Month: February 2013 (page 2 of 2)

(Image credit: Left – Multnomah County Library, Right: Sam Howzit)

If you ask people who attempt to predict the future of education, you will find out quickly that there are two very different, competing perspectives.

One camp believes that the future of education is in moving away from complete standardization of curriculum and focusing on nurturing students to become learners, so that when they need to learn something new, they are capable of doing so independently. They are less concerned with the media that students use to learn, and more concerned about ensuring that students have at least some say in what they learn, and how they learn it. They believe that computers are powerful devices for exploration, and that the full potential of computers in education has not yet been realized.

This first camp believes that learning is something best done within social contexts, while simultaneously believing that cultivating the ability to think independently of others is of critical importance in our life. They believe in students spending some time learning independently through self-exploration, and some time collaborating deeply with others. They believe in teaching kids how to think, not what to think. They believe the role of teachers is primarily to mentor students and to model being a learner with them.

The other camp believes that the future of education is in mechanical learning. They believe that if we can just find the right mixture of content, media, and machine-graded assessment, we can greatly reduce the costs of education, and deliver a personalized education experience to every child. They believe that a teacher’s job is to deliver content and assess the understanding of students, and they believe that these can both be done efficiently and effectively with a computer. They believe that if children just have the perfect explanation, they will learn.

This second camp believes that the future of learning is with children carefully isolated, sitting in cubicles, watching videos, and then answering questions prompted on the screen. They believe that social interaction with other children is at best a supplement to what happens on the computer, and at worst it is a distraction. This camp is usually more concerned with the cost of education than the quality of learning.

Both of my descriptions of these two camps are somewhat reductionist. Obviously there are shades of gray between these two camps. However, if you had to choose between these two visions, which would you choose? More importantly, what are you doing to make it a reality?

I don’t think we are doing a good enough job of preparing high school students for the university experience. We need to do more!

• We should increase class sizes in high school up to 500, so that students get the experience of being in a large lecture hall. We may want to ease students into this experience, so we should gradually increase up to 500 students per class, perhaps at 20 students a year. Working backwards, this would mean we should start with kindergarten class sizes of 260 students.
   
• We should make high schools larger. No more measly 2,000-student high schools. They should have 20,000 to 40,000 students at least!
   
• We should hire mostly teachers who have little formal training in teaching and are mostly interested in pursuing their own research. The lowest level classes in the school should be taught by graduate students with little to no teaching experience.
   
• We should reduce summative assessment in our schools to two exams per semester and use little to no formative assessment. If the students do not understand, they need to study more.
   
• If our students are struggling, we should just keep putting them into remedial courses until they drop out. Why would we offer them any support? They will be on their own in university!
   
• We should charge students ever increasing amounts for tuition and force students to take out gigantic student loans in order to complete high school if they cannot afford to pay.
   
• We should drop all of the ‘soft’ courses from our schools. Students do not need to take home economics, planning 10, or shop class. We should also make physical education optional. After all, our job is to prepare students minds for academia, not prepare them for life.
   
• We need to teach students how to navigate depersonalized bureacracy. Therefore we should make high school as depersonalized and bureacratic as possible.
   
• We should encourage our high school students to drink, so that we can replicate the drinking cultures prevalent on many university campuses.

(Or maybe we should stop backwards designing from university and instead focus on building effective practice, whether or not it "prepares students for university"?)

"We seem to think that education is a thing—like a vaccine—that can be designed from afar and simply injected into our children." ~ Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr

This is a quote from the State of the State address by the Governor of California, and it is one of my new favourite quotes on education. Thanks to Scott Mcleod for spotting it.

It’s a pretty interesting analogy. I wonder how many parents, students, teachers, administrators, and education policy makers believe that education is like a vaccination against ignorance. I see education as something developed within a community, by a community, for their community.

The challenge I see here is when a community begins to trample on the rights of its community members, neglects its duty to ensure everyone has equal access to happiness and opportunity, and therefore creates an education system which does not serve everyone in their community. In this case, I think the state should be able to intercede, but otherwise (unless they are coordinating projects between communities where scale matters) the state should stay out of the way.