What Contemporary Life Is and Why to Study It
What Contemporary Life Is and Why to Study It
What contemporary life is
- The advanced, modern, up-to-date world that exists now.
Why the question arose
- Before industry, knowledge was limited, so selecting from the cultural heritage was easy.
- Industry exploded the body of knowledge; schools could not teach all of it.
- This forced the question of which knowledge has contemporary significance.
Job analysis
- A wartime need to train many skilled workers quickly outpaced slow apprenticeship.
- The answer was job analysis, need assessment, and tailored training programs.
Contemporary life is just what it sounds like: the advanced, modern, up-to-date world that exists right now, the life learners will step into. The second source of objectives asks a developer to study that world and draw objectives from what it actually demands of people.
Why the question of contemporary significance arose
For most of history this was not a pressing question. Before the industrial revolution, the body of knowledge was limited, so it was relatively easy to make a selection from the cultural heritage and teach it. There was not so much that a school had to choose carefully.
The industrial revolution changed that. The body of knowledge increased enormously, and at first schools were expected to teach all of it. They quickly ran into difficulty, because it became impossible to include all scholarly knowledge in an educational program. Out of that impossibility came a new and unavoidable question: which particular knowledge, skills, and abilities have contemporary significance? Since you cannot teach everything, you have to decide what is worth teaching now, and that means studying the life that “now” consists of.
The advanced, modern, up-to-date world that exists now
A developer studies it to find what knowledge, skills, and abilities matter in the present, because the explosion of knowledge made it impossible to teach everything from the cultural heritage.
Job analysis and the wartime lesson
Early efforts to study contemporary life relied on informal observation, though some techniques resembled modern investigation. A sharper push came with the First World War, which created a specific situation: a large number of people had to be trained in skilled trades, and the training had to be done in a short time. The slow apprentice system, which had worked for centuries, turned out to be inadequate to the urgency.
The response taught a lasting lesson. To train people fast, planners used job analysis, need assessment, and tailored training programs, and they produced skilled people in trades and various technologies. This showed that studying what a task actually required, then building training around it, could work far faster than tradition.
Analysing the activities a job requires, then training on the critical ones
When the First World War demanded many skilled workers fast, slow apprenticeship failed. Job analysis, need assessment, and tailored programs trained people quickly, showing the power of studying what a task actually requires.
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