Educational Organization

Education is still mostly organized around control.  We have been operating on a 19th century philosophy developed by Prussians to teach cohorts of students, based on age teaching the same subjects each day.  We use a technique that pours information into their brains and those who can not keep up are rejected or shunned in some way by the establishment.  The twentieth century brought about Pavlov and his ideas of reward and punishment.  These became the established system for controlling students in their classrooms.  The primary example is grades, A for the hard worker and F for the lazy.  The rhetoric is straight our to Protestant orthodoxy.  Work hard, live a good life and you will go to heaven. This system fit neatly into an industrial society where creativity and critical thinking were not important for the average worker who basically shifted widgets around for the owners of industry.

These concepts and philosophies never worked because they are antithetical to learning.  Certainly those who were motivated to learn did so, but those who had no support and found the lessons difficult had no way to excel in this system.  There were many more drop outs than graduates of the system.

The end of the 20th century brought the technological revolution which required that education actually teach students knowledge they would need to work.  Not just basic skills and science but, retrieval of data that they would use in the workplace.  This includes creative and critical thinking,  research skills  and social emotional maturity necessary necessary to work cooperatively as teams to develop, plan and create. 

As Kuhn pointed out in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, paradigms shift slowly and much of what we know about learning has been discovered in the last thirty years.  Changes in our thinking has been shaped by neuroscientists who delve into the physical brain to discover how it works.  These discoveries have debunked the systems of reward and punishment we have used to control students in school.  There have also been many experiments in education to find out what is the best way to organize for learning and it is not large groups of children, sitting at desks listening to a teacher talk.

The primary finding is that when children are treated with respect and given individual support they do much better.  One of my favorite stories is about a free school in Massachusetts where students are not required to do any academic work.  There were no classrooms, no desks, no prescribed curriculum.  The students sit on committees that hire teachers and make decisions about the nature of the school.  They can learn anything they want, when they want and choose how they want to learn.  One girl, for whom this school was a last chance for education due to her behavior, decided that she would leave. There were no guards, no rules about attendance.  As she reached the street she had an epiphany.  Why am I leaving there are no reasons to do so.  She turned around and decided to pursue her education. We must have internal motivation to truly learn.

If we want school to be a place where learning is a center of organization rather than control we must rethink our schools.  To certain extent the charter movement has cut into traditional schools but they have not been embraced by the establishment.  We must decentralize our classrooms, understand how humans learn and treat all students with dignity and respect before our education system will be center on learning.