"Standards!" "Accountability!" "Raise the Bar!" "Rigor!" "No excuses!"
The slogans and catchwords of would-be school reformers are exploited by politicians, broadcast by radio talk-show hosts, plastered on car bumpers, underlined by newspaper editorialists, elaborated in the popular press, and taken seriously by much of the general public.
They’re also favorite themes of those leaders of business and industry who, in the 1980s, began to elbow professional educators aside and work through Congress to take over education reform. There’s little or nothing wrong with American education, these leaders are certain, which can’t be made right by tightening institutional screws.
Notwithstanding the arguments of experienced professional educators, the conventional wisdom has it that teachers and students deserve most of the blame for poor school performance. The conventional wisdom also insists that market forces are the key to quality. Let Adam Smith’s "invisible hand" work the miracles in education it sometimes works in the marketplace. Stiffen competition—student against student, teacher against teacher, school against school, system against system, state against state, nation against nation. Test. Rank. Reward. Push. Punish. Publicize. Penalize. Privatize.
All of which is ironic, for in the world of business, the most respected opinion leaders long ago concluded that poor performance nearly always indicates not a "people problem" but a system problem.
And a system problem there is. Unless that problem is recognized, unless it’s accepted that market forces don’t address it, unless it’s realized that tightening the screws on the status quo is counterproductive, America’s schools—public, private, parochial, charter, virtual, whatever—won’t just fail to improve. They’ll eventually self-destruct.
The major source of problems
All complex social institutions have problems, the most serious of which usually stem from the process of "institutionalization." Newly created problem-solving organizations tend to adopt highly effective problem-solving procedures to which, understandably, they become devoted. When, as is always the case, social change alters the nature of the problems the organization was created to address, solving those problems may become less important than protecting the familiar, once-effective procedures.
This process is well along in education. Every society’s first priority—its basic reason for educating—is survival. Survival requires making sense of experience. Making more sense of experience gave rise to the academic disciplines and the school subjects based on them. Now, however, polishing those subjects has become more important than solving the problems which led to their creation. Yes, specialized studies are essential. (Indeed, many more should be offered.) But they need to be continuously re-keyed to real-world problems, and that isn’t happening. We teach the young to solve quadratic equations, diagram sentences, name the state capitols, and much else, not in the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness, but because it’s what we did last year, and the year before that, and the year before that.
Until we re-think and rework the curriculum devised by the Committee of Ten in 1893 , education "reform"—standards and accountability, raising the bar, imposing rigor and so on—will produce little but political noise, student hoop-jumping, educator burnout, ever-escalating costs, and increasing societal inability to meet the demands of an unknown future.
PROBLEMS
A curriculum is the reason there are schools. Everything else—staffs, schedules, buildings, budgets—is just support system.
It might be supposed, then, that if discipline is poor, if students are dropping out, if teachers are leaving the profession, if bond levies are being defeated, if test scores over the long term are flat—the curriculum would get a great deal of attention.
It doesn’t. In fact, check current reform proposals and it’s obvious that the curriculum isn’t getting attention at all. A bit of folk wisdom may explain why. "A fish," according to an old saying, "would be the last to discover water." Today’s education reformers, immersed in the traditional curriculum for their entire school experience, literally can’t imagine alternatives to it.
If schools are to be saved from terminal inertia, the myriad problems with the curriculum must be admitted and addressed. Here are some of those problems:
1. An acceptable curriculum will be guided by a clear, overarching aim shared by students, parents, educators, and the larger society. No such aim is presently in place.
2. Reality is systemically integrated, and the brain perceives it seamlessly. The curriculum—which is supposed to model reality—ignores its holistic nature.
3. Knowledge is exploding, but no criteria establish what new knowledge is important, or what old knowledge to exclude to make room for the new.
4. Recent years have brought new and useful insights into how the brain processes information, but the discoveries are largely ignored.
5. Research confirms a relationship between intellectual development and physical activity, art, music, varied experience and so on, but the curriculum treats these as "frills."
6. The present curriculum is shaped primarily by expert opinion in a handful of disciplines. Intellectually, there’s little students can do with this secondhand information except try to remember it. Thought processes other than recall—classifying, hypothesizing, generalizing, synthesizing, valuing, and so on—are largely neglected.
7. The curriculum is inefficient. Lip service is given to student differences, but general education requirements are so time-consuming there’s little opportunity to develop individual abilities and interests.
8. The traditional curriculum casts students in passive roles, as absorbers of existing knowledge rather than as active creators of new knowledge. The future, unknowable, demands a curriculum that teaches students how to construct knowledge.
9. No convincing case is being made for the relevance of the content of the traditional curriculum. "You’ll need to know this next year," "It’s in the book," and "This will be on the test," aren’t arguments likely to convince students that school work merits their time, effort, and emotional commitment. Problems with boredom, disengagement, classroom discipline, attendance, dropouts, and so on, are inevitable consequences of a dysfunctional curriculum.
10. All humans have and use a system for organizing knowledge shaped by their society. To make sense, to be remembered, and to be useful, everything taught must fit into this system. If it doesn’t, it goes into short-term memory and soon disappears. This knowledge-organizing framework isn’t "surfaced" so students can examine, refine, and make deliberate use of it.
11. The traditional curriculum neglects vast and important areas of knowledge.
12. Change is a fact of life and is everywhere apparent in the natural and human-made worlds. The traditional curriculum has no built-in mechanisms forcing it to adapt to current reality, anticipate probable and possible futures, and shape preferable ones.
13. The desire to learn is one of the deepest of all human drives. However, instead of cultivating and encouraging this intrinsic love of learning, present curriculum-based instruction relies primarily on extrinsic motivators—the threat of failure, fear of censure or the law, or the promise of praise, gold stars, grades, certificates, diplomas, or future success.
14. Complex technology and pressure from business and industry have elevated in the public mind the importance of specialized studies, particularly in mathematics and science. As a consequence, students considered "best" are channeled into narrow fields without adequate exposure to other dimensions of life, particularly the complex moral and ethical issues raised by developments in technical fields and their potentially devastating impact on society.
15. Curricular emphasis on merely distributing information has given rise to simplistic, superficial, destructive notions—instruction that confuses "harder" with "better," standards" that merely standardize, and machine-gradable tests incapable of measuring higher-order thought processes.
16. The traditional curriculum fails to lead students in a systematic way through ever-increasing levels of intellectual complexity. To the extent there’s concern for coordinating what’s taught, it’s limited to efforts within fields of study without concern for the whole.
17. The transition from the static, insular nature of school to the dynamic, exposed nature of adult life is so abrupt many students are unable to adequately cope. The curriculum should so thoroughly integrate education and life there’s little or no sense of transition.
18. How little most adults can recall of what they once "learned" in school testifies to the inadequacy of the theory that "if you throw enough mud on the wall some of it is bound to stick." The brain’s ability to cope with large amounts of unorganized information dispensed at fire-hose velocity is extremely limited, a fact routinely disregarded by the traditional curriculum.
19. The young learn at a phenomenal rate. Long before they start to school, most can acquire more than one language, internalize the complex rules governing myriad social situations, master many technological devices, learn the rules of any number of games, and much, much else. All this without being able to read or compute. In school, however, the abilities which make such learning possible are smothered by the assumption that learning comes primarily from interpreting and manipulating symbols—literacy and numeracy.
20. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, learning isn’t primarily a matter of transferring information from those who know to those who don’t know, but of discovering relationships between parts of reality not previously thought to be related. Because the present curriculum erects awkward, arbitrary, artificial walls between the study of various aspects of reality, fragmenting it into disciplines, subjects, courses, themes, and so on, the basic process by means of which individual and collective knowledge expands is blocked. Only if students have in place and know how to use a framework of ideas that includes and logically relates everything they know, is it possible for them to generate a full range of hypotheses about possible relationships. Because humankind’s very survival hinges on the ability to create new knowledge, it’s impossible to exaggerate the societal costs of a curriculum which fails to provide students with the basic intellectual tool by means of which knowledge is constructed.
Every one of these twenty problems deserves major, immediate attention. None is getting it.
A SOLUTION
Socrates demonstrated the major way insight and understanding grow. Learning isn’t primarily a matter of moving information from those who know to those who don’t know, but of helping learners reorganize and relate what they already know.
This is at odds with the assumptions currently driving most education reform efforts. However, as experienced teachers know, the young don’t come to matters of importance with empty heads. They have explanations and opinions about how the world works, they’re attached to those explanations and opinions, and they resist frontal assaults on them. That resistance is in part emotional, and the best way to skirt it is to raise non-threatening questions which cause learners themselves to reason their way to different opinions and images of reality. In that effort, there is a powerful conceptual tool students can be helped to develop.
1. Successful human functioning requires (a) ready access to the whole of one's knowledge via memory, (b) skill in identifying what one knows that’s applicable to the situation at hand, (c) an understanding of the systemic relationships between specific things one knows, and (d) the ability to predict or anticipate the consequences of the interactions of those things.
2. Since humankind has survived for millennia with only a relatively few individuals having been exposed to today’s standardized, "factory model" approach to educating, it follows that the brain has some way other than studying an assortment of school subjects to turn information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom.
3. It does. In everyday life, sense is made of specific past, present, anticipated and imagined experience by means of "stories" in the form of gossip, news, research reports, histories, folk tales, battle plans, policy proposals, drama, novels, casual conversation, and so on.
4. These stories elaborate and integrate five kinds of information, information about (a) setting, (b) time (c) actors, (d) action, and (e) states of mind (beliefs, values, assumptions, etc). These are the building blocks of meaning. Although they’re vastly (and differently) elaborated by human societies, use of the five appears to be universal.
5. Academia’s disciplines, subjects, and courses elaborate and organize various parts of these five kinds of information, but they neglect much of great importance, and they fail to model the integrated nature of reality. Collectively, time, setting, actors, action, and states of mind, suffer from neither of these two problems.
6. The five, with their supporting conceptual substructures, are a society’s "model of reality." Woven together, they’re its "master meaning-making system." Individuals adopt and adapt the model as a guide to life. On a larger scale, the interactions of societies "acting out" their models of reality shape human history.
7. Think of the five as distinct disciplines or conceptual tools , but tools which, because of the integrated nature of the reality they seek to understand, are best used simultaneously.
8. Students helped to raise this five-element knowledge-organizing model of reality into consciousness and use it to guide thought will perform at intellectual levels beyond present expectations, including in the specialized studies which make up the traditional curriculum.
Societies helped to raise the model into consciousness and use it to understand themselves and those societies with which they interact will significantly decrease intra- and inter-societal frictions and mis-communication.
The best way to teach the young to think is to teach them to think about thinking.
RAMIFICATIONS
When considering the following, a metaphor may be helpful. Think of the traditional curriculum as presenting students with disciplines, subjects, and courses—random pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Think of what’s being proposed as showing them the picture on the lid of the puzzle’s box. Either emphasis without the other is unacceptable.
Aim
A survey of current literature will identify 25 or 30 statements of aim or purpose for general education—instill a love of learning; improve problem-solving abilities; teach the basics; enhance thinking skills; explore broad themes; keep the US economically competitive; prepare students for democratic citizenship; transmit societal values; develop character; prepare students for useful work; promote love of country, and so on.
Although most of the aims are commendable, only rarely are they operative. Teachers, understandably, teach to the tests, and standardized tests emphasize low-level thought processes, particularly the ability to recall (at least temporarily) the content of a few fields of study. What students can actually do with this recalled information, or whether it’s likely to translate into desired personal qualities or greater likelihood of success in life, can’t be measured by machine-scored tests.
Success in pursuing acceptable aims of general education hinges primarily on the intellectual resources students bring to the effort. It follows, then, that the overarching aim of a general education should be not to "cover the material," but to maximize intellectual ability.
Realizing that aim requires lifting into consciousness and making deliberate use of the individual’s whole way of looking at the world:
Each of us has acquired from our society a comprehensive conceptual model of reality. The most important task of a general education is to help us understand that model, the models of those with whom we interact, and the range of alternative models from which we might choose.
The main instructional task
Most of the members of every generation assume that what the next generation needs to know is what "the elders" know. This assumption is operationalized in education by way of lectures, textbooks, drill sheets, memorization exercises, standards, measures of accountability based on conceptions of ‘minimum competencies," and so on.
For much of human history, this "cloning" of successive generations worked. The rates of social, technological, and environmental change were very gradual, allowing each generation to pass along to the next the knowledge and skills it needed to meet the challenges of survival. That’s no longer true, but formal education hasn’t adapted to the new reality.
There is, of course, an enormous amount of accumulated, useful knowledge, and each generation profits greatly from being able to "stand on the shoulders" of previous generations. However, spending most classroom time internalizing that knowledge when advances in technology make access to much of it nearly instantaneous is enormously wasteful of time and money. What students need but aren’t getting is the ability to cope with an unknown future, the ability to generate for themselves answers to questions not yet being asked, the ability to imagine, the ability, in short, to construct knowledge.
Instructional materials
"Textbooks won’t be in until the end of the week, so we won’t start class until Monday."
The assumption that learning is primarily a matter of moving "expert" opinion from those who know to those who don’t know is probably the single greatest obstacle to significant education reform. Metaphors for teaching and learning reinforce the idea that information is almost tangible and therefore movable from mind to mind. Teachers and books are "loaded" with information. Students are "empty headed," "air-heads," or "stuffed" with knowledge. They "cram" for exams until "it comes out their ears."
Library and Internet assignments, textbooks, note-taking, handouts, most PowerPoint presentations, film and fictional portrayals of schooling—all reinforce the idea that "it’s in the book," and that education’s main role is to move it to students’ heads.
Educating is far more complicated and difficult than that, as ancient, commonsense principles of effective teaching recognize. Simplicity should come before complexity, the concrete before the abstract, the familiar before the unfamiliar, ordinary vocabulary before jargon, firsthand experience before secondhand experience.
The best "textbook," then, is "right here, right now"—the real world in all its complexity. Tracing the changes of a patch of sunlight on the classroom floor is a better introduction to the study of the solar system than a diagram in a textbook. Analyzing seating patterns in the school cafeteria is a better introduction to social dynamics than reading about India’s castes. Following the paths of the school’s waste to its final destinations is a better introduction to earth science than can be gotten from any book, film, or the Internet.
There’s no principle worth studying, in any discipline, which doesn’t manifest itself in some instructionally useful way within immediate, accessible, direct experience. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a more powerful initial focus of study for students at every level than the school they attend, driven by an effort to make it a continuously improving learning organization.
Once students have a firm, working grasp of basic ideas and principles, the second level of instructional materials is the "residue" of reality. Unedited, unmediated, unexpurgated primary sources—tire tracks in the snow, spent shell casings, recorded comments of participants, legal documents, tombstone inscriptions—these kinds of things lie closest to immediate reality.
The third and least intellectually stimulating instructional materials are those which cost the most and teach the least—the textbooks and other corporately produced materials which now flood classrooms. They pass along secondhand knowledge, usually years out of date, watered down for student consumption and about as interesting as completed crossword puzzles. These and other references should come not first but last in the instructional sequence.
Methodology
A single word summarizes the most-used instructional method in institutionalized education: Telling. It comes in many forms—a university professor’s lecture, a mentor’s prompt to a reciting student, a talking head on an educational television channel, a reading assignment in a textbook, crib notes on a student’s fingernails or shoe sole—but telling it is.
Just as a single word can summarize the instructional method dominating American education, so it is that a single word can summarize what ought to be the most-used of all instructional methods. That word is "asking." It’s been recognized for millennia that nothing stretches the mind better than difficult, open-ended, dialog-generating questions directed to groups small enough and comfortable enough to encourage "thinking out loud."
Thought processes
Because "telling" plays the major role in traditional instruction, "recalling" is the major (sometimes the only) thought process in which students engage. But instruction, like life, should routinely require the use of all known thought processes—observing, recalling, comparing, classifying, translating, analyzing, inferring, hypothesizing, generalizing, synthesizing, valuing, and so on.
"Standards and accountability"
When teaching is assumed to mean primarily "telling," and learning is assumed to mean primarily "recalling," establishing standards and evaluating student performance is relatively simple. The standards say what students are expected to remember, and measures of accountability tally and compare what’s remembered and what’s forgotten.
But when students are asked to demonstrate understanding of their model of reality by applying it to their own experience, when they’re expected to bring that model to bear on their society’s relationships with other societies, and when they use it to speculate about probable, possible, and preferable futures, responses will be too idiosyncratic for answer sheets designed for electronic devices. Notwithstanding America’s love affair with standardized tests and the neat numbers they produce, if the point of educating is to improve the quality of student intellectual performance, the inherent complexity of the task necessitates human judgment.
As the thrust of education "reform" at the turn of the 21st century amply demonstrates, however, that’s a problem. Teacher judgment isn’t respected. Policymakers might want to reconsider the merit of teacher teams with long-term responsibility for blocks of students. Perhaps the collective judgment of such teams would be more acceptable to parents and critics.
NOTES ON IMPLEMENTATION
1. The rather extensive comments above may leave the impression that integrating knowledge necessitates changes too radical to implement. In fact, because the traditional content of instruction can remain unchanged (is merely used differently), administrative organization, staffing, class schedules, student loads, grade cards, grading procedures and so on, can remain the same.
2. With the single exception of making deliberate use of time, setting, actors, action, and states of mind as "super" organizers, the above descriptions of methods, materials and so on simply recommend practices and procedures already in wide use by thoughtful teachers.
3. Cost: Because paradigm shifts initially merely change minds, no additional expenditures are necessary. Indeed, there’s great potential for lowering education costs.
4. Routine: A seamless, thoroughly integrated approach to instruction is more consistent with how the brain learns and is therefore simpler. It’s also more efficient, and its systemic, mutually supportive nature imbeds what’s learned more firmly in understanding and memory. After the first few grades, when emphasis switches from the development of basic skills to content, two or three hours per day for general education is enough. This frees up time for students to pursue specialized studies for which they show aptitude, or to engage in apprenticeships and other learning activities not traditionally associated with formal schooling. It facilitates the "magnet school" concept by streamlining the general education component, and encourages development of activities which smooth the transition to adulthood. Most importantly, it ends the appalling waste of student potential stemming from imposing the same curriculum on all students regardless of aptitude.
5. Integrated general study vastly simplifies the curriculum and the teacher’s task, but because it’s perceived as unorthodox it may initially intimidate some teachers. Teaming those with differing academic backgrounds and strengths addresses the problem.
6. The present preoccupation with standardized test scores kills innovation. As long as that preoccupation persists, the only way to introduce new programs may lie in their use with students considered either academically hopeless, or so superior their performance on mandated tests is of no concern.
7. Notwithstanding impressions based on observations of upscale suburban schools or those temporarily benefitting from extraordinary leadership, America’s schools are suffering from terminal inertia. It’s almost impossible to overestimate either the dangers of failure to change, or institutional resistance to it. That resistance rarely stems from careful investigation of new ideas and their rejection based on substantive issues. Instead, it ordinarily takes the form of reasons for failing to act: "We’re already doing that." "We tried that and it didn’t work." "Our teachers couldn’t handle it." "That wouldn’t work with our students." "We’ll get to that after we’ve covered the basics." "We’d like to do that, but _________ won’t let us." "We have to teach to the standards." "We have to meet college expectations." "It’s just a passing fad." "This isn’t what the tests cover."
8. None of these reasons for sticking with a poor curriculum is valid. Every aim of education, including the achievement of the simplistic subject-matter standards now in place, and improving scores on standardized tests, can be met more efficiently and effectively by students who understand and use their implicitly known system for selecting, organizing, integrating, and creating knowledge.
9. Catch-22: Educators won’t adopt a new idea unless they see it demonstrated. A new idea can’t be demonstrated unless it’s adopted. Adoption requires the approval of politicians. Politicians won’t approve an idea they don’t understand. Understanding requires demonstration.
Exploitation of human variability is what makes civilization possible. American education’s appalling preoccupation with minimum standards rather than maximum performance will, if continued, destroy the institution and with it the society.
For links to:
- Reaction to this idea from across the US and abroad
- A more detailed overview
- A PowerPoint presentation
- Books, journal articles, and newspaper columns
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