Forget about factoids. Why memorise the date of the Battle of Clontarf when you can look it up on Google? It’s not what you know that counts any more; it’s what you can learn.

Students need to think creatively, critically and collaboratively — to master the “basics” and excel in reading, maths, science and information literacy; and to respond to opportunities and challenges with speed and innovation.

Unfortunately, only a few progressive educators are talking about modernising pedagogy to fit 21st-century needs. Most educators cling to the old system, which I call one-way broadcast learning. It was designed for an age when industry needed workers who did what they were told. The teacher was the sage who delivered knowledge, and pupils were expected to write down the sage’s utterances and deliver them back if they wanted to score an A. As I often say, the definition of a lecture is the process by which the notes of the teacher go to the notes of the student without going through the brains of either.

As someone who gives many lectures a year, I appreciate the irony of this view.

I speak mainly to older groups, for whom the broadcast model is not completely ineffective. But when I give a lecture, my goal is not to educate. I hope to open someone’s mind, or to get an audience member to investigate something.

I doubt whether anyone actually remembers my four principles of Wikinomics. A great lecture inspires and motivates; that’s about it. Real learning, especially for this generation, occurs through collaboration and discovery.

When I was in school, the educational model was to build up your inventory of knowledge before you entered the world of work, where you could retrieve that information when needed. This worked in a relatively slow-paced world. But now, in the information age, you can’t take the time to send workers back to school for retraining when their jobs change. We have entered the era of life-long learning. If you are studying a technical topic at a university, half of what you learnt in your freshman year might be obsolete by the time you graduate. On the job, employees must reinvent their knowledge base repeatedly as they move from one career to the next.

Now that almost every fact is instantly available online, the old model of teaching is nonsensical. It’s not what you know that really counts; it’s how you navigate in the digital world, and what you do with the information you discover.

A very different system would better suit the talents and skills of today’s youth. They are immersed in digital technology and are keen to try new things, often at high speed. They want school to be fun and interesting. They enjoy the delight of discovering things for themselves.

As Seymour Papert, one of the world’s foremost experts on how technology can provide new ways to learn, said: “The scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive a child of the pleasure and benefit of discovery.”

Teachers have to step off the stage and start listening and conversing, instead of just lecturing. They have to abandon their broadcast style and adopt an interactive one. They should inspire children to discover for themselves, and learn a process of critical thinking instead of just memorising the teacher’s information.

Teachers also need to encourage pupils to collaborate among themselves, and they need to tailor their style of education to individuals’ learning styles. Some students are visual learners; others understand through listening. Still others learn by physically manipulating something (and need to get up and move around while in class or doing homework).

A recent report by the Brighton Central School District in New York put it well.

“If the factory was the model of the typical 20th-century American school, the craftsman’s shop or artist’s studio is the model for a 21st-century educational delivery system,” it said.

So we have a choice. We can continue to drill kids with facts — kings, coronation dates and battles — so that they can regurgitate them in tests. Or we can give children fewer facts but more knowledge. They can learn how to think, communicate, solve tough problems (from maths to society), put things in context and work in groups.

I know the latter choice is better, because Google will always know that the Battle of Clontarf was in 1014.

Don Tapscott is chairman of the nGenera Innovation Network. His most recent book is Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World

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