Stacy McGeever



Stacy McGeever

MAS.713

October 1, 2001

Should there be schools 20 years from now? If so, what should they be like?

The very fact that someone has thought to ask this question should be a warning sign to educators. As a general rule, people don’t challenge the existence of institutions that work - it would be odd for someone to pose the same question of hospitals, restaurants or hair salons. Of course, these organizations all require physical locality, so perhaps they are unfair examples.

A better analogy might be to ask whether office buildings should exist. However, telecommuting advocates tended to cite cost savings, convenience or accommodating bizarre work schedules as the primary reasons for doing away with the traditional office – very few advocates suggested that people simply work better via electronic networks than they do in physical group settings. In any event, the core concept of the office itself was never seriously brought into question; even the most rabid telecommuting fans did not call for disbanding corporations and groups of employees.

The question of whether schools should exist is an indictment of the educational system. It is being asked not because schools are inconvenient, or even costly – but because they are perceived to be ineffective at achieving their sole purpose: to teach students.

ARE SCHOOLS REALLY FAILING?

You don’t have to go far to find evidence that many (perhaps even most) people believe that schools are somehow inadequate. Politicians often talk about the “educational crisis” in America – a view echoed by new organizations and parents throughout the country. But what’s the real source of this discontent with school systems? Is the discontent justified?

Yes, but probably not for the reasons many people cite. Evaluations of the American educational system are very college-centric – schools tend to be measured by the percentage of graduates who go on to college or by average SAT scores. Part of the reason for this is that we have a culture that views higher education as the clear path for all successful students. A more subtle reason for the college focus is that people want quantitative reports of success – college enrollment and standardized test scores are easily measured.

Measuring school success by college metrics is ludicrous because the notion that all students should go to college is ludicrous. So is the notion that all “smart” students should go to college. One of the ways in which our educational system fails us is that it does not provide enough connectivity to other walks of post-high-school life; people are led to believe that the only honorable way out of the 12th grade is by way of college admission.

This is not to say that schools would be a roaring success if we simply start measuring them with a different yardstick. Schools are failing, but before we can examine how they’re failing we must set the baseline for what schools are supposed to accomplish.

THE PURPOSE OF SCHOOLS

To a large extent, the purpose of schools is tied to who’s paying. If the Catholic Church were to foot the bill for some high school, it would not be unreasonable for the church to demand that the school teach the tenets of the religion. If we restrict the discussion to public schools (K-12), funded by taxpayers, then the only common thread we really have is that the sponsors are American citizens. As such, they have an interest in preserving democracy, the electoral process and national security. We can probably throw in the additional assumption that parents want their children to be happy – which encompasses economic prosperity, personal fulfillment, and the like.

That said, here’s a reasonable set of school goals (in order of importance):

1. Teach the basics of how to communicate. This includes language, reading, writing and anything else people need before they can efficiently absorb and disseminate information. This is not an immutable list - if some day voice technology renders reading obsolete, we can revisit what we teach.

2. Help students sharpen and apply their reasoning skills. Have students listen to arguments (the topic doesn’t matter) and teach them to apply their thinking in an orderly way. Bonus points for helping students see analogs across different fields.

3. Socialization. Get kids used to working with other people in a variety of settings and in a variety of roles.

4. Teach some base set of required knowledge. This includes learning the methods used in ubiquitous fields (such as certain branches of math) and learning to reason using those tools. There should also be a set of required facts, albeit a much smaller one than what schools use today. For example, there’s no reason that we shouldn’t make sure everyone knows the basics of how our government works – it wouldn’t take long to teach.

5. Give students an idea of the breadth of what’s available to them and where they can go to learn more. This includes glimpses of careers in science, the arts, engineering or service-related fields. It should also include hobbies, developing a personal philosophy, picking up useful everyday skills, etc. The precise content isn’t important here, but the range is.

BUT WAIT A MINUTE – DO WE NEED SCHOOLS AT ALL?

Need? No. Are schools a smart thing for society to pay for? Absolutely. Society has a vested interest in producing and maintaining a reasoned population. If parents want to keep their kids home so that they can learn by doing and absorb the world as they observe it, that’s fine – but it is wise for society to provide resources for students whose home environments are less than enriching.

Maybe someday we’ll live in a world where kids are in constant, engaged interaction with adults, other kids and learning environments – and then perhaps schools will no longer be useful. Until that day comes (and it will be a lot longer than twenty years from now) it is important to have at least some component of physical locality in education. Otherwise, unmotivated students will never become more motivated to learn and think and do – what will pry them away from their televisions? Of course, this is a problem with our culture, not just our school system.

TOWARD A NEW SCHOOL STRUCTURE

Given that some sort of school system is a good idea, what should it look like? On one end of the spectrum, traditional education advocates argue for “getting back to the basics” of reading, math and history in a lecture setting. On the other end, some education reformers argue for letting students do whatever engages them, collaborative learning and grade-free environments. As with most things, the truth is somewhere in-between.

What We Teach

First and foremost, there must be some standards for the content we teach. It should not be the teacher’s role to simply to guide students until they discover something that interests them. It would be fairly trivial to creatively engage a group of 12-year-old girls in a gossip session about a fellow classmate – hopefully no one would consider this to be a positive educational experience.

Second, there must be minimum requirements. It is not unreasonable to say that there are certain things every student should know or know how to do. That said, schools today try to cover far too much required material; it’s no wonder students lose sight of what things are really important to master. We should get to the point where meeting these minimum requirements is universal – students should fear meeting them no more than an eighth-grader would fear having to recite the alphabet.

Third, much more focus should be placed on learning how to analyze and reason. One of the most valuable lessons is learning to recognize when you don’t know something with certainty. Students should gain experience reasoning with language, math, physical systems, art, and anything else there’s time to cover. They should also reason in a variety of fields: biology, law, philosophy, etc. The specifics here are less important than the breadth.

Fourth, students must be given the time and resources to explore and create in fields that interest them. They should be encouraged (probably required) to find links between what interests them and the core curriculum that is being taught to everyone. Most importantly, they should work on “real world” projects; it is vital that students can see the control they are developing over their environment.

Finally, we need less rigidity in the grade system. Thirteen years of essentially the same core curriculum is far too long a gauntlet for everyone to have to run. It would make more sense to have students weave in and out between core programs and programs of study that interest them specifically.

How We Teach It

Nothing in the core curriculum should be irrelevant to any student. The challenge of teaching is to interest students by exposing the power of what’s being taught and demonstrating how they can personally use it. It is sometimes possible (although usually quite difficult) to do this in a mass lecture setting. At other times, the mass lecture setting will fail miserably.

That said, the 30-person lecture is not useless for all purposes, nor is 30 a necessarily overwhelming number of students for one person to teach. Teachers must exercise judgment on when to break students into groups, when it is appropriate to have students teaching other students, and when hands-on projects are more appropriate than written work or lectures.

Could we fundamentally change schools so that the classroom is no longer the unit of organization? Of course. But it seems doubtful that the classroom setting is the fundamental problem – nor are there any obvious advantages to moving away from the classroom to some other forum. A group of 30 students is a wonderfully flexible learning environment for teachers who can adapt.

Who Teaches

Which brings us to a touchy political issue: is the current set of teachers qualified to truly educate students? Certainly there are problems with the school system that make it difficult for teachers to work effectively. Yet some teachers are excellent – they inspire, motivate and explain clearly. Others fall into one of several categories: they complain of an oppressive bureaucracy that makes it impossible for them to teach; they complain of behavioral problems; they complain of too much material or too many students; they lack the ability to inspire or communicate, or; they lack the necessary mastery of the material they are supposed to teach.

The skill set needed by a teacher is in incredibly high-demand within private industry. How many people do you know who can communicate clearly? How many of those are good at extracting someone else’s thoughts about a particular problem? How many of those can hold the interest of an audience or even a few people? As the list gets longer, the number of people who fit the bill gets smaller. If we’re only paying these folks a fraction of what they could get working for a corporation, it should be no surprise that we only get a fraction of them who want to teach. Paying teachers (a lot) more seems like a clear win; on the other hand, paying the current set of teachers more wouldn’t accomplish the same goal.

IN SUMMARY

Overall, schools are in dire need of reform. We teach too much and not enough – all at the same time. Students rarely make connections between what they learn in the classroom and real-world experiences. They go through school feeling like much of what they learn is irrelevant.

In spite of this, the answer is not to simply move toward a system where everyone learns everything in a real-world environment. While learning by trial-and-error leaves a lasting impression on students, it is not the most efficient way to learn. A combination of structured instruction, feedback, hands-on projects and group work can achieve the same end with more depth and in far less time. A classroom setting has all of the flexibility needed to provide this variety. Moreover, physical locality for learning will be essential unless our culture undergoes a radical shift.

Schools need to severely pare down their core curricula in order to give educators time to make sure students are mastering concepts. However, this freeing-up of the curriculum will only work if the teachers have the necessary judgment, commitment and skill set to turn a less structured environment into an effective learning environment for all students.

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