The special momentum of the status quo

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Michael

Have you ever noticed how little schooling has changed since your parents or even grandparents' classroom days?

I've often wondered how a classroom in 1985 Communist Russia would differ from one in 2011 Canada or America. Oh sure, there would be nuances with what kids were learning, but I fear how they were expected to do so would look freakishly similar. Regardless of time, place and political affiliation, behavioral conformity, worksheet completion and pre-test memorization would be the name of both games.

So why is school such a timeless institution where the more things change, the more things stay the same? Why does so much of school reform feel like the equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?

Why is this?

Joel Westheimer writes in his review of Ted Sizer's book Horace's Compromise:

One of the most stable structures in card house building, my nine year old cousin informs me, is the triangle. Three cards placed just so, leaning against each other in a three-way system of support, can be used as an "awesome foundation. On one architectural design occasion, as she happily laid cards for level four, I couldn't resist asking if her house could survive a slight change - adjusting one of the base triangles, for example. She tried, rotating one card gently counterclockwise. The house giggled for a moment and collapsed. It was a messy sight, a young architect's nightmare. "The foundation," she reported, "can't change without a whole lot of trouble!" 

"The status quo," writes Sizer in Horace's Compromise, "... has special momentum."

It's been said before that Old School is not a place - rather it is a state of mind that thinks very little of the mind - which is built on the premise that the teacher 'teaches' and the student 'learns' and never shall the two roles be confused. Paulo Freire aptly outlines this pseudo-learning environment well in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed while Robert Fried properly indicts the Game of School in his book:

I see no despicable plot, no conspiracy by educators to deny children their right to learn. The problem is not that those who work within schools and colleges regularly force us to abandon our own learning goals and submit to their indoctrination. It's just that too many of us - students and teachers alike - agree to substitute lesser, symbolic goals for greater and truer ones. When we allow ourselves (or get convinced) to gear ourselves up so as to complete school tasks that have little meaning for us aside from the value of getting them done and over with, we lose touch with our own learning spirit. We become alienated from the natural learning desires and inquisitiveness within us. We tend to become compliant rather than creative, docile instead of courageous, inwardly passive instead of assertively engaged, cynical at a time in life when we should be idealistic. We become game players by reflex, and learners only one occasion... 

My argument with the Game of School is not an argument against school, much less against the teaching profession. Teachers, schools, and school systems are themsleves often the victims of this self-same game, played out according to the rules set down by those who have power over us. My hope is to bring this phenomenon to the attention of educators and learners at all levels; it is most destructive where least acknowledged. Those caught in the Game soon lose awareness of it; it begins to seem like the only way of doing business.

Like Robert Fried, Ted Sizer and Paulo Friere critique Old School not as an argument against school (or teachers) anymore than Joel Westheimer's nine year old cousin would argue against triangles. Rather, the point to be taken from all of this is one of awareness.

Because one of the largest obstacles to improving school is our own memories, we need to be aware that until school ceases to be merely something done to kids, rather than by kids, reform will only ever improve school while changing nothing.

Until we stop selling 'more of the same' as a daring departure from what we've always done, the status quo will continue to gain more and more momentum. Real change will require school to look a lot less like school - and to do that would require a whole lot of trouble.

The Independent Project

Inspiration, hunger: these are the forces that drive good schools. The best we educational planners can do is create the most likely conditions for them to flourish and then get out of their way.

-Ted Sizer

True accountability would demand that we ask children if they like school; then we would have to care about their answer - and be prepared to do something about it.

Where interest lies; achievement follows. 

Susan Engel puts it this way:

You can't achieve the broader goals of making people into readers, making people love ideas, love conversation, love knowledge, want to get good at things, if you don't make school a place where kids want to be.

For more on how high school can be less about the system's needs and more about student's needs, check out The Independent Project:

Legacy of Traditional Education

I started reading Ted Sizers book Horace's Compromise where I came across this excerpt:

And yet Americans underrate the craft of teaching. We treat it mechanistically. We expect to know how to teach fractions as though one needed only a formulaic routine to do so, a way to plug in. We talk about "delivering a service" to students by means of "instructional strategies"; our metaphors arise from the factory floor and issue from the military manual. Education, apparently, is something someone does to somebody else. Paradoxically, while we know that we don't learn very well that way, nor want very much to have someone else's definition of "service" to be "delivered" to us, we accept these metaphors for the mass of children. We thus underrate the mystery, challenge, and complexity of learning and, as a result, operate schools that are extraordinarily wasteful.

The more I think about all that is wrong with school...

...the more I recall all the things I hated when I was a kid...

...the more I read about school reform...

...whether it's Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Martin Haberman's Pedagogy of Poverty or Ted Sizer's compromises, I'm starting to see a common thread that is the undoing of traditional education.

Because school defines learning as passive, learners come to see education as something done to them. When students are stuck in the middle of a problem, they don't try and figure out what makes sense to do next; instead, they try to remember what they are suppose to do. If this is the premise for learning, is it any surprise that learners become less autonomous, more dependent and ultimately mindless?

If this is the recipe for K-12 schooling, disengagement on behalf of the students is as predictable as it is problematic.

Mindless Math Mimicry

When the process of learning in arithmetic is conceived to be the mere acquisition of isolated, independent facts, the process of teaching becomes that of administering drill.

Math educator William Brownell wrote this in...

...1928!

And yet his words feel like they could have been written today to describe how drill and kill, algorithmic instruction continues to hold an indelible grip over math classrooms all over the world.

Traditional education and its legacy of sit and get, do as your told and get the right answer quickly distracts us with its infatuation with behavioral mathematics.

Good math teachers concern themselves with helping children make sense of math for themselves.

Good math teachers understand that we no longer believe that human beings acquire knowledge by internalization, reinforcement and conditioning.

Good math teachers understand the superiority of Jean Piaget's Constructivism. In her book Young Children Reinvent Arithmetic, Constance Kamii explains:

Piaget's theory provides the most convincing scientific explanation of how children acquire number concepts. It states, in essence, that logic-mathematical knowledge, including number and arithmetic, is constructed (created) by each child from within, in interaction with the environment. In other words, logic-mathematical knowledge is not acquired directly from the environment by internalization.

Behavioural mathematics is malpractice for at least two reasons:

Firstly, behavioural mathematics places an exorbitant emphasis on time, and secondly, it convinces kids that product is infinitely more important than process. Both are poisonous pills for any classroom set on intellectual exploration.

Mad Minutes! and its emphasis on time is counter-productive for creating a classroom climate built on real learning. Alfie Kohn explains:

Teachers who want to encourage intellectual growth give students time to be confused and create a climate where it's perfectly acceptable to fall on your face.

A classroom determined to help kids find "right answers" are one's that oddly enough place more emphasis on process than product. Ted Sizer writes:

Good schools promote displays of incompetence (strange as that may sound) in order to help students find their way to competence.

Traditional instruction does not sell learning as a process; rather it teaches kids that math is really about being fast and right. And the best way for kids to achieve this kind of mindless math mimicry is to memorize at the cost of real learning.

Trivial educational reform

In his book The Element, Sir Ken Robinson urges us to rethink school:

This is especially true in high schools, where school systems base education on the principles of the assembly line and the efficient division of labour. Schools divide the curriculum into specialist segments:"some teachers install math in the students; and others install history. They arrange the day into standard units of time, marked out by the ringing of bells, much like a factory announcing the beginning of the workday and the end of breaks. Students are educated in batches, according to age, as if the most important thing they have in common is their date of manufacture. They are given standardized tests at set points and are compared with each other before being sent out onto the market.

Too often the changes made over the years to education have been simply trivial. In his book The Red Pencil, Ted Sizer writes:

Most of it is not only recognizable; it is still fully accepted and honored today as a representation of what we call secondary school: a class of twenty or so adolescents gathered by age into grades to learn together a subject both for its content and for the skills embodied in that content taught by a single teacher who is responsible for delivering that material, assigning homework, and assessing each student's performance in a uniform manner, all this proceeding in sequential blocks of time of forty to sixy minutes each in a specialized school building primarily made up of a succession of identical rooms taht are used for six hours for fewer than half the days in a year... This is what school is.

What makes the persistence of this routine even more interesting is that its effectiveness has long been known to be weak, "effectiveness" defined as the students' ultimate resourceful use of the content and skills being studied. Nonetheless, the form of such a "good" school is widely accepted, and today's students assembled in classes... surely have palms as sweaty as mine were. The red pencil has, perhaps, been replaced by the machine-graded standardized test, a trivial difference. Tradition in the framework of schooling has remarkable momentum.

School simply has not changed very much since the turn of the century - and I'm not referring to 1999 to 2000. I would wager Sir Ken Robinson's description of school would ring just as true for my grandfather who was born in 1916 and my father who was born in 1953, as I who was born in 1978.

My greatest fear is that my daughter, who was born in 2008, will understand all too well the system that Sir Ken Robinson describes.

If she responds to the above descriptions of schooling with anything less than shock and awe, we will know we have failed her.