Student Culture
No Name-Calling Week Draws Homophobic Attacks
Published January 27, 2010 @ 05:08PM PT
Anyone who's ever gone to school should know: bullying is a major problem. It's virtually impossible to make it through school without ever being bullied or called names, usually for something that makes you "different." And since we're not all carbon copies of one another, everybody has something "different" about them.
At its worst, bullying can even lead children to commit suicide.
As Adam writes over on Change.org's Gay Rights blog, this week is GLSEN's No Name-Calling Week, "an annual week of educational activities aimed at ending name-calling of all kinds and providing schools with the tools and inspiration to launch an on-going dialogue about ways to eliminate bullying in their communities." All schools should participate in this event, because bullying is a problem they all face; GLSEN also provides a resource kit and educational materials for schools to use to combat bullying among student.
I've posted on the issue of bullying in schools, and the terrible consequences it can have, over on the Women's Rights blog before, where I called attention to a number of suicides in the past couple years by kids as young as a result of slut-shaming or homophobic bullying. In a post about the frenzied media attention blaming sexting for the suicide of two teenage girls, I spelled out, "Sexting: the Problem is Bullying, Not Sex."
But Linda Harvey of Mission:America would say: the problem is homosexuality, not bullying.
The Toolbelt and Universal Design - Education For Everyone
Published July 17, 2009 @ 04:00AM PT
Education may be understood in one of two broad ways. Either it is about teaching people a discrete set of facts they will be able to repeat – multiplication tables and The Lord’s Prayer are two examples – or it is about helping people learn how to function in the world – crossing the street, using the Dewey Decimal System, reading a map all fit into this category.
The first understanding is not without value. It is important to know an alphabet, basic math facts, or what “President” means. But the second is crucial to survival. Humans, from the very start, needed to know how to hunt, how to recognize safe plants from poisonous ones, how to find their way back home.
And almost as soon as humans began to function as “humans” – this process of learning to function in the world began to revolve around tools. Humans are tool makers and tool users. It truly is our most significant distinction among the species on the planet. Sure, many animals use a few basic tools, but no other creature uses as many tools, or constantly refines those tools, or continuously invents new tools. It is almost a definition of “humanity.”
Our societies are defined by our tools. Our first complex tool is our language, which allows us a huge communicative advantage over most species with which we compete. And our languages significantly define who we are and what we know. The rest of our tools tend to define where we fall in social evolution. We describe much of our history by our tool sets: The Stone Age, The Bronze Age, The Iron Age, The Age of Steam, The Information Age.
This progress explains an important idea to educators. If you are teaching your students the tools of yesterday, you are preventing society from moving forward. Rather, we must be teaching our students to use the tools of this moment, and teaching them how to learn the next set.
Toolbelt Theory
For the past four years I have talked about something I call “Toolbelt Theory.” This began as an idea for allowing students with “disabilities” to learn and choose their own Assistive Technologies. But it very quickly expanded to all students, because every human on earth needs some kind of technologies which assist them in their interactions.
It is impossible for most to climb to the second floor of a building without stairs. It is very difficult for most to get to a meeting on the 25th floor without an elevator. And it is perhaps even more difficult for most to get to work each day if work is 30 miles from home, unless we use a car.
Because we are not whales, we need some form of “assistive technology” if we are to talk to someone 3,000 miles away. We call this a telephone. Because we are not birds or Monarch Butterflies, we need other “assistive technologies” if we are to cross from one continent to another. We call these planes and boats. And because we are not Socrates, we struggle to remember everything we have ever been taught without “assistive technologies.” We call these books and paper, pens and ink.
So we create toolbelts for ourselves. We not only collect hammers, saws, screwdrivers, we load up on books or television, typewriters and newspapers.
A toolbelt for everyone
I began to discuss Toolbelt Theory in my field – for students with special educational needs. I was frustrated when some “school-based team” would pick a single technological solution for a student’s “disability” which the student was expected to use no matter the task, no matter the environment, no matter how the student was feeling that day.
For example, a student with a reading problem might be given complex, expensive literacy software for his computer but not be able to read a menu at a restaurant or a sign on a school door. Or a student without verbal communication might be given a speech-generating device too large to use on the bus as she traveled home. Or lots of students might be given tools based on their “worst day” needs – rather than allow them to use “just” the help they needed.
It was the equivalent of breaking out a chain saw every time you needed to cut wood – even if you were trying to build furniture.
But once I began to see Toolbelt Theory work, I saw that every student needs this. There’s not a human on the planet that doesn’t need to reach for a tool sometime – and knowing how to pick the right tool for the job and moment, how to use that tool well, and how to find new tools, is an essential survival skill.
Universal Design
We don’t call someone “disabled” because they can not saw 100 sheets of plywood in half by hand. We get them a table saw. We don’t call someone “disabled” because they need a power screwdriver or they’ll be exhausted after an hour of putting down deck boards. We put a bit in our drill. And we don’t call people “disabled” because they can’t walk five miles to work every morning. They take a car or a bus or a train.
This is the idea behind Universal Design Technology, and behind Toolbelt Theory. We, as humans, differ. Our tasks differ. Our environments differ. Our circumstances differ. And we pick the appropriate tool.
This Wednesday I could walk much further, cane and all, in the 64 F degree weather in San Francisco than in the 98 F degree weather just south of there in Mountain View. I could decide if I wanted to drive between those two cities, or take the train. Get off early and take BART to my destination, or ride to the station by AT&T Park and walk to the streetcar – What’s the weather? Is time an urgent factor? How does my leg feel?
But without education, I can’t make these choices. I need to know how to know the temperatures. I need to know what transit options are open to me. I need to know how to drive and how to read a timetable. How to operate parking and train ticket machines. I need to know which way the streetcars run, and how to ask for help.
When I read I need to make similar choices. I read really slowly, really badly. But for short things I just tough it out with “ink-on-paper” (or paint-on-signs), though I have a Reading Pen with me if I’m having a very bad day - a day when no alphabetical system connects correctly in my brain. But I also use Click-Speak in Firefox for reading web pages. I use WYNN for big academic reading, and Read-and-Write-Gold – all of which convert text to audio (WYNN and Read-and-Write both highlight each word visually as it is being read aloud). Sometimes I use audiobooks – especially for novels, poetry, or great historical stuff, or I let WYNN, Read-and-Write, or WordTalk convert the text to an mp3 I can listen to in my car.
Without education I could not make these choices either. I need to know how to use those different tools. I need to know how to work with them – say, how to take notes effectively. I need to understand what the purpose of my reading is. And yes, I need to know about these tools, and where to get them.
Are you teaching your students those things?
Suppose your wealthy, white, typically-abled child is heading off to Europe. Can they read maps effectively? Can they read maps on their iPhone or Blackberry so they aren’t “screaming” “I’m an unfamiliar tourist” as they walk down the street? Can they translate information quickly from unfamiliar languages? Can they use Google to convert currency? Or to know if they’re being ripped off? Are they able to figure out the transit system maps when they arrive in a city?
Oh yeah, they’ll probably need all of those tools simply to start college in a new place or to go to that first big job interview in New York or Chicago or San Francisco.
Can they get through that last hundred pages of reading when their eyes hurt? When they need to finish as they drive to work? Can they dictate a text message or email to their boss while driving a 50 mph on the Eisenhower Expressway toward Chicago’s Loop? Can they switch their Firefox spellcheck when they communicate with that job possibility in London? Do they know if it will be better for them to buy the print version of that textbook or the digital?
Or have you left them clueless in the tool store via an education continuously committed to one way of doing things?
T.E.S.T.
Toolbelt Theory, and Universal Design, means there aren’t “disability solutions” and there aren’t “normal ways to do things.” There are just humans and the tools they need. And so we don’t write IEPs for some and insist on conformity for others, but we make the tools of the world available to all, and teach them to evaluate on their own.
We do this because we know, we know, that across everyone’s lives their tasks will change, their environments will change, their skills and capabilities will change, and the available tools will change. Or quick, grab your fountain pen, fill it with ink, look up the number you need in your Manhattan White Pages directory, and dial it via your rotary phone.
So: Task – Environment – Skills – Tools (a specifically ordered re-design of Joy Zabala’s SETT Framework for those educators playing along at home). When students begin a task they need to consider what that task really is – the essential purpose. They need to know where, when, for whom that task must be completed. They must understand their own skill set and capability position (which might vary throughout even the day as they tire). And they must know the range of tools available to them – and how to use those tools.
None of this is automatic. Don’t give me your “digital native” nonsense. People even need to learn to properly hold a hammer – tool skills are not natural. Nor is tool knowledge. Every day I go into schools where students struggling with reading are left in the dark – as if we denied wheelchairs to students who couldn’t walk on the theory that being left on the floor would motivate their legs to work. Every day I go into schools where the vast majority of students struggle – and often give up – as they are forced to use antiquated tools which fit their needs badly.
Teach your children well
We are humans. We are tool users. We are defined as humans by our constantly changing tools. Those tools, in turn, actually change who we are, as they alter our capabilities.
Your school must be a tool shop, where tools are demonstrated, taught, considered, respected, used, and deliberately chosen. Because we can not afford to send our students out without the toolbelts they need to function in their future world.
- Ira Socol
You can find my blog on education, technology, and "special needs" education at SpeEdChange . You can find my books on Amazon.com.
Pharmer's Market: The Cost of Producing "Successful" Students
Published June 26, 2009 @ 07:05AM PT
[A big welcome to William Farren with this first guest-post. Bill has long struck me as one of the most original and piercing critics of education around. You can see his "Did You Ever Wonder?" video in the left sidebar, below, for a taste. Bill writes at the radically sane Education for Well-Being. - Clay]
Not long ago, I finished reading Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, a book about the high price of cheap food and the disconnected thinking that produces it. It made me think that the way we produce food today--that is, ignoring nature's logic in the quest for efficiency--is very similar to the way we produce "educated" citizens. Ignoring millions of years of evolutionary design has resulted in some interesting (if not disconcerting) similarities between the two camps. Both industrial schooling and industrial agriculture seem to have developed pathological ways of looking at pathology.
Whether in the field, the feed lot, or the classroom, issues of low productivity and dysfunction are commonly attributed to the individual, rarely the larger system that controls it. When a farmer curses a corn plant's inability to repel a particular pest, he does so without reflecting on the fact that the plant has been taken out of its natural environment and placed into a man-made monoculture--a hotbed of disease. Plants grown in isolation lose the defenses and nutrients that neighboring species once freely provided. In homogeneous rows designed for the convenience of machinery, a plant's exquisite defense systems become ineffective. "Corrective measures" in the form of herbicides and pesticides end up coating the plants and sterilizing the soil.
Pigs are faulted for biting other pigs' tails as a result of being weaned prematurely and packed together tightly. Animals living in stressful conditions, denied the expression of their once useful behaviors, lose the will to protect themselves in the face of danger. As a consequence, when infection sets in on a chewed tail, pigs are put down. (It's not profitable to nurse them back to health.) Forward thinking hog farmers, in an attempt to stamp out this "vice", noticed that by docking the pigs' tails they could produce a sensitive nub that would force even the most demoralized pig to fight back.
Cows, ruminants which have evolved to eat grasses and fibrous vegetable matter, are today mostly fed a diet of government-subsidized corn. Here again, we ignore nature's design. Not having evolved for such a diet, cattle end up living in a state of permanent illness, propped up and kept in the system by a permanent cocktail of pharmaceuticals. Big Pharma is only too happy to fill in when nature is ignored.
Our education systems, seeking efficiency through standardization and conformity end up creating students who, just like their agricultural counterparts, are no longer well-adapted to their environment. Michael Pollan reminds us that, "Most of the efficiencies in an industrial system are achieved through simplification: doing lots of the same thing over and over." Like corn planted in a monoculture, removed from the diversity that protects it, or cattle fed an unnatural diet of corn, students today are fed a standardized diet of procedures and reproducible facts. This educational monoculture does nothing to nourish minds that have evolved to seek diversity, novelty and stimulation.
Those numbed by disconnected ideas unrelated to their needs are soon labeled attention-deficient, unmotivated, substandard. Stimulants, antidepressants and impulse inhibitors are used to conform the human mind to a deformed system the same way herbicides, pesticides and antibiotics are used in agriculture's great disconnect. Like the corn-fed cow raised on an unnatural diet of corn, constantly anemic and never well but kept alive through the use of drugs, students raised on disconnected facts, numbing routines, and endless testing often find themselves on the receiving end of a medical prescription. Those who don't have the stomach for such unsatisfying fare, who prefer not to be chemically altered, who'd rather have a more free-range existence, are eventually "counseled out". Simply put: they have not met the required production quotas of a system designed for scalable throughput.
In standardized environments, students with a high tolerance for monotony and the ability to repress their curious gene are deemed the fittest of the bunch. Strangely, curiosity, a trait nature has selected for and which has served us well, seems to be selected against in schools. Blue ribbon students grow their grade point averages en route to graduation and a chance to compete in the "real world". Their farm analogues, purposed for industry, have been selected to tolerate crowding, pesticides, sameness--but most importantly--to be high yielding. The corn farmer with the most bushels per acre is acclaimed for his skill at converting petrochemicals into grain. The feedlot operator's profits depend on how efficiently he can turn grain into meat. The highest ranked schools floss in the knowledge that they can efficiently convert standards and routines into high test scores. Along the way, little thought is given to the soil that is depleted in the field, to the groundwater being spoiled by the feedlot, or to the creativity and innovation being extinguished in the classroom. How productive is all this productivity?
It seems that despite (or maybe because of) our fetish with productivity, many of humanity's most pressing issues seem to be getting worse. The unnatural selection playing out in schools creates what every educational institution's mission statement pledges against: the creation of uncritical, passive, challenge-averse individuals, unwilling and unable to tackle the challenges of the 21st-century. It's simple to blame the students for being unproductive or unmotivated, for lacking curiosity. Indeed, they often are seen as the problem, especially by those who've designed the system. Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus, however, reminds us that "the seed of poverty is in the institutions we have made, not in the person." With more effort and an inward gaze we'd see the deeper connections. We'd see students acting rationally in environments that ignore their evolutionary history. We'd understand that avoiding challenges and dropping out are simply logical responses to a system that discourages risk-taking and too often treats curiosity as a challenge to authority.
In their quest for efficiency and value, consumers have failed to notice the creation of false economies. We are now using more energy (in the form of oil and gas) to produce a calorie of food than we ever have in our history. What nature used to do for free through biodiversity and solar power, now requires pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers and pharmaceuticals. In the bargain, our industrial agriculture is destroying our two most important environments: our bodies and our planet. Cheap food has led to obesity, type II diabetes and heart disease. Meat marinated in medicine and the effects it has on people (never mind the animals) never seems to make it into the cost-benefit analysis. Polluted air, toxic water and soil depletion are not billed at the supermarket register. Taxpayers, subsidizing the food that malnourishes them, complain little. Taxpayers, supporting educational systems that miseducate them, complain little. What's the true cost of an educational system which "through simplification: doing lots of the same thing over and over", causes mind and spirit to atrophy, suffocating students' natural desire to know? Maybe the biggest loss comes from the creation of generation after generation who cannot tell the difference between a bargain and a heist.
Michael Pollan writes, "Our food system depends on consumers' not knowing much about it beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner. Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing." Education today requires the same relationship. Educational policies seem to display a meager understanding about the importance of curiosity, awareness, or how we fit into larger systems. Education's checkout scanner--tuition and taxes--provide only a partial accounting of its true costs. Similar to industrial farming, industrial education produces no bargains while diminishing itself in the process. The price of producing a "successful" student may be higher than we think.
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William Farren: Interested in making education an instrument of well-being. Believes that schools, as the most important shapers of mental models, need to seriously retool in an effort to address the problems caused by dysfunctional economic models, biophobia, “nature-deficit disorder” and an immense lack of planetary situational awareness.
Keeps asking himself, "How is preparing students to enter a system that is at war with itself, preparing them for the future?"
Teachers Without Masks: a Sudbury Alternative
Published June 13, 2009 @ 08:04AM PT
In a Google Group discussion of Sudbury schooling, Change.org member Don Berg recently posted an interesting article from Teacher Magazine. Written by Anthony Cody, the article responds to Suze Orman's assertion that "students can't learn empowerment from people who aren't empowered." Cody admits, "We can only teach what we actually embody."
One of the teachers I learned the most from...told me, "The subject your students are studying is you. They watch everything you do." He helped me understand that when I taught my students, I was showing them the way a man could behave in the world, the way he respected women, the way he dealt with conflict. All these things were part of teaching—way beyond how many protons there are in the nucleus of a carbon atom...
So Suze Orman is right in suggesting that we cannot teach empowerment unless we are empowered. But this got me thinking a bit more. Are we actually even trying to teach our students to exert power over their own lives?
It seems as if students are being taught the exact opposite. Learn what is on the test, because it is on the test, and doing well on this test will prepare you for the next set of tests, and at some point you will finally finish all the tests and be ready—for what? Certainly not for acting in a powerful way in relationship to the world or those around you!
Those who have read my bio know that prior to my move to Sudbury schooling, I taught in public schools. Today I'd like to consider the differences between these two models from a teacher's-eye view. I agree with Cody that our students study us, and that we teach them far more by example than we ever could in lessons. However, most of the time, in most schools, this sort of instruction is buried beneath an avalanche of mandates and an undemocratic power structure.
When I taught high school, I could never get past the feeling that it was all a performance. My character's name was Mr. Smith, and the most prominent feature of his costume was the necktie. In the classroom, Mr. Smith was a figure of some power: he made the rules, evaluated everyone's performance on tasks he set, and controlled students' freedom of movement. Yet when it came to the conditions of his workplace, Mr. Smith had little to no power. His daily schedule, the curriculum, and the hiring of personnel at his school—these things and more were decided somewhere else, by unknown others, and simply imposed on him and his colleagues.
What's more, relationships of any kind between teachers and students were frowned upon and/or made impossible. After all, one must get through lessons and prepare for tests, and you only have 50 minutes a day, 180 days a year, to do so; then new combinations of students and teachers must go through the same routine. In such a setting, it seems to me what students learn from their teachers is that it's okay to accept situations where you're disempowered, where you do things of questionable value and relevance because, well, that's just the way things are done: do what you're told, complain to the administration and school board if you want—and good luck with that.
With this kind of institutional dynamic, the need of students to learn who their teachers (and, I should add, their fellow students) really are is severely marginalized. There is little opportunity for teachers and students to know each other in any substantive way, no way for this deeper learning to occur. What's really going on in the world, as well as each other's lives, takes a back seat to an agenda dictated by people with no direct, personal stake in what's learned. I think a lot of my public-school students liked me, and got something out of my classes; but in retrospect, I fear the demands of that system sharply curtailed their most valuable learning opportunities.
What's the lesson here? Disempowerment diminishes learning. When teachers aren't free to teach, and when curricula and testing are valued over students' individual needs, everyone loses.
Fortunately, Sudbury schooling extends to its teachers, as well as its students, real empowerment. In fact, the one job title at Sudbury schools is "staff member," since the work involves so much more than simply teaching. All staff members combine conventional functions of instruction, administration, and counseling; more fundamentally, we serve as mentors and role models. Staff work together, with no one person in charge, to do whatever they deem essential to the good of their school and its students. Consequently, everyone's strengths are maximized, and their needs met in the most effective way possible, with maximal flexibility.
Because the power structure at Sudbury schools is democratic, there is no need to maintain an aura of separateness about the staff, no need to prop up their authority. Staff members are addressed by their first names, same as anyone. And because students can attend one school over several years—as many as twelve or more—they get to know their "teachers" remarkably well. In fact, our schools feel less like institutions than extended families in which children benefit from growing up with multiple aunts, uncles and grandparents, as well as siblings.
When teachers are fully respected and given the power they deserve, they are in turn more capable of respecting and empowering their students. Ellen Berg, one of Anthony Cody's colleagues in the Teacher Leaders Network Forum, wrote to him her view that
If our children leave school with anything, they should leave with the sense that they have choices, and that they are in control of their lives. As people, we can't control what happens, but we can control how we react to situations and whether we learn from the horrible things in life.
I've sometimes described my Sudbury career as "everything I loved about teaching, with none of the b.s." I still believe that, but it now occurs to me that the correlation between empowered teachers and effective education is what really matters. It's past time we fully respect everyone involved in education, so that young people may enjoy lives where, as Ms. Berg says, "they have choices, and [know] they are in control."
image by BES Photos
Teaching Lolita
Published June 09, 2009 @ 03:08PM PT
[Note: Shipped the furniture to Singapore yesterday, cleaning apartment and moving out today. Backache from hell from waist-high Korean broom. Until normal comes back, have some Lolita. Written 10 April 2008. See this intro post for more. - Clay]
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Fear-Based Curriculum: A Language Arts Tragedy
In Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, Oedipus kills his father, then marries and impregnates his mother: we teach this parricidal, incestuous, antique “classic” to 14-year-olds.
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the prince’s uncle murders his brother and marries that brother’s wife, enjoying her in “incestuous sheets“: again, we teach this 400-year-old Renaissance “classic” to 15-year-olds.
And let’s not forget the sentimental favorite about a 12-year-old whose father is trying to marry her off to a prize bachelor of at least 25, and in which instead the 12-year-old heroine elopes with her maybe 14-year-old lover, and spends a night of tender love-making a few paces away from her iconic balcony. Their pillow-talk the morning after their love-making is something we have 13-year-olds recite by the millions in our annual, usually painful, front-of-the-classroom recital days. Yes, I’m talking about Romeo and Juliet. Juliet would be a middle-schooler today - and her father would be in jail for pandering her to his cellmate Paris, the noble pedophile.
In Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, a 40-year-old pedophiliac professor of literature marries an over-sexed 12-year-old’s mother, who shortly thereafter dies in a freak accident, plunging the professor and the 12-year-old in a morbid love affair that ruins both their lives. Often brutal, as often tender, more often laugh-out-loud funny, but never vulgar or graphic, this acknowledged masterpiece and “classic” of modern, 20th century literature - “the only convincing love story of our [20th] century,” according to Vanity Fair - sends educators running for the hills.
It’s a tragic irony and a very telling double standard: teach controversy from old, safely removed times? No problem. (Well, maybe just skim over Paris’ age, Juliet’s loss of virginity, Oedipus’ and Gertrude’s incest.) But teach the same issues about modern schoolgirls? No, no, no. That hits too close to the real world. Let them learn about that, if at all, from their sensationalistic prime-time TV’s at home: To Catch a Predator, anyone? School is not the place for unsafe subjects. We only think critically about safe ones here.
That we should think about these subjects in our classrooms - our young females, in particular, but our young males too, as is shown below - can be supported by a few statistics (USA only): (Click "read more" below...)
No need to pack a lunch: Online learning in K-12 education
Published June 09, 2009 @ 05:33AM PT
Usually urban school systems are trying, often desperately, to recruit new teachers, but Joel Klein, chancellor of New York City schools, wants to reduce the teaching force by 30%. It is not the economy. Unlike Los Angeles and other parts of the country, no one has been laid off in New York yet. Yet, Klein has said a long term of goal his is to reduce the city’s teaching force. While TIME magazine encourages young people to choose teaching as a career, the city’s largest teaching force may be shrunk by almost a third.
Klein does not want to fire teachers but to implement a distance learning model which he claims would enable more students more access to education. Inspired by a new book by Terry Moe and John Chubb called Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics and the Future of Education, which advocates for online teaching. On page 7 of their book, Chubb and Moe list the benefits of online instruction:
1. Curricula can be customized to meet the learning styles and life situations of individual students, giving them productive alternatives to the boring standardization of traditional schooling.
2. Education can be freed from geographic constraint: students and teachers do not have to meet in a building within a school within a district, but can be anywhere, doing their work at any time.
3. Students can have more interaction with their teachers and with one another, including teachers and students who may be thousands of miles away or from different nations or cultures.
4. Parents can readily be included in the communications loop and involved more actively in the education of their kids.
5. Teachers can be freed from their tradition-bound classroom roles, employed in more differentiated and productive ways, and offered new career paths.
6. Sophisticated data systems can put the spotlight on performance, make progress (or the lack of it) transparent to all concerned, and sharpen accountability.
7. Schools can be operated at lower cost, relying more on technology (which is relatively cheap) and less on labor (which is relatively expensive).
Sounds great, right? It seems to solve some of the problems for public schools, like cost. Not so fast though. First of all, since most online education exists at the college level, very little research has been done on online learning for K-12 students, let alone any research that has shown its effectiveness. Second, online schooling presumes that all K-12 students have computers at home, which is not the case for low income students. Not to mention the costs of technology upkeep for these virtual schools.
Thirdly, who are Chubb and Moe? Why should we trust their ideas? As early advocates of market-based school reforms like charter schools and vouchers, Chubb and Moe claimed opening schooling to the marketplace would solve educational inequality. We still have an achievement gap, in spite of the implementation of market-based reforms. So, why should we trust their latest reform idea especially when it suffers from the misguided belief that technology will solve all of our problems? I am no Luddite, and believe in the power of technology to do great things, but Chubb, Moe, and Klein are looking for a cheap and simple solution to a complex problem.
Moreover, they discount what is important about having physical schools- as expensive as they are- and that is their culture. Schools provide a space for students to cultivate relationships with people who share a common experience. For children, who are just developing their social skills, even an occasional face to face meeting, which Chubb and Moe say should be part of K-12 online schooling, is no substitute for a school culture. Call me old fashioned or sentimental, but as a teacher in public schools, I found relationships between teacher and student and among students to be vital. It was what got many students out of bed and into the classroom every day. Chubb and Moe might say that kids would not have to get out of bed for an online school, but they miss an important point. Ask anyone what got them to love learning a particular subject, and they will often say it was a particular teacher. A person, not a computer. Even if you have a MacBook to cozy up to, there is no replacing a great, inspiring teacher. So, to Klein and friends, I ask: Why not put some funds into cultivating more great teachers? If you’re going to try only one reform, that’s where I’d put my money.
A Commencement Speech of Terror and Beauty
Published June 07, 2009 @ 09:44AM PT
I hate to sound all gloom and doom, but as the speaker below says, "If you look at the science ... and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand the data." More and more, as I study ancient Near Eastern religions of Babylonia, and especially Israel and Roman Christianity - Near Eastern in mind if not in space - I find myself noticing that science has taken the mantle of prophecy from religion, and that its jeremiads seem to have as little effect on society as those of its pre-modern predecessors. Today's Cassandra wears a lab coat.
If there's any hope at all, it's in education. For the sake of the world, I can only hope Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, and Eli Broad stop talking about education as a set of skills to dumbly read a "no insurance" contract at WalMart and to make change at its cash registers, and start talking about it in the more momentous terms the times demand.
But with businessmen leading our education policy, I can't say I'm too hopeful that will happen.
Call that a preface to the following. Thanks to Anand Thakker on Twitter for tweeting me this University of Portland commencement speech - "Healing or Stealing?" - by Paul Hawken, co-author of Natural Capitalism. It speaks of things we tend not to speak of to our young, when our only hope seems to be that they do hear these things, and make the changes in the near future that our own and previous generations were too weak to make.
Here's the beginning. Click through for the whole thing - and show it to the young.
Let’s begin with the startling part. Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation... but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, civilization needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.
This planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food—but all that is changing.
There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: You are Brilliant, and the Earth is Hiring. The earth couldn’t afford to send recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.
When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. (Read the rest....)
photo of Malaysia by Shutterhack
