To Create, To Design

A video and education reform's 100 year failure

A timely video inspired by Michael Wesch came across my desk today and it comes at an interesting time in my thinking on education. The Future of Ed Reform? weaves a very short yet potent story about the realities so many of us face who seek to radically change the structure of education from "places of schooling" to "places of learning".



I have written about critical education in many posts and realize that most of my ideation, design and praxis towards democratic education has met with the realities of institutions, schooling an societal structures around education and official knowledge. I would like to say I met these challenges and take the path I do now, knowing I stand on the shoulders of progressives and a hundred years of work from John Dewey, L. Thomas Hopkins et al., and their contemporaries James Beane, Micheal Apple, Deb Meir and so many others who are in the field not writing prolifically but fostering experiences and learning.

The Future of Ed Reform begs questions of reform and stasis in education. "If so many years of reform, (including some almost 100 years old that espouse the same reform we are seeking in education today) have failed why do we think it will work....this time." A good question and one I had with a visionary leader and progressive educator in the field just yesterday: More on this in future posts.

The author of Future of Ed Reform is right to question these new "reforms" and their ability to succeed. The authors points at "the revolution failed" are right. The use of Dewey as an example is illustrative of the issues here. Dewey, Francis Parker, L. Thomas Hopkins et al. faced a backlash from an American society bent on order and standardization. Though their reform was brilliant and on the mark in many ways, school in the 20th century was an institution based on order and control just as it is today. Today as in the 20th century, linear schedules, corporate curricula, and the extra-curricularization of energy and interests still combine to hold firm what has been at the expense of what is. The School structure and its meanings are the issues of today just as they where a century ago.

Dewey did call for a revolution from schooling to learning, and espoused among so many brilliant ideas a call for deschooling on the grounds that control and order do little for learning. Dewey (1938) reflects,

Almost everyone has had occasion to look back upon his [and her] school days and wonder what has become of the knowledge he was supposed to have amassed during his [and her] years of schooling....but it was so segregated when it was acquired and hence is so disconnected from the rest of experience that it is not available under the actual conditions of life. (p.48)

We must reflect presently on the "reform" engines of today motoring throughschools and quietly accepting the structures imposed in what amounts to seeing learners and their communities as commodities and economies of scale, versus dynamic realities of human possibility. The author of The Future of Ed Reform? is calling out the realities of societal structures and the school not the reform which may have similarity to our 100 year past.

To Create, To Design

It is no mystery to many that I favor the design of new learning Ecologies that leverage much of what Dewey et.al espoused and practiced in the fields of experiential and democratic education. I have also focused my work on the networking of blended learning ecologies. A combination of Illich's learning webs, the mesh ideas of OLPC and my roots in experiential and mobile learning in the big outside. This design like so many is at risk when placed against the onslaught of stasis in education. No Softballs here, we have heard them in detail. Yet I find myself asking are we ready for a networked learning ecology? Is society? What will it take?

So anthropologists, critical educators, deschoolers, unschoolers, reformers, what will make your vision work? Are you part of a revolution? If so why, and will that revolution be enough force to break the dam of traditional control and order schooling to create or recreate places of learning for society? I am interested in hearing your voice and working with you.

Yong Zhao on Educational Risk and the Reason to Deschool

From: Yong Zhao » Blog Archive » A Nation At Risk: Edited by Yong Zhao. (n.d.). Yong Zhao. Retrieved March 11, 2011, from http://zhaolearning.com/2011/03/10/a-nation-at-risk-edited-by-yong-zhao/

Indicators of the Risk

The educational dimensions of the risk before us have been amply documented in materials read by this editor. For example:

• For
  the first time, research shows American creativity is declining. Since
  1990, Americans’ creativity scores have been on the decline
  significantly and most seriously among young children (from kindergarten
  through sixth grade).
• As
  a result of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), a significant number of
  schools in America have narrowed their curriculum by cutting arts,
  music, physical education, social studies, science, recess, or lunch.
  “Forty-four percent of all districts nationwide have added time for
  English language arts and/or math, at the expense of social studies,
  science, art and music, physical education, recess, or lunch.”
• Meanwhile, our competitors such as China and Singapore
  have been decreasing their instructional time for math and increasing
  time for creativity, critical thinking, arts, physical education. For
  example, since 1999 China has decreased total instructional hours by 380
  for grades 1 through 6, reduced math instruction by 140 hours and added
  156 instructional hours for physical education.
• Unethical
  and dishonest behaviors have become rampant in American education.
  Teachers, school administrators, and students have been forced to engage
  in all sorts of cheating to raise test scores and state governments
  lower standards to avoid penalties.
• America
  spends $1.1 billion dollars per year testing their children under NCLB
  while many schools have to cut short instructional hours and or lay off
  teachers due to budget cuts.
• In
  2004–2005, Wisconsin students spent a total of about 1.4 million hours
  taking state tests; with full implementation of NCLB testing, that
  number will more than double, to 2.9 million. These figures do not
  include the time spent distributing and collecting materials, taking
  practice tests, giving instructions, and addressing other logistics of
  testing.
• American teachers’ morale has reached a crisis level. Over a quarter of teachers leave the profession within the first three years and nearly half leave within the first five.
• Teacher unions, the last organized line of defense for public education, are being threatened across the nation.
• Yet,
  the governments continue to impose policies that connect teacher
  evaluation with student test scores although research has clearly shown
  that such policies do not improve student learning, even measured by
  test scores.
• American education has become a nationalized standardized
  education system. Locally democratically elected school boards have been
  rendered bureaucratic assistants of the state and federal government to
  enforce implementation of state and federal mandates rather than
  guarding the education of their children.
• Less
  than 20% of American students are enrolled in a foreign language course
  while all Chinese students are required to study a foreign language
  beginning from third grade at the latest.
• Only 11 percent of twelfth graders nationwide demonstrated proficiency in U.S. history.
• More
  than 80 percent of New York City eighth graders did not meet the state
  standards in social studies in 2004.  Moreover, the number of students
  meeting the social studies standards has decreased by almost 20
  percentage points since 2002.
• 25
  percent of college-bound high school students could not name the ocean
  between California and Asia. 80 percent of young Americans (ages 18 to
  24) did not know that India is the world’s largest democracy; 37 percent
  could not locate China on a map of Asia and the Middle East.
• The
  average number of languages spoken by American business executives is
  1.5, compared with an average of 3.9 languages spoken by business
  executives in the Netherlands.
• Business
  and military leaders complain about the lack of international and cross
  cultural skills of American graduates. “A 2002 survey of large U.S.
  corporations found that nearly 30 percent of the companies believed they
  had failed to exploit fully their international business opportunities
  due to insufficient personnel with international skills. The
  consequences of insufficient culturally competent workers, as identified
  by the firms, included: missed marketing or business opportunities;
  failure to recognize important shifts in host country policies toward
  foreign-owned corporations; failure to anticipate the needs of
  international customers; and failure to take full advantage of expertise
  available or technological advances occurring abroad. Almost 80 percent
  of the business leaders surveyed expected their overall business to
  increase notably if they had more internationally competent employees on
  staff.”

Time to Deschool

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