Unschooling Alternatives
Character Development: Opportunity Costs and Roads Less Traveled
Published September 02, 2009 @ 03:00PM PT
One of the first things you learn studying economics is that you can't have it all. Opportunity costs, they call it: given finite amounts of time and other resources, pursuing any course of action means doing without certain things. English classes typically find this concept in Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken"..."And sorry I could not travel both/And be one traveler."
Having worked in both conventional and Sudbury schools, I've noted that a key difference between the two seems to be their choosing the roads of content and character, respectively. Not that these paths are mutually exclusive; but it's interesting to observe how prioritizing each affects learning and growth.
Conventional schools devote vast amounts of time to content, to academic knowledge and skills. Everywhere you look, people are declaring what every Nth grader should know. Endless hours are spent drilling the state capitals and causes of the Civil War; multiplication tables and the Pythagorean theorem; the scientific method and taxonomy; and the differences between Shakespearean and Italian sonnets.
Beyond Barriers
Published August 11, 2009 @ 07:04AM PT
In my previous post, I introduced an idea for a different type of online class, one which is only possible because of available technology. Many people have, rightfully so, questioned technology's ability to seriously impact education. It is often over-hyped, oversold and overpriced, yet I still hold the belief that under the right circumstances, it can help learners (and their communities) reach new places. For me, the challenge will be to do more than simply move the traditional classroom model online, throwing in some Web 2.0 tools for good measure. It will rest on how to best combine current technologies with pedagogical approaches that lead to significance, flow, self-direction, group action, sharing, joy... and produce the type of learning that will help us tackle the distributed, complex problems of our day.
Technology has never quite lived up to its potential as a teaching/learning tool because critics have spent too much time analyzing the wrong thing. We've thrown billions of dollars of hardware and software into the classroom, analyzing it under a microscope without doing much looking at the pedagogy it's supposed to support. In a recent blog comment (post worth reading!), Ira Socol astutely points out, "It is the job of education to alter itself to prove itself of value to the world which now exists."
What would happen if education altered itself to take advantage of the mature, ubiquitous tools that let anyone become a mass publisher? Or that allow for the simple group forming that makes people and their ideas findable, that simplify sharing and collaboration, and that disrupt long-held power structures? What would happen if educational programs stopped viewing socializing and play as hostile to learning, but instead, in the words of a recent report (p. 35), "positioned [themselves] to step in and support moments when youth are motivated to move from friendship-driven to more interest-driven forms of new media use"?
A traditional class, with its small group of students, insulated from the outside world, fails to capitalize on what's happening beyond its borders. Bill Joy, Sun Microsystem's founder, points out that most good ideas and talent are not in your institution but outside of it. It would seem to make sense then to try to establish connections with those on the outside.
Today's technology has made it easy to create and join networks. This has drastically changed important quantitative variables involved in learning. When a networked class member connects to another networked class member, they do not simply add another person to their network--they add another person's network to their network. Interconnections grow geometrically. The possibility of finding just the right person for a collaboration, or to answer a question, increases dramatically. More people connected to more information and the minds that are producing it, improves the possibilities of getting better feedback, attaining quicker results, and connecting people to new ideas. All this connective growth has increased variety, catering to the long tail. Using social media, students can now join formal and informal affinity groups and take online classes that in the past, either didn't exist, or were prohibitively expensive for their schools to offer. The quantity of information available today due to the fact that anyone can become a mass publisher is greater than at any time in our history. Those using networks and social tools like Delicious.com, Facebook and TweetDeck, are figuring out how to take advantage of ever-increasing amounts of information, finding needles in the ever-deepening haystacks.
While networked learning has allowed us to access larger quantities of information and increased variety for learners, maybe even more importantly, it has the potential to improve the quality of ideas. In his must-read book, Here Comes Everybody - The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Clay Shirky points out that, "... most good ideas came from people who were bridging 'structural holes', which is to say people whose immediate social network included employees outside their department. Shirky follows with a quote from researcher Ronald Burt, author of "The Social Origins of Good Ideas", who writes:
People connected to groups beyond their own can expect to find themselves delivering valuable ideas, seeming to be gifted with creativity. This is not creativity born of deep intellectual ability. It is creativity as an import-export business. An idea mundane in one group can be a valuable insight in another.
If we look at how schools are structured today with their often strict adherence to hierarchies and disciplines, it would seem there are plenty of opportunities for bridging structural holes.
As potential agents of change, schools spend too much time in the future, preparing their students for that fateful moment when they enter the "real world". Insulated classes, island teachers and outdated policies end up disengaging students from the very real (and current!) world just outside their classroom window. Millions of hearts and minds ready to engage with all types of issues sit idly, battling the clock. Here, technology has the potential to be a real game-changer. Not only does it put students in touch with important issues, it allows them to do something about them. Social media has changed power structures in unprecedented ways. With the ability to easily connect with others (often surreptitiously), take pictures, record video, mass publish, and share information with little or no interference from superiors, people today are taking on governments, corporations, mass media--and winning. Maybe it's time for students to be challenged to do more with their networked technology than simply check grades and hand in work.
Many of today's most pressing challenges like climate change, fisheries depletion, virulent disease, invasive species... are complex, distributed, messy, extend beyond borders, and will require cooperation and collaboration in order to solve. The traditional school model where a few people at the top provide scarce knowledge to passive individuals at the bottom in order to make them more competitive on the global stage, no longer seems to make as much sense. (If it ever did.) We're only going to get better at this when we realize that information is no longer scarce, that people actually do like sharing and helping, and that force and competition will not solve all problems. The tools to effect serious change are on our desks, in our pockets and in our schools. However, they'll never live up to their potential as tools for change while the pedagogy they're supposed to support goes unanalyzed.
Tell Your Teacher Where to Go
Published August 10, 2009 @ 09:08AM PT
Participatory Learning - Join Us from Plearn on Vimeo.
After 15 years of working in schools and observing and reflecting on the practice, I’d like to attempt something different. I’m curious to know if it’s possible to get fifty people (and possibly an institution or three) on this wired planet to take just one foot out of the mainstream of education and participate in a course that operates under a very different educational paradigm than the one they’re used to. I’d like to know if learners are willing to put their own creative desires and curiosities ahead of doing what’s educationally safe. Is the dissonance between how people learn on their own today and how they are taught in schools jarring enough to make them want to try something new? Can the Internet’s currently evolved state and the culture of sharing, collaboration and participation that it has fueled, lead to a new educational paradigm where independent educational contractors (IECs), working in more decentralized environments, are able to offer a variety of courses serving the long tail of educational consumers in a way that more hierarchical institutions cannot?
In order to try to answer these questions, I’ve quit my job as a classroom teacher for next school year and built an online space–-a class (ParticipatoryLearning.net)–-based on the principles of participatory learning, among others. The definition of participatory learning which I find most useful, is the one which was offered for the Digital Media and Learning Competition:
Participatory Learning includes the ways in which new technologies enable learners (of any age) to contribute in diverse ways to individual and shared learning goals. Through games, wikis, blogs, virtual environments, social network sites, cell phones, mobile devices, and other digital platforms, learners can participate in virtual communities where they share ideas, comment upon one another’s projects, and plan, design, advance, implement, or simply discuss their goals and ideas together. Participatory learners come together to aggregate their ideas and experiences in a way that makes the whole ultimately greater than the sum of the parts.
Here's the pitch:
Join international educator Bill Farren for two semesters as he travels through four different South American countries, connecting students to real people, real communities and real issues. The journey will begin in Peru. From there, the class will vote on what country they will visit next. Participatory Learners (Plearners) will be able to track their teacher who will be acting as their “reporter/guide in the field” via global positioning satellite. Through a request system, Plearners will be able to assemble information such as pictures, video footage, interviews, etc. for their learning use and for the creation of various learning objects including collaborative projects. Students will decide what projects (challenges) to tackle, and working with a variety of other people, get on with the business of changing the world today. Freedom of choice and expression will be an important part of this course. Students will be encouraged to extend their expressive abilities using a variety of tools and genres.
This class seeks to do more than simply take the classroom model and move it online. It seeks to challenge the status quo in various ways:
- Students will be active managers of their learning; with some guidance, they will manage what to learn, how to learn, who to pay attention to, how to learn from peers, how to assess their learning, and when needed, learn to redirect their efforts
- It will be democratic, bottom up.
- The class will self-organize, catering to the long tail. It will form itself, and it will largely run itself. We will investigate "the power of organizing without organizations". (Clay Shirky)
- Authority will be earned. It will be turned on its head.
- Outcomes will not be prescribed. We do not know how things will turn out. We may have to change direction as we see fit.
- Failure will not be punished. It will be treated as information.
- It will be open, inviting interested others to look in, collaborate, participate, assist... (There will be mechanisms for private communication between class members, as needed).
- It will not be graded. Assessment will come in various non-graded forms from teacher/guide, peers, visitors, and most importantly, self-reflection. The space will become a deep, rich electronic portfolio for each class member. Additionally, students will be provided with a formal, networked, electronic portfolio that they can manage as they see fit. They will decide what goes into their portfolio, who gets to see it, and when it's available for viewing. This holistic approach seeks to, “transform accountability driven by testing into richer conversations around inquiry into learning” ¹ (more)
- It will be multidisciplinary, anchored around various themes.
In their book, Disrupting Class, authors Christensen, Johnson and Horn state that innovation and change often happen when individual actors work outside of the regulated sectors, offering goods and services through independent commercial channels, eventually getting noticed by the regulatory systems once enough people, through their own choice, opt out of the dominant offering. The authors mention that change rarely happens from within institutions, being that those institutions are more likely to hammer down the sharp edges of innovation to fit their current way of thinking, in the process, sustaining the approach it has always used.
It is hoped that if this approach works, many other independent educational contractors will be motivated to hang out their own e-shingles. Students of all stripes and ages will have a much larger selection of courses and learning formats to choose from. Classes offered by experts, many in unique circumstances, connected to interested others, unshackled from obtuse regulations, could provide an incredibly rich, eclectic and tailored experience in ways that today’s institutions simply could never match.
Teachers with various specialties and interests, using a similar approach, could create some interesting learning opportunities by, for example, spending a semester:
- In a cloud forest, helping add to the EOL
- Traveling throughout the rivers of Europe, connecting students with local history and art
- On a sailboat studying themes related to oceanography, climate change, marine biology, meteorology...
- On a container ship learning about globalization, trade, economics...
- On an Amish farm, reflecting on appropriate use of technology
The possibilities are limitless. It seems like the TFA crowd and Peace Corps types might be attracted to this type of work, improving educational opportunities for all (including teachers!).
Will this type of learning obviate the need for schools or classrooms? Absolutely not. There are many times when people want and need to be in each other's presence. Often, that's the optimal situation. However, being together is not always feasible. What these technologies offer us today is the ability to find and then interact with people that we may never have had the opportunity to connect with otherwise. They offer us the ability to get information, create information, experience places, and work and learn with others in ways that previously were impossible. They lower costs. They make failure cheap and worthwhile. Clay Shirky reminds us that things get interesting when the technology gets boring. Today, nobody cares that you have a blog or use Facebook. It's time for things to get interesting.
I invite you to visit ParticipatoryLearning.net. In the spirit of learning from others, I ask that if you have ideas on how to increase the likelihood that a project of this type succeeds, please send them my way. I’d also kindly ask that if you find this approach good for education, to help spread the message via your own networks. Thanks for reading.
¹ from Making Common Cause: Electronic Portfolios, Learning, and the Power of Communication, Cambridge, Cambridge and Yancey
Teaching Creativity
Published July 19, 2009 @ 12:52PM PT
I suspect Mrs. Watts is rolling over in her grave these days.
My piano teacher for nine years growing up, Mrs. Watts wasn't exactly strict, but she did insist on things being done a certain way: fingers curled just so, tempo faithfully followed, learning each hand separately and not playing a piece any faster than control would allow. I can still hear her blasted metronome, and the way she had us students stand up and announce "I shall play such-and-such, by so-and-so" at recitals and competitions.
I never imagined, though, that I would come to teach piano myself one day. Yet I've played around enough at my current school, Alpine Valley, that occasionally students ask me to help them. So I do my intuitive best to accommodate their requests, giving each the sort of instruction that best suits their interests.
I've also taught creative writing at Alpine Valley for several years—although with the class set up as a workshop, I consider myself more an especially experienced participant than the gateway to writing excellence. As with piano instruction, when it comes to writing I'm first and foremost a practitioner sharing what he knows and does with other interested parties; more artist-in-residence than professional instructor.
Given these experiences, I've long been intrigued by the idea of teaching creativity. Granted, there's a host of technical aspects to cover in both piano and writing; yet how, I wonder, can creativity be conveyed in a pedagogical scope and sequence? After all, the technical side of capital-A Art is not where its magic lies. As the great Artur Rubenstein once remarked: "The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes—ah, that is where the art resides."
Just so, I have found that paying attention to the spaces within the structure is the most reliable path to genuine creativity. Working at a Sudbury school, I am happily reminded that people are inherently creative. There is something in each of us that must make art, and I am very lucky to be part of a school that acknowledges this. I watch students plunk out their own tunes on the piano; I see them spontaneously tell and write stories. Even those not especially predisposed or endowed eventually find their way to various art forms. It's what we humans do.
This has confirmed my longstanding belief that one can make art only to the extent that one is in touch with what it means to be alive. I recall attending a technically flawless recital several years ago. What stands out is my memory is how this young person's playing revealed a relative lack of life experience. As suggested above, getting the notes right isn't nearly enough. Fortunately, at Sudbury schools students are able to pour every ounce of their lives and selves into their pursuits. They "play" in the fullest sense of the word, at art and at life, working hard to master complex, even daunting, endeavors.
This sort of immersion is absolutely vital. If they are to plumb the depths of creativity, kids need to experience life directly and deeply. Because creativity occurs on its own timetable, vast amounts of time and flexibility must be available for this impulse to unfold. And because getting anywhere in a creative pursuit requires a great deal of practice, young people need an environment that encourages self-discipline. Specific curricula and methods are far less important than elemental encounters between individuals and their artistic nature.
As for the technical elements of music and writing, it's the same as with any discipline: students will pick up the basics when those things appear meaningful to them. They'll learn to read music and observe proper rhythm, dynamics, phrasing—or pay attention to conventions of spelling, grammar, and style—just as soon as they see why and how they're necessary, how these things help artists achieve their goals. By learning creativity in context, Sudbury students are allowed to become the artists nature meant them to be, rather than mimicking in a superficial way the creativity of others.
Don't get me wrong: there's no substitute for learning the ropes of a discipline, and scheduling has its place. In the real world, rehearsals, performances, meetings, etc. happen at agreed-upon times and places—deadlines are still deadlines—and so it is in Sudbury schools. Yet what is creativity if not individual variations on given themes? Surely students can explore the world around them without their exploration always being coordinated along established paths. Far better, I would argue, is letting students follow the rhythms of their own hearts, as well as of their communities.
I can still hear Mrs. Watts' voice in my head, questioning my more relaxed, flexible approach. Yet I've come to believe that while we can teach technique, creativity itself cannot be taught. The path to true creativity lies rather in honoring its natural occurrence in people, giving them every opportunity to explore their world and do the hard work of creating their own life. Yes, we need to support students' creativity; but suprisingly often, this involves little more than giving them space and getting out of their way.
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?"
Simple Math
Published June 23, 2009 @ 03:38PM PT
It's legendary in the Sudbury literature: the five-month math class. As Sudbury Valley co-founder Daniel Greenberg reports in the above article, it took twenty weeks—a mere twenty contact hours—for a group of twelve kids ages 9 to 12 to cover all six years of elementary-school math.
A miracle? Hardly.
Greenberg's friend Alan White, a longtime elementary school math specialist, wasn't surprised. "Everyone knows," he said, "that the subject matter itself isn't that hard. What's hard...is beating it into the heads of youngsters who hate every step. The only chance we have is to hammer away at the stuff bit by bit every day for years. Even then it does not work...Give me a kid who wants to learn the stuff—well, twenty hours or so makes sense."
This squares with my experience as well. I once taught math to three students who consistently showed up on time. One day, however, I waited and waited...but they never appeared. A bit puzzled, I wandered back to the main room, only to find these students hard at work on their own. They'd gotten too busy and distracted working on math to think about math class.
Another time, a student asked me out of the blue—not in class, just in the course of a normal day—what I knew about counting in base 2 (a.k.a. binary numbers, the basis for digital computers). A spontaneous quasi-class ensued, as she and I looked things up, using a chalkboard to piece together the mysteries, treating it like a puzzle or a grand game: When do you add another digit? When is a 1 replaced with a 0? and so forth.
The way math is taught tells us much about how an educational system works...or why it doesn't. Some of the most powerful arguments on this theme are made in a piece popularly known as "Lockhart's Lament." Paul Lockhart teaches at Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn. Written in 2002, "A Mathematician's Lament" is a scathing critique of math education that has circulated widely, despite having never been published. The remainder of this post offers an overview of this unusually insightful and frank work.
There is surely no more reliable way to kill enthusiasm and interest in a subject than to make it a mandatory part of the school curriculum. Include it as a major component of standardized testing and you virtually guarantee that the education establishment will suck the life out of it.
Lockhart opens with nightmare scenarios of music education reduced to teaching notation, and art education that's mostly worksheets, memorization, and paint-by-numbers. Beyond being absurd, this approach spells death for creativity.
If I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child's natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn't possibly do as good a job as is currently being done—I simply wouldn't have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul-crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.
To Lockhart, mathematics is "the purest of the arts...the music of reason. To do mathematics is to engage in an act of discovery and conjecture, intuition and inspiration." Mathematics touches on the very core of human meaning-making: patterns, imagination, and creativity. Yet in schools it is replaced by the sterile doppelganger of decontextualized facts and regurgitated formulas.
Students learn that mathematics is not something you do, but something that is done to you. Emphasis is placed on sitting still, filling out worksheets, and following directions...The main problem with school mathematics is that there are no problems...[only] "exercises." "Here is a type of problem. Here is how to solve it. Yes it will be on the test. Do exercises 1-35 odd for homework." What a sad way to learn mathematics: to be a trained chimpanzee.
Beyond decrying what schools have done to mathematics, Lockhart also delves into what teaching truly means. Rather than training students to perform, teaching is to him a matter of being authentic, making connections, and manifesting the delights of discovery.
Teaching is not about information. It's about having an honest intellectual relationship with your students...You will never be a real teacher if you are unwilling to be a real person. Teaching means openness and honesty, an ability to share excitement, and a love of learning. Without these, all the education degrees in the world won't help you, and with them they are completely unnecessary.
Before I close, here are a few more of Lockhart's gems:
We learn things because they interest us now, not because they might be useful later. But this is exactly what we are asking children to do with math...Of course it can be done, but I think it ultimately does more harm than good. Much better to wait until their own natural curiosity about numbers kicks in.
Mental acuity of any kind comes from solving problems yourself, not from being told how to solve them.
How can schools guarantee that their students will all have the same basic knowledge? How will we accurately measure their relative worth? They can't, and we won't. Just like in real life.
The good news is that the frustrations of misguided education are more than matched by the delights of authentic learning. Whatever your take on math education or Sudbury schooling, all our schools—indeed, our culture in general—could benefit from a massive infusion of this kind of passion for common sense and reason.
