Public Education: Start Again

If you could start from zero, what would public education look like?

Posts Tagged ‘education’

The New Home For Self-Directed Education

Posted by Stephen Dill on July 5, 2017

The Alliance for Self-Directed Education (ASDE) was formed in 2016 to bring together the many people and organizations who espouse the belief that children are manifestly equipped to educate themselves. From the website, self-directed.org, we read:

The Alliance for Self-Directed Education (ASDE) is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to informing people about the benefits of, and methods for, allowing children and adolescents to direct their own education. The Alliance’s ultimate goal, its vision, is a world in which Self-Directed Education is embraced as a cultural norm and is available to all children, everywhere, regardless of their family’s status, race, or income.

For many who have been in any way involved, the recurring, exasperated wonderment persists: why there are still so many forced to learn things they will never use, and so few taking advantage of the ever-more readily available learning environments? And yet, from certain vantage points, it is clear that the population of self-directed learners is growing quite large. And data is finally being collected to document their lifestyles and outcomes. And it’s good!

So that is what the Alliance wants to amplify. There is a reason to hope. The possibility exists in our lifetime to see lifelong, self-directed education become the norm. The movement is real, and it’s time to collect the converted and bind them together. That is the role of the Alliance: collect the disparate and provide the support they need to offer their children and themselves the opportunity to pursue their own passions and interests.

Join the Alliance today and become a part of the active forums sharing questions, experiences, and resources. Support the Alliance and feel good about being a contributor to one of the most important improvements to life and mankind currently underway.

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We Are Not Alone!

Posted by Stephen Dill on February 17, 2013

The premise of this site is the idea that the system we call public education is broken. In the years since its launch, I have come to know that the concept of education itself is flawed as it’s perceived by most—that it’s learning that is what we need a new system for. Learning is individual, education is generally seen as a group activity.

As with many ideas that challenge years of status quo, the idea of starting over to build a new system—much less one that puts the responsibility on the individual much earlier than most are comfortable with—there are many who feel this to be ludicrous, ignorant, rash, even anti-social. So when you cross paths with those who feel as you do, you want to make sure that others know – strength in numbers, right? Thus it was a pleasant surprise to find this on Ira Socol’s blog:

If education in the United States of the 21st Century is failing, that failure has been built over a very long time. And I do not think that it can be “fixed” in any meaningful way unless people understand that the failures we see today are our system working exactly as it was intended to.

Yes, that’s what I’m saying. Our American public education system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. It is separating “winners” from “losers” and it is reinforcing our economic gap. The system was designed in the 1840s and at the turn of the 20th Century to separate society into a vast majority of minimally trained industrial workers and a small, educated elite. It was designed to enforce White, Protestant, Middle-Class, “Typically-abled” standards on an increasingly diverse American population. A few blessed children in each generation who met those standards might move up in society. The rest would be consigned to low wage manual labor. It was designed to ensure that the children of the elites had the opportunities they needed to remain the elite. Everything about the system – from the way schools are funded, to the way standards are created, to the system of tests, to our peculiar form of college admissions, to our notions of disability – was created to meet the employment goals of the United States from the mid 19th Century to the mid 20th Century.

Unfortunately we are 50 years past that historic moment, and we are no longer happy with the results.

But if you want different results you will not get there through changing teachers, or changing managers, or expecting more from students. You can only change the results by changing the system itself.

Ira Socol, education technology professor and consultant.This concept of a class-motivated altruism motivation behind public education is found repeatedly in education histories. But those same histories rarely draw the conclusion that the system built upon it is impossible to fix and should be replaced. It’s a key element in the argument for revolution, but it falls on deaf ears when parents hear it. Ira goes on to discuss the debilitating effects of age-based segmentation, grades, and the inadvertent constraints placed on teachers, making it near impossible to adjust curriculum to the individuals they are charged to inspire and guide toward learning. Those are the topics that raise the interest and pulse of parents. Talk about societies and you lose every parent long before they read the punchline. But talk about children being denied their individuality, their independence, their democratic rights, their promising future and more and you have completely engaged those same parents.

For those who have read this site, these are familiar points, some may wonder if there will ever be progress. The good news is there is change afoot. Observing the various homeschooling groups and pages on Facebook, the many listservs for democratic schools, and the rise of unschooling in mainstream press (albeit misunderstood and often with incorrectly characterized methods), there are signs that access to alternatives is being sought by many more students and their parents who have realized that their dissatisfaction with public education is not their fault and can be remedied.

Stay tuned – soon there will be an announcement here of a new site offering knowledge and resources for those who seek to change their circumstances and options for learning.

Many thanks to Ira for being another voice in the growing chorus for revolution.

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Is There Time For Ed Reform? Or Is It Time For Revolution?

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 the 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 on 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!?!?

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Amen, Brother!

Posted by Stephen Dill on September 21, 2010

The Dalai LamaThis 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!

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The Slow Awakening

Posted by Stephen Dill on August 5, 2010

The total reboot of global public education (which will no longer be public, by the way, but personal—what we call private now) is going to take time. Lots of time. I call it my 150-year project because I suspect it will take at least that long to bring about. However, every day there are more and more small signs that thinking individuals are coming to the conclusion that the foundations of the current education system are no longer appropriate, as indicated by the poor results of the system built upon them.

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.

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Frank Feather on today’s education systems

Posted by Stephen Dill on November 22, 2008

Frank Feather

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!

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Mission: Gather the best minds, ponder the responses to starting over, decide a course, begin.

Posted by Stephen Dill on December 23, 2007

The idea for this forum has been a long time in coming. It began with an observation from the spouse of a preschool director. After hearing so many stories of what some parents called parenting, the following goal was penned in a journal: “to teach people to parent as well as we teach them to give birth.”

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

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