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Pedagogy is considered a very conservative sphere. It's not conservative because of society's fear for something new, but because the need to teach kids from all social classes and origins has been there since the beginning of time. Hence, we've tried a huge variety of methods, we now have a few that're proven good and working, and there's very little one can add to this. Obviously, modern research in children's psychology has helped a lot, but it hasn't been a breakthrough. It's been more of improving what we've already got.

But one must not forget that Education and Pedagogy, albeit confusingly similar, aren't the same. Education is a very complex concept (if not process) that includes the curriculum (what is being taught and learned), methodology (how every subject is taught and learned) and pedagogics (a meta-approach to education - a philosophy in a way). Pedagogy is vague without Education, Education is vectorless without Pedagogy. Pedagogy is very conservative because we've already got most of what we could from the philosophy of teaching and learning. Education heavily relies on the available material: human resources, learning resources, current demand of society. That's why one can't say that education lags behind the progress. It responds to progress very quickly, although the ways in which it does aren't always apparent.

You might have noticed that, overtime, the volume of study material the students are expected to consume is growing and expanding. The result is fragmentation of knowledge and shift of focus from memorization to navigation. It's not bad, it's the demand of the modern society: remembering something isn't as valuable as knowing where and how to find information. Also, there's a question of processing the material. Traditionally, homework essays were a way to make students systematize and analyze the new material. But, once again, we've had a switch from memorization (let's assume it's roughly similar to systematization) to navigation (in this context, I'd also call it optimization). Students' demand for optimization lead to market's supply of facilitating material: essay writing apps, "The History of Ancient Rome in 7 minutes" kind of YouTube videos, online collections of short summaries and analyses of literary works.

One may note that, this way, processing study material has become very superficial, and this claim is probably true. As noted earlier, education responds to the needs of society very quickly, and not always in the way the society finds moral or appropriate. Progress is progress; a thousand years ago it was considered highly immoral to treat fever with medicine, let alone try to cure plague or lepra. Four hundred years ago the civilized society found the idea of a woman running a business simply scandalous. And today the students take blame for being too superficial.

Education always goes hand in hand with progress. Do you agree or disagree?