas still matter. But if we want to prepare graduates to think for themselves in a quickly changing world, then we need to understand the new science of learning, which suggests that the focus of education could fruitfully be reimagined around a new 3Rs of Relationships, Resilience, and Reflection. Relationships because learning is always mediated through context, resilience because failure is always a part of learning, and reflection because the point of new experiences and insight is that it offers the potential to change us. 

Where there is no change, there is no learning—only storage. Unlike the original 3rs of content, these 3Rs are about process—they articulate a process of how students can learn to think for themselves.