Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (62 page)

The normal school (now called a teacher’s college) was developed to indoctrinate teachers into the system of the common school, ensuring that there would be a coherent approach to the processing of students. If this sounds parallel to the notion of factories producing items in bulk, of interchangeable parts, of the notion of measurement and quality, it’s not an accident.

The world has changed, of course. It has changed into a culture fueled by a market that knows how to mass-customize, to find the edges and the weird, and to cater to what the individual demands instead of insisting on conformity.

Mass customization of school isn’t easy. Do we have any choice, though? If mass production and mass markets are falling apart, we really don’t have the right to insist that the schools we designed for a different era will function well now.

Those who worry about the nature of schools face a few choices, but it’s clear that one of them is
not
business as usual. One option is smaller units within schools, less industrial in outlook, with each unit creating its own varieties of leaders and citizens. The other is an organization that understands that size can be an asset, but only if the organization values customization instead of fighting it.

The current structure, which seeks low-cost uniformity that meets minimum standards, is killing our economy, our culture, and us.

At the heart of Horace Mann’s push for public schooling for all was a simple notion: we build a better society when our peers are educated. Democracy was pretty new, and the notion of putting that much power into the hands of the uneducated masses was frightening enough to lead to the push for universal schooling.

Being surrounded by educated people makes democracy stronger,
and it benefits our entire society. In the words of John Dewey, “Democracy cannot flourish where the chief influences in selecting subject matter of instruction are utilitarian ends narrowly conceived for the masses, and, for the higher education of the few, the traditions of a specialized cultivated class. The notion that the essentials of elementary education are the three R’s mechanically treated, is based upon ignorance of the essentials needed for realization of democratic ideals.”

It’s easy to see how this concept manifests itself. There are more doctors, scientists, enlightened businesses, and engaged teachers in a society that values education. Sure, education is expensive, but living in a world of ignorance is even more expensive.

For a long time, there was an overlap between the education that the professions rewarded and the education that we might imagine an educated person would benefit from. Tied up in both paths is the notion that memorizing large amounts of information was essential. In a world where access to data was always limited, the ability to remember what you were taught, without fresh access to all the data, was a critical success factor.

The question I’d ask every administrator and school board is, “Does the curriculum you teach now make our society stronger?”

As superintendent of schools in Massachusetts, Mann basically invented the public school. Except he called it a common school, because a key goal was to involve the common man and raise the standards of the culture. Right from the start:

Building a person’s character was just as important as reading, writing, and arithmetic. By instilling values such as obedience to authority, promptness in attendance, and organizing the time according to bell ringing helped students prepare for future employment.

After a self-financed trip to Prussia, he instituted the paramilitary system of education he found there, a system he wrote up and
proselytized to other schools, first in the Northeast U.S. and eventually around the country.

His second legacy was the invention of the “normal school.”

Normal schools were institutes that taught high school students (usually women) the community norms and gave them instruction and power to go work for common schools as teachers, enforcing these norms across the system.

His third legacy, one with which I find no fault, was banning corporal punishment from schools. As further proof that his heart was ultimately in the right place, the man who industrialized the public schools he created left us with this admonition,

… be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.

Unfortunately, that part of his curriculum is almost never taught in school.

In 1914, a professor in Kansas invented the multiple-choice test. Yes, it’s less than a hundred years old.

There was an emergency on. World War I was ramping up, hundreds of thousands of new immigrants needed to be processed and educated, and factories were hungry for workers. The government had just made two years of high school mandatory, and we needed a temporary, high-efficiency way to sort students and quickly assign them to appropriate slots.

In the words of Professor Kelly, “This is a test of lower order thinking for the lower orders.”

A few years later, as president of the University of Idaho, Kelly disowned the idea, pointing out that it was an appropriate method to test only a tiny portion of what is actually taught and should be abandoned. The industrialists and the mass educators revolted and he was fired.

The SAT, the single most important filtering device used to measure
the effect of school on each individual, is based (almost without change) on Kelly’s lower-order thinking test. Still.

The reason is simple. Not because it works. No, we do it because it’s the easy and efficient way to keep the mass production of students moving forward.

School’s industrial, scaled-up, measurable structure means that fear must be used to keep the masses in line. There’s no other way to get hundreds or thousands of kids to comply, to process that many bodies, en masse, without simultaneous coordination.

And the flip side of this fear and conformity must be that passion will be destroyed. There’s no room for someone who wants to go faster, or someone who wants to do something else, or someone who cares about a particular issue. Move on. Write it in your notes; there will be a test later. A multiple-choice test.

Do we need more fear?

Less passion?

The notion that an organization could teach anything at all is a relatively new one.

Traditionally, society assumed that artists, singers, artisans, writers, scientists, and alchemists would find their calling, then find a mentor, and
then
learn their craft. It was absurd to think that you’d take people off the street and teach them to do science or to sing, and persist at that teaching long enough for them to get excited about it.

Now that we’ve built an industrial solution to teaching in bulk, we’ve seduced ourselves into believing that the only thing that can be taught is the way to get high SAT scores.

We shouldn’t be buying this.

We can teach people to make commitments, to overcome fear, to deal transparently, to initiate, and to plan a course.

We can teach people to desire lifelong learning, to express themselves, and to innovate.

And just as important, it’s vital we acknowledge that we can
unteach
bravery and creativity and initiative. And that we have been doing just that.

School has become an industrialized system, working on a huge scale, that has significant by-products, including the destruction of many of the attitudes and emotions we’d like to build our culture around.

In order to efficiently jam as much testable data into a generation of kids, we push to make those children compliant, competitive zombies.

The book publisher or the bookstore?

Culture changes to match the economy, not the other way around. The economy needed an institution that would churn out compliant workers, so we built it. Factories didn’t happen because there were schools; schools happened because there were factories.

The reason so many people grow up to look for a job is that the economy has needed people who would grow up to look for a job.

Jobs were invented before workers were invented.

In the post-job universe, workers aren’t really what we need more of, but schools remain focused on yesterday’s needs.

If you had a wish, what would it be? If a genie arrived and granted you a wish, would it be a worthwhile one?

I think our wishes change based on how we grow up, what we’re taught, whom we hang out with, and what our parents do.

Our culture has a dreaming problem. It was largely created by the current regime in schooling, and it’s getting worse.

Dreamers in school are dangerous. Dreamers can be impatient,
unwilling to become well rounded and, most of all, hard to fit into existing systems.

One more question to ask at the school board meeting: “What are you doing to fuel my kid’s dreams?”

Jake Halpern did a rigorous study of high-school students. The most disturbing result was this:

“When you grow up, which of the following jobs would you most like to have?”

The chief of a major company like General Motors

A Navy SEAL

A U.S. senator

The president of a great university like Harvard or Yale

The personal assistant to a very famous singer or movie star

The results:

Among girls, the results were as follows: 9.5% chose “the chief of a major company like General Motors”; 9.8% chose “a Navy SEAL”; 13.6% chose “a U.S. Senator”; 23.7% chose “the president of a great university like Harvard or Yale”; and 43.4% chose “the personal assistant to a very famous singer or movie star.”

Notice that these kids were okay with not actually being famous—they were happy to be the
assistant
of someone who lived that fairy-tale lifestyle.

Is this the best we can do? Have we created a trillion-dollar, multimillion-student, sixteen-year schooling cycle to take our best and our brightest and snuff out their dreams—sometimes when they’re so nascent that they haven’t even been articulated? Is the product of our massive schooling industry an endless legion of assistants?

The century of dream-snuffing has to end. We’re facing a significant emergency, one that’s not just economic but cultural as well. The time to act is right now, and the person to do it is you.

It’s also not very good at doing what we need it to do. We’re not going to be able to make it much cheaper, so let’s figure out how to make it a lot better.

Not better at what it already does. Better at educating people to do what needs to be done.

Do you need a competent call-center employee? School is good at creating them, but it’s awfully expensive. Do we really need more compliant phone operators, and at such a high cost?

Given the time and money being invested, what I want to know, what every parent and every taxpayer and every student should want to know, is: Is this the right plan? Is this the best way to produce the culture and economy we say we want?

What is school for?

If you’re not asking that, you’re wasting time and money.

Here’s a hint:
learning is not done to you.
Learning is something you choose to do.

If the new goal of school is to create something different from what we have now, and if new technologies and new connections are changing the way school can deliver its lessons, it’s time for a change.

Here are a dozen ways school can be rethought:

Homework during the day, lectures at night

Open book, open note, all the time

Access to any course, anywhere in the world

Precise, focused instruction instead of mass, generalized instruction

The end of multiple-choice exams

Experience instead of test scores as a measure of achievement

The end of compliance as an outcome

Cooperation instead of isolation

Amplification of outlying students, teachers, and ideas

Transformation of the role of the teacher

Lifelong learning, earlier work

Death of the nearly famous college

It’s easier than ever to open a school, to bring new technology into school, and to change how we teach. But if all we do with these tools is teach compliance and consumption, that’s all we’re going to get. School can and must do more than train the factory workers of tomorrow.

It’s clear that the economy has changed. What we want and expect from our best citizens has changed. Not only in what we do when we go to our jobs, but also in the doors that have been opened for people who want to make an impact on our culture.

At the very same time, the acquisition of knowledge has been forever transformed by the Internet. Often overlooked in the rush to waste time at Facebook and YouTube is the fact that the Internet is the most efficient and powerful information-delivery system ever developed.

The change in the economy and the delivery of information online combine to amplify the speed of change. These rapid cycles are overwhelming the ability of the industrialized system of education to keep up.

As a result, the education-industrial system, the one that worked very well in creating a century’s worth of factory workers, lawyers, nurses, and soldiers, is now obsolete.

We can prop it up or we can fix it.

I don’t think it’s practical to say, “we want what we’ve been getting, but cheaper and better.” That’s not going to happen, and I’m not sure we want it to, anyway.

We need school to produce something different, and the only way for that to happen is for us to ask new questions and make new demands on every element of the educational system we’ve built. Whenever teachers, administrators, or board members respond with an answer that refers to a world before the rules changed, they must stop and start their answer again.