Peter Gray’s “Freedom To Learn”Posted by Stephen Dill on December 31, 2011
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 3,100 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 52 trips to carry that many people.
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Posted by Stephen Dill on June 2, 2011
So if education is unique to the individual, why is it that most students are forced to learn what all their peers are learning at the same time? And why must they learn it in the same way as everyone else? And why must they be tested in the same way as their peers, and be judged as having learned the topic only if they can recite as much or more of the facts than the majority of their peers?
Alfie Kohn, long known as an advocate for the rights of the student, has carried on a lifelong effort to eradicate the stress of homework and AP testing. In a panel discussion held in Atlanta after a showing of Race To Nowhere, Kohn and others on the panel point to the flaws of the current education system for all the reasons most ANPE readers are familiar with: high-stakes testing, homework before high school, imperfect college admission measures, and more.
Kohn also gives advice to parents who are looking for solutions to support their children’s inner urge to find their passion, or at best to cope with the environment that they are submersed in today. Take the 20 minutes to hear this interesting panel discussion:
Race to Nowhere: Atlanta Panel Discussion from Vicki Abeles on Vimeo.
And while on the topic of Race To Nowhere, the creator and director of the movie, Vicki Abeles, is in the process of collecting stories for a book. If you have a story to tell, go to the RTN site and share it with her. Keep us posted if you have something accepted for the book! Below is my submittal:
For so many reasons well documented elsewhere, public education in the United States and around the world today is a highly unpredictable system. We cannot expect consistent results in one school over 5 years, much less the entire nation. What if we started over? What would it look like?
My 150-year goal is to be the catalyst to bring about that discussion and the design of a new education system. One that recognizes that education begins at conception and continues after death as others learn from our examples. Education that is natural and exciting, customized and managed by the individual, always a part of our lives—either as students or teachers.
As described in more detail on AllNewPublicEducation.com, youth education is seen as a family function, augmented by a volunteer force of seniors, retirees, and experts available in the immediate and adjacent communities performing the roles of teacher, coach and mentor. Such an individual education is an individual’s obligation to society, advocated by federal law, supported by employers, communities and families.
Such an individualized system will probably not be public, as so much will change and move away from centralized buildings, busing, chronologic and geographic groupings, and all the trappings of the industrial-age society that created it. Instead, education will leverage technology to connect students with common interests across any and all boundaries when they are ready to learn or teach a subject. Learning happens in life: in the workplace, the libraries, on the farms, in the factories of the immediate and adjacent neighborhoods. Education is not seen as a formal stage of life, instead a life-long habit of reading, reflecting, exchanging and growing.
And with a new system, we need to accept that “success” will not be determined by test scores. Not all those individuals are going to want to study languages, math, science, engineering or art—at least not at the exact same time as everyone else born the year they were born. They may not test with their peers, ever. They may outshine their peers, or lag behind, but they will be creative individuals, leaders, innovators guiding their own lives at their own pace. When the individual exhibits enough maturity, progress is self-determined, self-monitored, and presented to the relevant communities for input and use by others.
I have a dream for my kid’s kids to live in a world where education starts at conception: parents are taught how to parent and raise a world citizen. Education is a daily occurrence for everyone in this world, for everyone is a student and a teacher, as soon as they have something to teach. Classes are local or worldwide, alone with a teacher or hundreds of students working one-on-one with a teacher in a hub-and-spoke topology aided by technology and managed by the student. In such a world, nations do not measure their success by how many hoops they can teach their children to jump through.
Let us all hope that we can begin the process of revolutionizing education in our lifetimes for the benefit of our progeny, and of the world.
For those who have read the site, you will recognize much of that is covered in the Solutions page. But for some of you new to the site and this topic, I would encourage you to explore the site beyond the blog to better understand the concept and inspire your own systems design thoughts. What would a wholly-new education system look like to you?
Posted in Action Steps, Mission | Tagged: Alfie Kohn, Atlanta showing, high-stakes testing, homework, individualized learning, Race To Nowhere, SAT tests, Vicki Abeles | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Stephen Dill on May 24, 2011
I am slowly beginning to realize that there are many people alive today who consider the current public education system as dysfunctional and out of synch with human nature as I do. For those who I have already crossed paths with, I want to hear who you are running into in life who share our perception, if not our commitment to create a new system. Keep us posted!
In that vein, I wanted to alert you all to a wonderful resource I was fortunate enough to meet and spend an afternoon with. Peter Gray is a research psychologist who recently retired from teaching at Boston College. He is the author of the primary textbook for college-level instruction, Psychology. I ran across Peter’s thoughts on education through the blog of a fellow education revolutionary who was extolling Peter’s bravery in calling public schools prisons. Peter’s blog, Freedom To Learn, struck a chord in every post I read, as I am sure they will for you:
We can use all the euphemisms we want, but the literal truth is that schools, as they generally exist in the United States and other modern countries, are prisons. Human beings within a certain age range (most commonly 6 to 16) are required by law to spend a good portion of their time there, and while there they are told what they must do, and the orders are generally enforced. They have no or very little voice in forming the rules they must follow. A prison–according to the common, general definition–is any place of involuntary confinement and restriction of liberty.
That from a wonderful post Seven Sins of Our System of Forced Education, one of the first I read of Peter’s writings. Needless to say, I was intrigued with his insights and assessments of the true nature of our current system. A link off this post took me to an even more exciting conviction that I had been harboring for some time, that children are more than capable of educating themselves, given the right environment, trust and support. Here’s a small piece of a very important post titled, Children Educate Themselves I: Outline of Some of the Evidence:
We do not have to worry about curricula, lesson plans, motivating children to learn, testing them, and all the rest that comes under the rubric of pedagogy. Lets turn that energy, instead, toward creating decent environments in which children can play. Children’s education is children’s responsibility, not ours. Only they can do it. They are built to do it. Our task regarding education is just to stand back and let it happen. The more we try to control it, the more we interfere.
Now do you see why I am so excited to have met Peter Gray? I encourage you to read all that you can of Peter’s blog and spread the word. Peter’s interests are focused on the lessons to be learned from hunter-gatherer cultures and how they raise their young, also the influence of play as an education-rich environment. Any and all expertise in those fields of research could benefit our cause greatly, who do you know?
Posted in Action Steps, Ideas | Tagged: Freedom To Learn, hunter gatherers, Peter Gray, Schools as prisons | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Stephen Dill on May 5, 2011
Salmon Khan is a remarkably humble man. He just did what he was able to do in his free time. Then some guy named Gates caught on to what he was doing and felt he should do it full time. And the Khan Academy was born. Watch this TED Talk and ponder the potential that both Khan and Gates speak of:
Doesn’t this address some of the most pressing problems that All New Public Education faces?
I’m off to brush up on my calculus, I’ll keep an eye out for your comments.
Posted in Action Steps, Ideas, Resources | Tagged: agrarian age education, Bill Gates, Khan Academy, multi-disciplined, new educational systems, Salman Khan, self-directed education, student-centric education, TED Talks | 1 Comment »
Posted by Stephen Dill on March 8, 2011
The President is asking for your advice. In a program called Advise The Advisor, Melody Barnes, Director of the Domestic Policy Council and one of President Obama’s senior advisors on education policy, is asking for feedback from parents, teachers and students about what’s working in their communities and what needs to change when it comes to education. There is a promise within her video that all responses submitted before end of the day Friday (3/11/11) will be read by White House staffers and compiled into a summary document for review by the President and his advisors.
Here is what I submitted. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts of what you would have said (or did) in the “under 2,500 characters” they asked for.
Our system is antiquated, built on foundations that could not scale with America and have not provided consistent results for decades. When a system is broken it is a waste of time to focus on bandages if no one is developing a cure for the cause. Can we entertain a two-pronged approach that maintains buildings and programs for a little while longer while another team starts from square one? The smartest investment would be a new system that is in tune with the future: distributed, decentralized and individual. A system that is not based on capital-intense administration and buildings. One that affords every citizen the same opportunity, not just what their community can afford. We need to put a team together to rethink education from scratch.
And with a new system, we need to accept that success will not be determined by test scores. Not all those individuals are going to want to study languages, math, science, engineering or art—at least not at the exact same time as everyone else born the year they were born. They may not test with their peers, ever. They may outshine their peers, or lag behind, but they will be creative individuals, leaders, innovators guiding their own lives at their own pace.
I have a dream for my kid’s kids to live in a world where education starts at conception: parents are taught how to parent and raise a world citizen. Education is a daily occurrence for everyone in this world, for everyone is a student and a teacher, as soon as they have something to teach. Classes are local or worldwide, alone with a teacher or hundreds of students working one-on-one with a teacher in a hub-and-spoke topology aided by technology and managed by the student. In such a world, nations do not measure their success by how many hoops they can teach their children to jump through.
Let us all hope that we can begin the process of revolutionizing education in our lifetimes for the benefit of our progeny, and of the world.
(and then I pointed them to this site)
Bottom line: is there really anyone out there who thinks that Ed Reform is going to direct the system we have to any semblance of stability? Consistency? Humanity? And isn’t there still that messy issue of mass testing to determine “success” (whatever that means)? How did we ever buy the idea that our child was the same as any child their age? On every continent!?!?
Posted in Ideas, Legislation, Mission | Tagged: education, education reform, individualized education plan, individualized learning, Online education, President's Education Agenda, public education | 5 Comments »
Posted by Stephen Dill on January 5, 2011
In the new education paradigm, education will be a lifelong habit. With the demand to stay up with the pace of change as motivation and the positive effect of learning something new as incentive, each of us will be students throughout our lives, starting at conception and continuing until death. Some may ask, “Why isn’t this happening now?” No simple answers, but “education” for so many has been nothing but a dim memory for the majority of their lives. And most of what they remember is the dominating teachers, worthless courses, embarrassing failures, sleepless nights, and for some, physical abuse of their “formative years.” On top of that, society demanded that they leave whatever dreams or passions may have been inspired during their youth behind them and immerse themselves in the rat race.
A minority of the world population can delay that call to labor by attending a secondary institution, and fewer still go on to masters degrees and doctorates, but that’s expensive. Therein lies another factor for why education isn’t close to lifelong now: the investment is daunting and the return in economic terms is hard to determine. In other words, the world’s societies do not support lifelong education.
Reading through Nurture Shock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman is a wake-up call for anyone who is a parent, wants to be a parent, or has ever thought about how human development happens in children of all ages. Leaving full descriptions of the book to others, let’s cut to the chase: most parents of the last 30 years have been operating on the assumption that they had an innate sense of what was best for their children. According to science, very few did. Sample a few of the chapter titles and you will begin to get the picture:
Are you beginning to understand why I was so excited as I read this book? The concept of “education starts at conception” was driven by one of the two observations explained in the first post (the Mission Statement) that spawned the whole idea of starting public education over: “Teach people to parent as well as we teach them to give birth.”
Sounded good, but I was not clear on what the curriculum was going to be based on. Now I am, or at least some of it. Beyond this will be elements of nutrition, financial management, career planning, and the crucial skills of how to learn by teaching. First their first (or next) child in utero, then others in the community that builds around them to support them and model the new world of education as lifestyle.
What could we expect for outcomes? Individually we should begin to hear of, witness, or experience for ourselves fewer examples of dysfunctional home environments. In the first few years after the program launch, society begins to see the benefits in lowered instances of pediatric medical demand, better nutrition, decreased childhood obesity, and more.
Think communal living on a global scale. Gradually everyone becomes more comfortable with higher levels of interpersonal interaction among families on both a local level and globally with online communities for learning, coaching, and support. This results in better socialization (for all ages!), greater awareness of everyone’s individuality and understanding of those differences, and overall improvement of lifestyles and life expectations. Coming into contact with so many more diverse populations heightens interest in sharing what we know and learning more.
Idealistic, I know. But there has to be a better way to inspire a desire for lifelong learning into the minds of every human being than the system we have now. And I do not believe it unreasonable to expect widespread societal improvements as an offshoot of such a system. (Ergo, I suspect there are numerous correlations between the ills of society today and the education system we are saddled with. But that is a distinctly different discussion!)
Posted in Mission | Tagged: community of learning, first teachers, Nurture Shock, parenting | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Stephen Dill on November 7, 2010
As already established under the Current Problem tab: “The majority of schools work on an annual calendar that was driven by the needs of an agrarian society. The curriculum still largely reflects the needs of the industrial age.” But there’s more! I posit that the roadblock to developing anyone’s individualized education plan is the very funding mechanism of public education: the public! Inherent in the school laws from the very start of this nation is the concept that the collected opinion of the residents of any town, state or nation—otherwise known as government—would know what you the individual would need to know throughout your life. And while that mandate to provide teachers for small communities and grammar schools for larger communities was a great step forward for the progress of mankind, there was never an assessment process put in place to make sure the system was relevant and in step with the times.
While appropriate for its day (and the three centuries afterward), the inexorable inertia of that concept has burdened society with a financial commitment the founders could never have foreseen and put those who are aware of poor results of the “one size fits all” education system in a rather daunting predicament. How DO we alter our education system to address the needs of the individual?
Try this on for size: what if education of the public was a private matter? Not privatizing public education, but disassembling public education and turning it over to every citizen. What if the only “public” piece was the online infrastructure that allowed every parent, child, young adult, and adult to research, find, and schedule learning experiences?
While I have been thinking about this for years, a Facebook note from Chris Brogan pushed me to get this out to the rest of you. Lifelong learning, a core concept behind All New Public Education, is a highly individual experience. As Sugata Mitra has proven, when given the chance, every single person is going to follow a unique path to learning. What the current system institutes beyond grade 12 and age 18 (two archaic frames of reference) could actually occur much earlier (or later), and should be encouraged to happen throughout life: we each are willing to find and pay for our individual education. We are long past the mass education that Frank Feather speaks of elsewhere in this blog. It’s time to put in place a system that allows for the changes in course that all of us go through in our lives.
Recent discussions with Michelle Rhee and other educators on this topic reveal that most people in public education feel strongly that there are core subjects that everyone must be taught at an early age. For example, from Ms. Rhee:
I agree that not every child learns in the same way, and great teachers are able to individualize instruction to address those differences. We also need to make sure kids have real world skills when they exit the system, and should definitely be ensuring that children get outside the classroom and take advantage of all kinds of learning environments throughout their years in public school. But I also believe in teaching the core skills you mention below [I had cited history, arts, language, and science], and believe they can be taught in the classroom.
Is it just me, or do others hear this as the response of someone convinced that government must pay for education, and as a result, must test and grade as proof of money well spent? If education is about learning what a person is passionate about, and that changes throughout their lifetime, then the only one who determines if they have learned enough is the student. Eliminate the government funding and you return the responsibility for personal education to the person. If every course cost you money, would you have bought some of the topics you were forced to (presumably, temporarily) learn throughout your public school years (or private school, for that matter)?
I hear the exclamations now: “You’d let a child decide what they want to learn and when?!?” Yes, and no. Children will be part of a team; no one should have to operate in a vacuum. That team will be a fabric made up of parents, relatives, neighbors, and teachers the parents have learned from themselves or otherwise identified as being well suited to facilitate in children the realization of how to learn. This is society as humans once knew it, extended ‘families’ of mutual support, the trappings of which are still practiced in some of the least modernized nations. Imagine bringing the technology of interconnection into such a social fabric! Now the fabric includes people in locations dispersed throughout the world, relationships forged by mutual interests and experiences. There is the best spend for public funds: the network of resources and the process to take advantage of those resources. Can you imagine how different life would be if our property taxes didn’t have to support education?
As Ms. Rhee and a few others have pointed out, this sounds more like a philosophical discussion than education reform. Not being clairvoyant, I cannot say what the future holds, but I can only hope that other dramatic cultural and societal change has come to the world from asking a similar question: if we could start all over from scratch, what would it look like? If so, that means there is hope that such history will repeat itself and we will see a world of lifelong learners. Until then—or at least for the next 70 years or so—I will keep asking the question. Will you?
Posted in Ideas, Mission | Tagged: education system, individualized education plan, individualized learning, lifelong learning, mass education, paying for public education, personal education agenda, private education, privatizing public education, public education, social fabric | 12 Comments »
Posted by Stephen Dill on October 15, 2010
Here is a very compelling presentation by Sir Ken Robinson, of TED Talk fame, animated on a whiteboard as he delivers it to a live audience. The presentation is just under 12 minutes long and it sets the stage for the premise of this website and its fundamental question: why does the world continue to invest in a public education system based on old and outdated precepts that are ineffectual and misguided? If we could start all over, what would we base our new system on and how different would it appear to us today?
Grab a snack or drink, commit to not looking at email and sit back for the 11 minutes to watch this and the 5 minutes your head will be swimming after watching it:
For those readers here for the first time (welcome!), there are some ideas elsewhere on the site on how to fix this predicament we find ourselves in, I would encourage you to read and ponder them. And if anyone has access to Sir Ken, would you suggest that he ring me up so we can stop agreeing on what is wrong and begin figuring out how to build a new system, test it, refine it, then launch it? Thank you!
Posted in Ideas, Mission | Tagged: agrarian age education, divergent thinking, education reform, industrial age education, new educational systems, public education, Sir Ken Robinson | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Stephen Dill on September 21, 2010
This from a series of questions asked the Dalai Lama on his Facebook Page:
Question: How can we teach our children not to be angry? —Robyn Rice, GRAND JUNCTION, COLO.
His Holiness: Children always look to their parents. Parents should be more calm. You can teach children that you face a lot of problems but you must react to those problems with a calm mind and reason. I have always had this view about the modern education system: we pay attention to brain development, but the development of warmheartedness we take for granted.
Can I hear an Amen for that observation!
Posted in Mission | Tagged: Dalai Lama, education | 1 Comment »
Posted by Stephen Dill on August 10, 2010
For those who may have arrived here without ever crossing paths with the groups established on Facebook or LinkedIn, may I suggest that you join both? The viral nature of Facebook makes it particularly well suited to spreading the word on our crucial challenge: how to draw attention away from bandages on the broken systems we have now and onto a meeting of great minds to come up with a whole new strategy. There are good discussions happening on both groups and it’s easy to join in.
One such example is this discussion on teachers, grading, unions, and grassroots versus top-down decisions to bring about the change in systems. It starts by asking how we ask this of President Obama: “If a new concept of public education could increase personal responsibility, raise awareness and tolerance of others, make education available to all people at a lower cost, and broadly improve the lives of all people, would there be any reason you would not want such a program initiated under your administration?”
Any ideas on how to get that in front of him? Looking forward to seeing you on the Facebook and LinkedIn groups soon!
Posted in Ideas, Resources | Tagged: Barack Obama, Facebook, LinkedIn, LONG Overdue, President's Education Agenda | Leave a Comment »
