I figured I would just put these here as is because I have no idea when I will finish this.
Things grow and fill the framework around which they are built, water conforms itself to the shape of its vessel, our skin and guts don’t really go much past our skeletal framework, economies follow and shape themselves around the presence and absences of regulations, people adapt themselves and operate within the confines of the mores and traditions of their communities,,, and schools and everything which they do and don’t accomplish all conform and build themselves around the basic unit structure of the traditionalclassroom.
For uniformity or convenience or modularity’s sake, almost all public schools that I know of take the of form of scheduled daily instruction, in a centralized location, in yearly or bi-yearly intervals, segregated by age. This is a very convenient and easily reproducable model because various ideas and educational objectives can be plugged into these set schedules, all you theoretically have to do is vary the curriculum and or the teacher.The problem with this solid and simple model is that it forces students to conform to the needs of the model instead of the model being able conform to the needs of the student.
Through the first 12 years and particularly the first eight, all students, except a few outliers, are grouped and taught according to age. period. In a centralized tiered school sytem where success as a person basically means advancing to the next level, everybody has to move at the same pace. This single speed instruction model means the kids who don’t get it are made to feel dumb and inadequate (and become dismissive of learning, for their own self defense), the kids who do get it feel entitled and unchallenged. And because it’s a one-size-fits-all non-voluntary system, almost everyone is bored out of their minds and could care less.
In seventh grade, one of the most exciting things(schoolwise) was being able to pick your own “electives”, the excitement kindof wore off when you realized that the elective classes were all basically filler “skill” classes and all the core classes were still being force fed to you mass production style, but the notion of choice was still very enticing and even more importantly, it was engaging. Choosing a goal for concrete reasons is the definition of caring about something. If you are just doing something because someone told you to do it, not only do you not care about the actual success of what you are doing beyond its ability to pacify whoever told you to do it, but you are also imprinting the counterproductive moral lesson that success comes from doing what you are told and not from doing what you care about. Though maybe in too many cases that is unfortunately true..
But imagine an education program where students really want to participate, and not in a cheesy let’s sing songs, eat candy, do arts and crafts kind of way, but in a way that is truly meaningful and rewarding on a substantial level.
Many people have recognized and pointed out these problems with the traditional school system before, even suggesting means of mitigating them, but the problem is that most of these solutions don’t really fit into the current framework and end up stifled and unsuccessful or difficult to scale up to a relevant and meaningful size.
I think in order to really make education what we want it to be, the whole organizational design principles of the system need to be flipped. The current system is one in which the objectives of the course have to fit themselves into the predetermined structure of a typical class framework. But If you build a system where the time, shape, composition and curriculum of all courses are all designed around the explicit objectives of the designers you will allow for infinitely more effective and efficient and innovative means of doing whatever it is we as nation decide education should be doing.
Honestly the closest thing to what I am envisioning that exists today is the Boy Scouts education system. I was in Boy scouts as a kid, I didn’t like it and eventually quit for reasons that don’t affect this comparison, but once I had developed some of these ideas, I was surprised to realize just how similar they were to the Boy Scout way of teaching. At the heart of it I am talking about badges, a badge is essentially an assisted self-taught class that the student pursues of their own volition. Once so many badges have been earned in so many areas according to the student’s own pace and ability, the emotional reward of “graduating” in rank is given as a rite of passage.
The beauty of this system is its openness. From an educational policy perspective the overall goals can be set, and then it is up to the millions of students teachers and parents to determine how best to achieve them.
To examine how this might work, we can look at math education. My personal first memory of math education was in kindergarten, and each student had to go individually sit in a chair in the back of the room with the teacher and count from one to one hundred, I remember at the time being amazed that there were kids in the class who couldn’t do this, obviously there were, but it just illustrates the point that teaching one thing to an entire age level of students at vastly different developmental and cognitive levels is an exercise bordering pointlessness. If however, instead of each student following a uniform course and rate of learning, they were just given a set of goals to accomplish at which point they would receive their “badge” at which point new badges would be available to them as well as old badges in other areas. Say we wanted to teach multiplication for example, you could set up a badge where the student had to accomplish some task according to the proper application of a knowledge of multiplication. It could be as simple as a set of tests or it could be something more complicated like building a structure in which using multiplication is necessary to do correctly. By incorporating a larger goal like structure design to which the knowledge of mathematics is integral, you do two important things.
One of the other significant problems of public schools is the student culture, it is the inevitable outcome of forcing large groups of students into a system in which they don’t really fit and where they do not want to be.
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A totally different draft
\Alright here goes…
School-
School is growing up. The environment of school is where almost everyone spends the majority of their waking hours up until they are essentially adults. To call it a formative experience would be a collosal understatement.
I think most people would agree that growing up involves learning lessons about life that teach you how to both live a life that is beneficial and rewarding to you as well as lessons on how to beneficially participate in the well being of greater society. That is pretty much by definition what we all want both ourselves and everyone else to be.
How to get to this point, what lesons should be taught to get there, and so one, is of course a more difficult question. But it is also, at this point, a question that society at large seems to never ask. And even if there a body of educators out there discussing these things, I and the rest of the world don’t seem to have been included in the conversation and I don’t really remember seeing much evidence of an overarching philosophy or philosophy of any sort reflected in the either the lessons or assignments of all of my mandatory education.
Philosophy is, according to my definition, the attempt to answer or at least ask: why. Why am giving this assignment why am I saying this, why am I reading this, to what end. Only by having real answers to these questions can we even start to evaluate how effective our policies and practices are. This stands in almost rediculous contrast to judging the effectiveness of our methods and schools by how well students do on standardized test which are basically fixed IQ tests. One would assume that the dominating role these test have in our growing up factories that we must be trying to increase the IQs of our children and therefore we need to massively monitor how well we are doing at this basically impossible task. I know that people have complained that these test measure innate ability more than “real learning” and have tried to rework the test to reflect some other notion of “things kids should know” but, to use the metaphor du juer, that just amounts to putting lipstick on a still oinking pig.
I’m not against the concept of tests, I think an absolute pass fail, either suceed or suffer the consequences, rite of passage, form of testing is vital to the growth of human beings and is analagous to the most useful way to approach so many situations in adult life or I guess life in general. I just think the kinds of tests and the consequences of failure should be vastly different from what they currently are. test where failure or success is more equivalent to winning or losing a championship football game than to whether you’re smart enough or care enough to retain x amount of information.
By winning a championship football game, I mean spending a considerable amount of time effort and emotion honing skills and ethics, both personally and within a team, for the purposes of acheiving a goal which has real value to the people involved.
To acheive this situation we would have to completely rewrite what kids spend 8 hours a day doing everyday of theri lives.
I hate compare something to the Boy Scouts that I think could be profoundly beneficial, but i think our education system should become loosely similar to the Boy Scouts; As in an elective “badge” system but with tangible rewards for completion of “badges”. We should probably call them something less cheesy than badges, maybe certificates, for now.
To start you would have to get rid of ties to campus based schools. You could get rid of grades. You would get rid of rigid classrooms and to a certain extent career teachers. Actually you wouldn’t get rid of career teachers, but hopefully you would add a significant number of freelance type teachers.
In a certificate system, all of these institutional infrastructure systems become largely unnecessary because the instruction of each course begins and ends with that particular course.
