We Can Do Better or, What I Learned in Grad School

In reflecting on my education in the MAT program at Chatham, I’m surprised to realize how much I’ve learned.  The frustration with the program’s failings has often eclipsed any awareness of gaining skills or knowledge relevant to my chosen career.  However, as I head into student teaching in a public school, I find myself wondering why they bother teaching us these things at all.

It is incredibly frustrating, disheartening even, to know that I’m entering a system that is fundamentally antithetical to what I’ve learned about good teaching.  We know that mastery-oriented motivation produces better adjusted people who care about their learning and have a lifelong curiosity.  But the public school system is not only performance motivated but performance obsessed.  We are inadvertently teaching our students that their PSSA scores are all that matter, that they are the only valid and valued measure of who they are.  Psychological research has shown that the most important aspect of good parenting and good teaching is consistency.  Yet the system changes constantly, moving benchmarks and goal posts almost yearly.  People can’t meet expectations that are unclear and always changing.  We know that teaching for depth rather than breadth of understanding is the best way to develop students’ critical thinking skills and knowledge base.  Yet we insist upon teaching ninth graders the nitty-gritty details of protein synthesis, rather than giving them an overview of the living world and their place in it.  

American public education was founded upon the Jeffersonian ideal that “the cornerstone of a democracy is an educated electorate.”  The common school movement sought to provide an equal, democratic, humanistic education to all American children.  (Technically all non-laborer class, white, male children.  But we’ll give Jefferson and the founders the benefit of the doubt that when they said all “men” were created equal, they were referring to all of humanity.  Which isn’t a huge intellectual leap given the modern applications of that most famous turn of phrase.  But I digress…) 

As America’s shores were inundated with immigrants and the Industrial Revolution seized the economy, a new purpose was identified for public education: To Americanize all children and to create a skilled workforce for the industrial machine.  This goal was expanded upon after the Sputnik crisis, when the powers of public education were turned toward beating the Soviets in the STEM race. This is the trend and legacy of 20^th century American education: The commoditization of children.  Adults decided that education should be the development of future human capital.  They stopped seeing children as people and became blind to the deeper, more meaningful outcomes of a good education. 

We must move forward by returning to our roots: Equitable, democratic, humanistic education for all.  It won’t be easy.  There are major practical and political obstacles.  As in so many spheres of American public policy, we have moved far from the founding ideals. (Or is it just that we haven’t yet agreed on what those founding ideals were?)  The American education system is a slow, unwieldy leviathan not easily given to change.  There will be opposition to the “progressive measures” or “excessive federal influence” or the dangerous proposition of a “socialist” education system.  But if we’re serious about closing the achievement gaps—both domestic and international—and about preparing our kids for the 21^st century, we don’t have a choice.  What we were doing barely worked under the old paradigm; otherwise, A Nation at Risk and No Child Left Behind wouldn’t have been necessary.  Certainly the old status quo can’t meet the needs of the new paradigm. As Sir Ken Robinson quoted Abraham Lincoln, “The silent dogma of the past is insufficient for the stormy present.”

We face real challenges in American education.  How do we educate an increasingly diverse student population?  How do we affect meaningful systemic change within the confines of a ­­­­­­­populist system that is allergic to federal interference?  How do we prepare today’s kids for a future we can’t even imagine?  And if we figure it out, how are we going to pay for it?  These are valid questions.  But challenges are no reason to accept the status quo.

Before we address these practical concerns, we have to change the values of the system.  There are two major philosophical obstacles to any meaningful reform in American education:  How we view the children and how we view the teachers.  We must view children not as future cogs in the economic machine but as developing human individuals in need of care, guidance, and support.  We must view teachers as what we claim to see them as now: The source of all student success. 

It might seem obvious that we have no choice but to educate our children for the 21^st century.  It is, after all, the 21^st century.  But we’re using a system designed for the mid-20^th century.  We’ve tried to fix it, but clearly we have failed.  So yes, we must choose to education our children for their century.   

But 21^st century learning is not about technology.  Or rather, it doesn’t have to be.  It can be more than an upgrade in instructional methodology and materiel.  As Trudy Sweeney makes clear, effective, meaningful incorporation of new instructional technology requires a pedagogical shift.  If you just tack the technology onto your existing teaching you are doing both yourself, your students, and the technology a disservice. 

And as Mitra discussed in his TED talk, educational technology has the potential to do more than change how we teach.  It has the potential to change how we think about education.  Sir Ken Robinson, Alan November, and other innovative 21^st century pedagogical thinkers agree.  Sir Robinson identifies the major challenge to today’s teachers:  It isn’t using technology, or preparing kids for a global tech economy.  It is preparing kids for a world we literally cannot envision.  How are we supposed to do that?  How can you prepare for something you can’t even imagine?  How do you teach students the necessary skills for success when you don’t know what they’ll have to be successful at?!

If we accept the basic premise of American public education, that the K-12 system is designed to prepare students for the workforce, then we must conclude that we’re doing a terrible job.  A high school education isn’t what it used to be. The earning power of a bachelor’s degree has declined significantly.  College is the new high school. The master’s degree (I can attest) is the new bachelor’s.  So we must assume that we are educating our students for the unskilled, sub-living wage workforce: for jobs at McDonald’s.  Is this really our goal?  Logically, it must be.

Likewise, if we accept that the K-12 education isn’t what it used to be, then the purpose of K-12 education must change.  K-12 education becomes about preparing students for success in whatever line of study they choose to pursue in higher education.  Because we cannot provide all children with the prerequisite declarative knowledge necessary for all college majors, we must deduce that our goal should be to provide them with the prerequisite, universal procedural knowledge necessary for the pursuit of all higher education and for successful adulthood.

What defines a successful adulthood? The individual.  One of the blessings (and curses) of the modern global economy is choice.  Each student will be able to choose how to define success for him or herself.  There are students who will define success as working for a hedge fund, arguing a case in front of the Supreme Court, or curing cancer.  Still more will define it in less traditional ways, ways that are made possible by the global, technological world in which we live.  Success for one might be getting off the grid or running a locally sustainable farm.  For another, it might be seeing her painting in MoMA or tagging as many global cities as possible with his street art.  For many, success will be defined as having a job they don’t hate that allows them, both financially and temporally, to live the life they want outside of work.  So how to we prepare students for such diverse futures?

"Rather than focusing on specific technologies or specific problems, we need to equip students with those concepts that are common to all problems, all technologies, all skills."(Gunderson, Jones, and Scanland: "Jobs Revolution: Changing How American Works)

By focusing on procedural, rather than declarative knowledge.  We want a literate populace.  What does literacy mean, beyond being able to read?  It means being able to find and evaluate information.  It means being technologically savvy.  It means being able to understand domestic and international news through the lenses of history, politics, and economics.  It means being able to understand, apply, and make decisions about ethically gray scientific topics.  It means being able to respectfully, productively communicate with people different from ourselves.  These are the tenets of Jeffersonian education. 

So the answer is deceptively, dauntingly simple:  We teach them to think.  How? By remembering that children should be at the center of any conversation about education; not money, not politics, not the economy.  Children. By taking a leaf out of Finland’s book.  By refusing to believe that teachers who can’t do are good enough for American children.  By caring about the education of our educators. By not just listening to but implementing the advice of smart, creative, innovative people.  By training our teachers well and then loosing them into a system that supports, encourages, and trusts them to apply their talents and skills to meet the needs of the unique groups of kids in front of them. By barring complacency from our educational institutions. By considering the questions of passionate, frustrated pre-service teachers who demand to know why, when they are devoting their lives to education, their own education is so insufficient. By not being afraid to dowhat we know works.