Solutions
In the interest of full disclosure, let me state here that I am not an expert in the field of education or education reform. Expertise will come from the contributors. However, others have told me that I have come up with some unique and successful solutions to challenges and quandaries. That said, when called on to brainstorm a challenge in an industry I am unfamiliar with (a fairly common occurrence in marketing), I test my thoughts constantly against those who have the depth of experience that I lack. Where I can usually tell when I have gone off track, the solution I have developed in concept for the problems that public education face and cause have obviously gone well beyond where educators feel comfortable. So while they have not called me crazy, neither can they tell me that I am on target. However, based on the consistency of my thoughts over the past two years, I will trust my intuition and take the risk to convey the ideas I have been turning over and over. I will trust in those who read these thoughts to either suggest modifications, additions, or total abandonment. But to those tempted to recommend the latter, be forewarned that I will challenge you to come up with reasons why this will not work, and then ask for your solutions to get to the goal.
Premise
Looking at most education reform efforts, it strikes me that most of them are modifications of the 20th Century system. I propose a 21st Century system based on these objectives:
- Extend education throughout life. Make it a part of our daily lives and have it begin with birth and end soon after death.
- Take education out of centralized buildings (schools) and make it the responsibility of the family, community, nation, and the world.
- Leverage technology to enable everyone to have access to the same resources.
Already some of you reading this are thinking utopia. Wait until you read the scenario. But I am convinced that the hard part is not imagining what can be, it is getting there. The transition from where we are to where we ultimately need to be will be an uphill battle, for all the entrenched constituencies.
Scenario
Let’s look at this from the perspective of the individual and step it out to the world.
World culture > US culture > US education system > Individuals
- 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.
- Youth education begins in the home using modules with lessons for parent, child and siblings.
- Individual education is an individual’s obligation to society, advocated by federal law, supported by employers, communities and families.
- Course topics cross all philosophies, languages, religions and beliefs for the old and the young they are teaching.
- Team teaching is carried out in playgroups in neighborhoods in homes, community centers, parks and businesses. Groups of adults of all ages with similar interests meet in public and corporate settings as well as virtually within collaborative Web environments. Parents and children gather in homes and community centers, sharing interests and research and reporting progress among peers.
- When the individual exhibits enough maturity, progress is self-determined, self-monitored and presented to the relevant communities for input and use by others.
- Learning happens in life: in the workplace, the libraries, on the farms, in the factories of the immediate and adjacent neighborhoods.
- Scheduling, networking and cross leveling of resources is supported online.
- Education is not seen as a formal stage of life, instead a life-long habit of reading, reflecting, exchanging and growing.
World culture > US culture > US education system
- Facilitates discussions about learning, living and life.
- Teaches self esteem, self-confidence and the value of improving one’s self, community, nation, world and legacy.
- Gradually returns school buildings to alternative uses.
World culture > US culture
- Gradually encourages lifelong learning
- Respect for generations, races and all differences is built into every person’s thinking as they learn to rely on more and more people in order to learn, to carry out their obligation.
World culture
- Understanding and respect for nationalities, beliefs, generations, races and all differences is built into every person’s thinking as they learn to rely on more and more people in order to learn, to carry out their obligation.
Obviously, there is a lot more to this than these bullets. But I suspect the picture begins to take shape for most, so let us start the discussion here and see where it goes.
Dan Spira said
Nice work with this site, Stephen! Your overly humble disclosures aside, I believe you are more than qualified to state the challenges of public education as you have done, and reframe the potential solutions in terms of integrated, life-long learning.
A lot of what you’ve written here reminds me of what I’ve seen in certain families and certain cultural traditions, which place learning at the center of family and community life. Conversely, I’ve seen families and cultural traditions where the situation is quite the opposite. I imagine the solution scenarios you describe, where we bring the school closer to the home, would play out very differently depending on the household. In fact, I think your modest proposal requires that certain values be in place within all U.S. communities, and this is the primary reason (along with entrenched institutions, agrarian traditions, etc.) that we won’t see your vision play out so quickly.
Long term, I guess one could argue that the dismantling of centralized schools would force parents to accept that their child’s education is their primary responsibility… but that transition would probably be a very messy process.
What about the centralized education system’s role as a social/national “glue,” through which we establish cultural norms and national identity? One could argue that the “glue” has come undone anyway, that we live in a more culturally fragmented world, etc. etc., but in reality, there is still a lot of acculturation that takes place through the school system. Perhaps the transition path from our current system to the one you describe would be to leverage whatever influence is left in “the system” to push forward those values needed to make your approach more viable? Worse case, we keep the public school system, but at least we’re imparting values of self-guided, life-long learning to the next generation.
Either that, or someone has to figure out how to impart those values, en-masse, through Facebook, MySpace, X-box and Wii.
srdill said
Dan,
You picked up on a theme that has recurred to me often: there are historic cultural precedents that have produced reliable, consistent education results for centuries. History and methods were preserved and progressed, societies flourished, and there was little difference in the economics, much less knowledge, among the communities. Over and over I see the “one-to-few” passing of lessons and history from elder to youth throughout time as an antidote to the lack of technology. It stands to reason that with the quantum advancement of communication technology we now enjoy allowing “one-to-many” distribution that we should by now have seen the reversal of the economic and knowledge inequities brought on by the industrial age. Instead, we have ever-widening disparities in the results from the world’s public education systems.
The tendency is to overlay this unfamiliar new system over today’s familiar economy and cultures and expect a perfect match. The two cannot coexist. Imagine instead the majority of the world home schooling and you will be closer to the end state that we must move to. The transition would be gradual, starting with the development of curriculum and supporting materials and systems for couples as they conceive. Once prepared, communities—perhaps states or nations—will ‘turn on’ this new system and with each new conception plug the parents into classes, coaches and support groups. Learning how to parent and how to begin speaking to their child in utero would be coached and counseled by community members proven to have good knowledge and teaching skills. Five to six years later the local public schools would start the new year with no incoming kindergarten class, the five-year olds having been learning among their communities for most of their life. Each year, one more class would be eliminated in the schools.
The problem with the acculturation that you attribute to our present school systems is the variance and inconsistency of the product. Bigotry, anger, intolerance and violence resulting anywhere is a sure sign that the system is not capable of inculcating the proper respect, attitudes and understanding necessary to be a responsible global citizen. In this new concept, a coalition of parents and adults of all ages would take part in the raising of every child. As each child proved their proficiency in increasing numbers of subjects, they too would become teachers. Students for any one instructor could be local or distant, using the Internet to connect and various directories to find the right instructor. Cultural learning would be homogenized as more of what we learned was taught by people of different backgrounds, races, native languages and cultures. Replicate that model hundreds of thousands of times across a state, millions of times across a nation, and billions of times around the world and there is bound to be a paradigm shift in the role of parents, the integration of child rearing into career management, and a transfer of the social/national glue you refer to from the schools we have now to the broader environment of communities known as the world.
The first few cohorts may be rough going, there are many who were never raised by one or more full-time parents. These are the people I see around me who do not know it is their responsibility to toilet train their child, thinking that is the preschool’s task. These are the dual-income parents who want the preschool to feed their child because they are too busy in the morning to handle it. But over time, this new approach is sure to introduce these people to peers who have figured it out, or who took advantage of the many good books, or who had wonderful role models in their parents.
Does this make sense? Am I missing something? Is there a reason we should not have this for our progeny?
Thanks again for your input Dan. I invite you and others to sound this out and return with more aspects of the challenge we face in bringing about this transition.
Jeff Camp said
A framework for thinking about the various approaches that people take to making schools work better can be found at http://www.fullcirclefund.org/education.php. (Look for the Education Impact Guide.)
The Guide doesn’t purport to be a book of solutions — just an aid to thinking and learning about the options. It is organized around an intentionally banal statement: “Education is Students and Teachers spending Time In a Place for Learning with the Right Stuff and a System that Supports Success.”
Full Circle Fund is a volunteer organization in the San Francisco Bay Area. Its members come from businesses, non profits, and public sector organizations.
Alicia said
In terms of education reform, I believe The Partnership for 21st Century Skills is doing some nice work. What I value the most is how they are weaving creativity skills into core learning.
The solutions outlined on this page made think of the 1/2 hour I spent with my son’s kindergarten class last week. I am currently studying for an MS in Creativity, Innovation and Change Leadership at Buffalo State…and I am also interested in education. One of the techniques we learned at Buffalo is called TIM (Torrance Incubation Model for Teaching and Learning). In a nutshell, TIM can be used for teaching core educational subjects while weaving in creativity skills.
Before I dove into developing the lesson I asked my son to show me how he learned to skip count in class (his class was familiar with counting by 5’s and 10’s). He said he needed some blocks, so we went to the toy room and he started sifting through Legos to collect all the blue double blocks. Well, we didn’t have enough blocks to skip count by 2’s up to 30.
When I asked my son to substitute a different colored block, he met my question with a blank stare. He had been conditioned to counting with blue blocks and was unable to switch colors or use different materials. I found this experience enlightening and figured if my son’s young mind was already set on a particular method for skip counting, then introducing flexibility might help his classmates as well.
I decided to us TIM and teach skip counting while weaving in the creativity skill of flexibility. In reflecting on TIM with my son’s teacher, she was amazed at how challenging it was for her class to think outside of the box. To warm up, I worked on mental flexibility (which turned out to be physical flexibility too). I put two pieces of tape about 3 feet apart and asked the students to cross from one piece of tape to the other any which way they’d like – the caveat…they had to make their crossing unique and couldn’t copy anyone else. Of the 18 students, about 12 wanted to participate. Some skipped, some hopped, some crossed like a hamster while one student chose to do a somersault and another did a cartwheel.
Through debriefing on this warm up the students said at first they could only think of one way to cross – walking…and they were surprised to learn of the other 12 ways. This opened the door to showing how there are multiple methods to skip count by two’s. We used paper clips, a number chart and an addition worksheet. Each student “experimented” with the different methods to see if each would provide the same solution (i.e. 2, 4, 6, 8, 10…)
The best part of this exercise was when my son’s teacher said she was going to integrate flexibility into her teaching method. She had an “AHA” moment in realizing some of the students felt uncomfortable thinking on their own and not being able to look to a teacher to take their lead.
Stephen Dill said
Alicia, thank you so much for this example of how even “good” (and certainly well-meaning) teachers can still miss crucial developmental triggers in the training of another human being. I have told this story a half-dozen times among parents and teachers and the punch line, as it were, always hits them the same: “Oh! Of course! I see how that could happen.”
Teaching almost anything is not easy, but if we were all teachers, taught by people using tools that made sure our learning style was accommodated, the topic was soundly covered, there was room to explore to satisfy our curiosity, etc., etc. then we would likely see a rise in the quality of teachers, comprehension, and retention. Don’t you think? The secret is a change of culture to encourage life-long learning.
Keep us posted on other learnings along the trail to your MS, won’t you?