My latest essay.
within a decade or two, the idea that learning can be located in time and space will no longer seem natural. The essence of the revolution that I foresee will be our embrace of anywhere-anytime learning. It could be that schooling as an institution will adapt to this paradigm, but I would bet against it.
Meanwhile, a more moderate proposal (still radical by today’s standards) is to get rid of school districts. As Bruno Behrend points out, the case against school districts is a strong one. Still,
people can’t yet envision an education system without the bureaucracy, powerless boards, “group rights” (what a frightening, tribal, concept), and the millions of unnecessary jobs that school districts force upon us.
As I have said before, people are really afraid of letting go of coercion in education. They think that we need adults to be in a position to coerce children, school officials need to be in a position to coerce parents and teachers, local politicians need to be in a position to coerce school officials, state politicians need to be in a position to coerce local officials, and national politicians need to be in a position to coerce state politicians. And, of course, teachers’ unions need to have particularly strong power.
Bureaucracy, group rights and “millions of unnecessary jobs” are the whole point of the existing public education system. That, and indoctrinating kids with P.C. nonsense and turning them into passive, pliable, conformist drones.
How do you write posts like this and still keep that slogan in the upper right? The hypocrisy is hilarious.
You did not read his essay, you just oppose Kling’s ideas on education, and try to frame him as a hypocrite, which is entirely irrelevant. Please try again.
Arnold, of all your posts I’ve read, this one has made me the happiest. Your dreams for education are also dreams I share, and in the years ahead the possibilities for such an approach will finally become obvious.
+1, although I agree this isn’t the most “charitable” interpretation of the other side, LOL.
Good linked piece, if a bit too cautious at the end. I’ll note that there’s no need for “virtual reality” to replace labs and machines, you can just do it with simulation software. Back when I was in college and taking a human physiology course, I was given the choice of dissecting a frog or employing software to learn frog anatomy, if I had ethical problems with killing the frog. There’s no reason you couldn’t do the same with most other labs. Actually, most labs are a joke, as you have to fulfill a predetermined script within a set time period, that’s usually too short and doesn’t leave much time for reflection and learning. I suspect that labs are mostly just cargo cult education, like most of the curriculum, though I can’t deny that such experiential learning might be worthwhile for a few who don’t learn as well through reading or lectures. Suffice to say, I found most labs to be a waste of time, particularly those that wouldn’t let me work with the equipment at my own pace.
In talking to others about the need for online learning, the big excuses given for the current education system are coercion, social interaction, and the need for physical labs. I’ve already noted that labs are usually worthless and the vast majority of curricula don’t employ them anyway, just a few science-based ones. Coercion only applies if you can justify the existing curriculum and why it is must be forced on students. Engage them on that point however and it becomes painfully obvious that they have no idea why an education is necessary or why certain components must be mandatory: they have simply and uncritically imbibed the notion that people have to be forcibly taught some vague “important” information and don’t venture beyond that.
As for social interaction, that is the biggest joke of all. First, you know your system is bankrupt if your most-cited excuse is something that’s not one of its stated goals in the first place. Second, social interaction in most schools happens almost exclusively between classes, not during class time, which could be why most of it resembles something out of Lord of the Flies more than anything else. To say it’s a positive is to be painfully ignorant of what’s going on. In any case, people, including kids, have more opportunity for social interaction these days than any time in human history, whether through Facebook or Foursquare or video conferencing or planning meetups online. They don’t need school for that, these aren’t rural kids living on some isolated farmhouse on the prairie.
The case for schooling is a joke and it’s a marker of idiocy for those who continue to make it.
This is going to sound meaner than I mean it but one of the top two reasons for school is daycare. Parents know they have a safe place to send their kids for seven hours a day. The kids won’t be ingesting drugs or alcohol or engaging in sexual activity. They will not encounter “bad” ideas. They will be rewarded for prosocial behavior and punished for anti-social behavior.
This requires that the kids be kept busy and under adult supervision for that entire period. That means those “millions of unnecessary jobs” are very necessary.
I am a public school teacher transitioning to a different career, and Roger’s comment really resonates with me. I think K-12 public schools are about warehousing children, giving parents childcare, whether they are at work or simply want a break from being around their kids (the quality of parenting going on is incredibly wide-ranging).
In affluent communities, I suspect the parents drive the educational system more than the educational system drives the children. Public schools are using IB schools and AP curriculum to retain high-achieving students in their districts, to standardize the curriculum taught, and to disaggregate higher-achieving students from non without claims of the evils of tracking.
The second big obstacle to switching to a more individualized, non-coercive form of education is the convenience of the current model where buses pick children up from their neighborhood bus stops, and parents have a familiarity with the system since it is similar to what they went through.
I summarized my take on why the current system is still in place-Cost, Convenience, Comfortability and Childcare. Unfortunately, the one-size-fits-all approach is ineffective, makes young people passionately hate school (which breeds some serious anti-intellectual pathologies) and is becoming even more centralized in curriculum and control. (See Common Core curriculum adopted by 48 states.) It may be the slogan of this decade-what can’t go on forever, wont’.
Reading a Captain Capitalism post, Repair never Replace, on not being afraid to make a mistake but rather use broken stuff to learn and to live quite well on a modest salary. He commented on Youtube as a massive source of knowledge. A comment I found humorous but also true “You name it, youtube has it. It’s practically replaced your dad.” No longer are kids without a handy dad without a way to learn handyman skills.
As for parents not pushing kids to learn outside of school. It’s the coercion that kids start to rebel against not the learning. My elderly aunt tells the story that a 5-yrs old she took herself down to the school and got enrolled. Of course, back then a kid showing up to learn without a parent didn’t kick off a police investigation with removal of the child from her parents. I we can keep from making school a job with an overbearing boss, kids will naturally be curious about knowledge. But who wants to think about their boring job after they clock out? Why should we expect kids to be different?
Arnold, I assume you have read John Holt’s classic books on education? If not, you must. Start with “How Children Fail” and then “How Children Learn”.