Thoughts On Post Industrial Education
Prediction and Control VS Creative Human Development
Two mighty forces shape the debate raging around school reform, a social, economic
and political issue every much as challenging as healthcare reform. What follows
is some of the best thinking on this issue from two respected colleagues. Read
both. You won't be disapointed.
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Obama's School Choice
Shouldn't the education that Malia and Sasha receive be available to all?
By David Marshak
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan wants to intensify the industrial,
modernist character of American public schools. He wants a longer school day,
a longer school week, and a longer school year. He wants national subject standards,
which will inevitably lead to one national test. And he wants to institute merit
pay, which is a euphemism for paying teachers to produce higher test scores.
And this sort of merit pay, combined with national academic standards and one
national test, will inevitably result in even more public schools becoming test-prep
factories. Thus, more and more of the same.
Every one of these putative remedies grows from a belief that intensification
of the command-and-control, modernist, factory model of production is what schools
need to improve their performance. Arne Duncan seems to have no understanding
that the most effective organizations in our society, both for-profit corporations
and nonprofits, have evolved beyond command-and-control cultures.
The author and business professor Peter M. Senge describes these new
entities as "learning organizations," which are built on the foundation of systems
thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, and team learning.
Senge explains why Duncan's desire to intensify the factory model of schooling
is destined for failure. "Today's problems come from yesterday's ‘solutions,'
" he says.
Factory-model schools, though always flawed by racism and classism, worked reasonably
well when America was primarily an industrial society. But given our evolution
into a more postindustrial culture, the industrial elements of schooling—mass
production, rigid time and curricular structures, simplistic age-grading, and
depersonalization and alienation—have become the problem, not the solution.
A postindustrial society requires postindustrial, post-modern schools. We could
find a good example of this kind of education by following President Barack
Obama's two daughters to school one morning. Since their move to Washington,
Malia and Sasha Obama have attended the Sidwell Friends School. It is both private
and expensive, but these are not its essential characteristics.
Sidwell Friends is more profoundly defined both by the values that it rejects—and
by those that it embodies. Sidwell rejects the modernist, industrial paradigm
of schooling that makes school like an assembly line engaged in mass production,
that claims all children should learn the same stuff at the same time. It also
rejects the modernist claim that children's individuality and inner knowing
are irrelevant to education.
Sidwell embraces a post-modernist paradigm of schooling defined by the following
elements:
• Sidwell is a prekindergarten through 12th grade school, with 1,097 students.
This is about 84 children in each grade, a small enough number so that no child
is lost in the crowd. If Sidwell had a free-standing high school, it would have
all of 336 students.
• Sidwell offers "a rich and rigorous interdisciplinary curriculum designed
to stimulate creative inquiry, intellectual achievement, and independent thinking
in a world increasingly without borders." It does not limit its curriculum to
the antiquated 19th-century subjects, as does every set of state curriculum
standards—or the new national standards that Arne Duncan is pitching.
• Sidwell encourages its students "to give expression to their artistic abilities."
It does not cut the arts out of the curriculum to focus only on math and reading,
as so many schools have done in our testing-obsessed era, but understands that
the arts need to be an integral element in every child's education.
• Sidwell Friends School is a community that values "the power of individual
and collective reflection." It values not only knowledge that is outside the
child or teenager, but also what children and adolescents know within themselves.
Sidwell encourages reflection and inner knowing, neither of which are acknowledged
in any state's academic standards.
• Sidwell promotes "an understanding of how diversity enriches us," recruits
a diverse student body (39 percent of its students are persons of color), and
offers a global and multicultural curriculum.
• In its curriculum and communal life, Sidwell emphasizes "stewardship of the
natural world" and engages its students both in learning the science of ecology
and in developing the ethics that are at the core of the concept of stewardship:
that every individual has a personal responsibility for ecological health and
sustainability.
• Sidwell also promotes service, and its curriculum and communal life engage
its students in understanding "why service to others enhances life."
• Sidwell explicitly acknowledges multiple forms of accessing knowledge and
truth: "through scientific investigation, through creative expression, through
conversation, … through service within the school community and beyond." All
state standards are far more simple-minded.
• Sidwell recognizes that schooling is about both individual learning and learning
how to work together well with others. "Work on individual skills and knowledge
is balanced with group learning, in which each person's unique insights contribute
to a collective understanding."
• Sidwell is a school that focuses on personalization of learning and on educating
the whole person.
"Above all," its literature declares, "we seek to be a school that nurtures
a genuine love of learning and teaches students ‘to let their lives speak.'
" Sidwell's central ambition is "to recognize and nurture each person's unique
gifts."
Yes, Sidwell Friends is an expensive private school; the tuition is about $29,000
a year. And it has one teacher on staff for every seven students—plus small
classes and expensive facilities.
But Sidwell's commitment to implementing a post-modern paradigm of schooling
based on the personalization of learning, a global and multicultural curriculum,
an emphasis on ecology and environmental stewardship, service to others, multiple
forms of knowledge, and personal responsibility and excellence has little to
do with money. It's driven primarily by the value of educating the whole person,
and any school in America could enact a program founded on that same value.
If Barack and Michelle Obama have abandoned industrial-paradigm, modernist schooling
and have chosen to send Malia and Sasha to a post-modern school focused on the
personalization of learning in the context of a caring, responsible school community,
isn't it time for every family in the nation to have the same opportunity?
And if President Obama sends his own kids to such a school, why are he and Arne
Duncan advocating policies that would intensify the most defective features
of industrial schooling, rather than trying to transform schools to make them
more like Sidwell Friends?
David Marshak is a lecturer in the Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies
and the Woodring College of Education at Western Washington University, in Bellingham,
Wash., and is a professor emeritus at Seattle University. Education Week Published
Online: August 3, 2009
Educating for Individuality
by
Lynn Stoddard
What will happen if our schools give up trying to standardize students,
but instead, decide to help students develop their unique sets of talents, gifts,
interests and abilities? Why not have high standards for nurturing positive
human individuality?
What will happen if we do it?
Some of the following things are already happening in a few private schools
like the one the Obama girls attend, but should be available for all of America's
children:
Teaching is restored as an honored and highly sought profession. Student
and teacher drop-outs decrease. School will be interesting, challenging and
exciting again. Parents will become meaningfully involved as partners to help
children develop as individuals. Crime rates will decrease. Self-chosen, home
study will replace teacher-assigned home work. Individual achievement and knowledge
will soar as students investigate their own interests and develop their own
talents. Cooperation and collaboration replaces most competition. Portfolios
and presentations will replace all but teacher and student-made assessments.
Hands-on investigations replace busywork sheets. Teachers will nurture curiosity,
creativity and problem-solving. Students will fall in love with reading and
increase in their zest for truth and knowledge.
A huge mistake is about to be made under the banner, "National Standards." The
National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the
Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) are unveiling a plan to develop
common English-language Arts and Mathematics standards across the nation. They
call it the "Common Core State Standards Initiative."
The plan is for subject matter specialists to decide what all students should
know and be able to do at each grade level. It is a call to develop student
uniformity at a higher level. Achievement tests will be administered to track
and compare progress across the states. Standards for uniformity? Is this an
oxymoron?
Is it possible to have high standards for doing the wrong things? It makes sense
for factories that produce products to have standards for uniformity, but what
about schools? Should they be operated like factories, with quality controls
(achievement tests) to make sure each "product" is the same?
Why do so many people believe it is the main business of schools to develop
human uniformity? The current push for uniformity shows that large numbers of
people have developed a false belief about what education is for. They are exhibiting
what George Odiorne calls, "the activity trap."
In 1974 he said, "Most people get caught in the (curriculum) trap. They get
so enmeshed in (curriculum) they lose sight of why they are doing it and the
(curriculum) becomes a false goal, and end in itself."
This may be the reason our society holds uniform student achievement in curriculum
as the main goal and purpose of schooling. Evidence for this is the courses
students are required to take (such as algebra) for graduation from high school.
Achievement in curriculum is what policymakers try to assess. By so doing it
dictates to teachers, with false goals, the methods they use. Standardized tests
force teachers to ignore the vast differences in students and try to make them
all alike in the knowledge and skills that are assessed.
Victor Weisskopf said "People cannot learn by having information pressed into
their brains. Knowledge has to be sucked into the brain, not pushed in."
If "national standards for student uniformity" get installed in schools
across the nation, it will force teachers to press information into the brains
of students as fast as possible. They will not be able to wait for the "urge
to know" to develop in each child. They will "teach" the prescribed curriculum
in a direct manner and accept the illusion that significant learning has occurred.
In reality the knowledge will only be shallow and temporary as it has always
been in a standardized, test-based school system.
Now you have a choice. Do nothing and get national standards for student uniformity
imposed on your schools. OR ….. Write or call newspapers, legislators, the president,
school board members, neighbors, teachers, your governor and others to help
stop national standards for uniformity from becoming a reality. Ask them to
start a movement toward educating for student individuality. If we develop high
standards that nurture human diversity, standards that nurture and address our
talents and our infinite variety, we will dignify not only our children and
our profession but indeed, all of us.
Lynn Stoddard is a founding member of the Educating for Human Greatness Alliance.
He lives in Farmington, Utah and can be reached at lstrd@yahoo.com.
Lynn Stoddard, 793 S. 200 E., Farmington, UT 84025 (801) 451-2554