Off the Assembly Line, Part 2

INVESTING IN THE FUTURE: Children have always been viewed as capital-first the parents' and then a nation's most important investment in the future. Adults do many things to provide for and assure a viable future for children. Indeed, if this were not true, the whole structure of society would collapse. In many Western and Westernized nations over the last century, business, capitalism and education have commingled to create the public school system. "Are our schools getting enough bang for the buck?" has been a preeminent question beginning in the early 1900s. The follow-on question, "Are our students prepared for work?" continues to be a driver of reform efforts. In the United States, the impetus for the school-work connection was developed from the work of Frederick Taylor in 1911. "According to Taylor," wrote education professor Raymond E. Callahan, "there was always one best method for doing any particular job and this best method could be determined only through scientific study." Taylor's theory of scientific management, combined with psychologist Edward Thorndike's behaviorist theory of learning, helped establish a so-called school science. Through studies of cats and chickens, Thorndike had by the 1920s concluded that a stimulus-response-reward system enhanced learning. The continuing belief today that the correct stimuli (test scores, merit pay, etc.) will create better graduates can be traced to these ideas. As Callahan argued, the goal of efficient use of public money and the tangential desire on the part of business for an obedient working class pushed school administrators away from being experts in children and education to becoming pseudo-experts in finance and public relations: "The great initial thrust for efficiency and economy against a young weak profession in the years after 1911 started the unfortunate developments in educational administration. . . . In retrospect, America might have been better off in the long run if American educators had taken a realistic look at what was expected of them and the means that were being provided and had closed the schools." Most of what we have experienced and accept as the status quo of modern schools in the United States and elsewhere-large class sizes in large buildings, a limited selection of courses, objective and easily scored multiple-choice tests, career or college-prep orientation, "stakeholders," rows of seats, bell-to-bell instruction-can be traced back to the rules of efficiency and rote instruction outlined by Taylor and Thorndike. These structures embody what parents have learned to expect from school, because that is what they lived. However common this perception may be, clouded memory can trick us into believing that the status quo is best. So even if we choose to pay for private instruction, select where to place our education vouchers, seek out lotteries to gain entry to magnet or other specialized schools, or even decide to take the responsibility of homeschooling, we often try to emulate these conditions. Like a child playing teacher, we put the toys in rows and lecture to them. While the imagery is true to form-school does look like this-its effectiveness has never been high. Even when it was efficient, turning out the sought-after 20 percent managers and 80 percent workers, many students simply left the system. Their refusal to follow the company line hurt the graduation rate numbers, but in the times when low-skill jobs were abundant there was little societal cost. Today we may fret over low graduation rates, but the upshot is that our schools remain poorly designed for the individual. This is what efficiency brings; the system is standardized. The tall poppies get cut down, if any grow at all. SCHOOL CHOICE: The negative long-term consequences of the assembly-line school are becoming more evident. Not only is such a system failing to meet the needs of society-as its critics have always insisted, whether from the business, moral, practical or cultural spheres-student discontent is growing toward critical mass as well. In all areas of life we are afforded choice. Whether in food, clothes, entertainment or electronics, everyone falls prey to the niche marketer. The suggestion to "have it your way" has become the clarion call of consumerism. It has penetrated every venue exceptthe school. In academic language, psychologist Kalina Christoff describes the inertia, "The standardization of examination methods and educational assessment is perhaps the biggest hurdle toward applying such an individualized and versatile approach to schooling." Thus it is critical that parents engage with their child one-to-one if true individuation is to occur. Parents need not avoid the public school out of hand; they must understand its shortcomings and expect to compensate. One purpose of the school has been to filter people down different paths. But the paths offered to the student have become increasingly constrained. Finances have contributed to this and so have the universities. Because they set certain entrance requirements and thereby bring greater legitimacy to some subjects and less to others, universities are to a great degree the driver of standardization. But while it is a myth that "you can beanything you want to be," all children must be allowed to besomething. The problem remains, then, to enhance the futures of all children; once some go through the filters toward university, how can the rest be best served? Guideposts are necessary to delineate skills and direct students toward the development of skill sets beyond college prep. How much differentiation the school can or should provide continues to be a challenging question, but it will need an answer soon. The growing danger is that fewer and fewer of our students are engaging in material they do not find personally relevant. They really do expect it "their way." This is not simply a reconfiguring of the 1970s argument for introducing a wider selection of coursework from which students could choose according to their own tastes. The whole process of learning is better understood today, including the role of motivation; we realize that pushing all students down similar paths-down the same assembly line toward the same outcomes, even a good outcome such as college preparation-is truly irrelevant to many students. McLuhan was prescient in this regard: "The challenge of the new era is simply the total creative process of growing up-and mere teaching and repetition of facts are as irrelevant to this process as a dowser to a nuclear power plant. To expect a 'turned on' child of the electric age to respond to the old education modes is rather like expecting an eagle to swim. It's simply not within his environment, and therefore incomprehensible." We must become better stewards of both our students and our schools, especially in regard to students who do not exhibit the verbal and numerical strengths that present schooling is designed to draw on. "The coin of the realm in schooling is words and numbers, so much so as to constitute a form of educational inequity for students whose aptitudes are in realms other than verbal or mathematical," says Elliott Eisner, emeritus professor of art and education at Stanford. Along with Howard Gardner (see "Multiple Intelligences"), Eisner believes that student talents exist in a much broader range and suggests the obvious but difficult proposition that we "broaden both the curricular options and criteria that affect students' lives." By: DAN CLOER dan.cloer@visionjournal.org Source: www.vision.org SELECTED REFERENCES: 1 Raymond E. Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency: A Study of the Social Forces That Have Shaped the Administration of the Public Schools (1962). 2 Angela L. Duckworth and Martin E.P. Seligman, "Self-Discipline Outdoes IQ in Predicting Academic Performance of Adolescents," in Psychological Science (2005). 3Elliot Eisner, The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs (3rd edition, 2002). 4 Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, "The Smoke Around Mirror Neurons: Goals as Sociocultural and Emotional Organizers of Perception and Action in Learning," in Mind, Brain, and Education (2008). 5 Deanna Kuhn, "How to Produce a High-Achieving Child," in Phi Delta Kappan(2007). 6 Marshall McLuhan, interview, http://www.mcluhanmedia.com/m_mcl_inter_pb_01.html (1969). 7 Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative(2001). 8 Ken Robinson and Lou Aronica, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything (2009).