pandering or adapting?

Another way to look at the issue of traditional vs. non-traditional literature assignments is to wonder whether a movement toward the non-traditional is actually pandering to the likes of today’s tech-saavy, attention-deficit prone students. JPF suggested that at its best what we are striving toward is not pandering but adapting – as long as we do it in a rigorous and effective way. Upon hearing this remark, I suggested to the group that I was unlikely to live to the year 2050, but that they probably would. Does it seem appropriate that the educational demands, methodologies, and assignments of the mid-twenty-first century remain stubbornly similar to those used a century before in 1950?