My childhood neighbor, Judith Scacco Pack—another Facebook reconnection success story, linked to an article from EducationNews.Org and the title caught my eye: Valedictorian Speaks Out Against Schooling in Graduation Speech. Unique as much for its message as the age of the presenter of that message, Erica Goldson politely and respectfully expressed her frustration with the education system to the audience at the graduation ceremony at Coxsackie-Athens High School. In her estimation:

We are so focused on a goal, whether it be passing a test, or graduating as first in the class. However, in this way, we do not really learn. We do whatever it takes to achieve our original objective. Some of you may be thinking, “Well, if you pass a test, or become valedictorian, didn’t you learn something?” Well, yes, you learned something, but not all that you could have. Perhaps, you only learned how to memorize names, places, and dates to later on forget in order to clear your mind for the next test. School is not all that it can be. Right now, it is a place for most people to determine that their goal is to get out as soon as possible.

Ms. Goldson touches on a concordant theme stated elsewhere here on All New Public Education: that “education” is not about standardization, but freedom of expression and lifelong learning. While many may nod their heads and agree to the words, few realize that this means no buildings where all children enter and are sorted by age. This means “classes” unlike any we know now, for classes will be associated by interest, not age or geography, connected by the Internet, unmeasured by tests unless decided by the pupils to have some value to help them learn the topic. Few I speak with can grasp the idea that a child may not begin learning from someone else until they are 12 or older, while other children may become teachers at age 10 without ever having taken formal training from anyone else, either in the topic they are now teaching, or the process of teaching. Throughout time the young mind, unfettered by adult constraints, consistently confounds adult’s preconceived correlations between age and mental acuity and capacity.

“Anarchy!” I hear all the time. If only a few did it, such as the relatively small number pursuing unschooling today, perhaps. But not when everyone does it, the world over. “Utopian,” is another response. Perhaps so, but we once knew the value of teaching by doing; letting children play and work alongside their peers and parents in order to identify their personal interests. But we are talking centuries ago. The last vestige of that culture is still seen in the traditional school year calendar, scheduled originally to allow children to assist the family farm. By 1854 Thoreau wrote in “Walden,”

I mean that they should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics. If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where anything is professed and practised but the art of life; — to survey the world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made, or mechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all around him, while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar. Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month — the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this — or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had received a Rodgers’ penknife from his father? Which would be most likely to cut his fingers?

I applaud Ms. Goldson’s bravery in challenging the status quo and in taking to task the system that almost convinced her that chasing the goal of better grades than anyone else in her class was in her best interests. Erica has joined the many who shake their heads in baffled wonder at how such methods can persist so long after so much conclusive evidence has been accumulated to disprove its validity. Howard Gardner, John Taylor Gatto and all the many others who have paved the way to understanding the need for educational revolution must be very, very patient people.

Frank Feather

I had an opportunity to connect with Frank Feather, the futurist, interim CEO, and advisor to the government of China and ask his view on the current education system. I really enjoyed his perspective, I hope you do too:

Mass education was the best we could do in the Industrial Era, and so we educated people on the basis of the factory model. This is the mass education we have today. It served us well. We could educate masses of people with few teachers, in production-line fashion, in batches. And the subject matter was also taught in batch mode. And that model may still be appropriate for some types of skills training in some environments in some countries. But it is being made obsolete by the Internet Revolution.

The Internet smashes the “mass” model to smithereens. Education must move towards individualized e-learning, where learners can pick and chose material, delivered in an interactive, content-rich, multimedia format, with mentoring or tutoring from a worldwide virtual faculty, learning at their own pace. In this way, virtual classrooms of people can assemble from all over the world, thus also facilitating multi-cultural learning and cross-barrier understanding. In other words, the planet becomes a virtual classroom. People can learn from anywhere. The brick-and-mortar factory-like classroom is obsolete. Developing countries can leap-frog into the e-learning age without ever needing to build classrooms or schools.

As for unintended consequences, the one main objection to e-learning that gets raised by techno-phobic luddites is the negative impact on social skills. This is a fasle fear; a myth. McLuhan observed that the more technology there is that comes into our lives, the more we compensate through social interaction. We are humans. We need social interaction. Yes, there are a few who become addicted to the Web and don’t have much of a social life. But they are the same introverts and isolationists that we have always had. Yet many of them are actually very social online. The Web becomes our social glue. And that is what the social networking phenomenon is all about. The Web will become more social as full multimedia develops, with webcams moving us to full “multimedia mail.” Just this week, Gmail added “video chat” to its toolbar.

But in its simplest form, as McLuhan talked about this, it means that if we use banking machines rather than spending time interacting with bank tellers (and I doubt how social that is anyway), we will find time to talk with other people in other settings instead—even while waiting in line at the banking machine! But the challenge with e-learning is that we need to make sure that young people do develop their social skills, not just via web-cams, but in person with real live humans. And that can be accomplished in local communities. Education needs to perhaps build in some social assignments where students go and participate and then come back and share online—in e-classrooms or on social networks—the human communication skills they learned from the assignment.

I think the biggest challenge to all of this is inertia by educators and governments. Education is threatened by this kind of technology. They naturally fear being replaced, just as did the luddites. And that is because they know they cannot actually compete with this technology, both in its extraordinary capabilities, and in its far lower cost of delivery. How these obstacles will be overcome I am not sure. It probably will start with higher education institutions such as University of Phoenix online. Or in the private school system, such as in Montessori schools, which are far more tactile in their teaching methods. It may simply come through consumer rebellion against the exorbitant cost of university education. Or from governments who cannot afford to pay for public education. There will be a few leaders; more will follow. Then there will come a tipping point and the whole thing will switch over and suddenly will become the popular thing to do. This may take a generation to occur, as when Gen X or Gen Y become the decision makers in education and government, and they take the entire system in new directions.

Clearly there are parallels in what Frank sees with both the current situation described and the solution proposed on this site. At some point soon we must address the transition planning. How will we separate from the infrastructure that is aging in place? Perhaps communities with the oldest facilities should be the pilots. More on that later, but if you have ideas – please share!

That spark began to smolder when I learned that 75% of our town’s budget belonged to the School Department. Nothing against our School Department, a similar number was everywhere I looked. At that point I began asking educators my question, “If you could start over, what would it look like?” and took note of the reactions. No one dismissed the question, and no one had a ready answer. After an appropriate pause I would run my idea of a new public education by them and again, no one shut me down. As with most concepts, the challenges appeared in everyone’s mind long before the solutions, so most conversations never progressed to tangible benefit. I knew I needed a different scenario. But not being known to the world of education theorists and visionaries, at best I could assemble two or three – not enough to yield the weight and momentum I know such change will need behind it to get the flywheel moving. The idea of a blog only recently dawned on me.

Invitations are being extended to those who have established their expertise in public education strategy. The structure of the site will evolve to address the needs of those who want to contribute. For now, let us begin with answers to the primary question: if you could start a new public education system from square one – with no preconceived ideas of what it used to look like, what it has to conform to, even what its metrics of success are – what would it look like?

Stephen Dill