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.

Illiterate America

The battle for literacy is being fought in our classrooms daily, but the true cause of illiterate America is not being addressed by endless hours of reading instruction.  Just as the innumeracy will not be defeated by hours of solving long division problems.  The problem is not our inability to read or compute algorithms, it is our inability to make meaning of the information we read.  As I follow the news about our diverse political thinking it seems as though everyone believes what they hear if the information comes to them from someone with whom they agree.

I had this problem when I was teaching online.  I taught a basic research class for college freshmen who had just finished a course in writing opinion papers.  Many of my students could not make the switch to writing an objective paper.  They were out to prove their point of view and used research from sources that agreed with them rather than searching and reporting on all points of view on their topic.

I fear this type of thinking is becoming epidemic with the Internet.  I regularly receive informative emails from people who want me to agree with their point of view.  They regularly use information that comes from unreliable sources and pass it on as if it were true.  One of the emails that sticks in my mind concerns Jane Fonda.  She is hated by many Vietnam veterans and other patriots who periodically pass on information about her behavior during her visit to N. Vietnam.  No matter how reprehensible her behavior was, most of the information has been refuted by those whom she reportedly harmed.  A quick check of different sources on the Internet shows much of the information in these emails to be false. 

It seems to me our failure in schools is not that we do not teach our students to read, it is that we do not teach them to discern propaganda and rhetoric from fact!

Kindness

School has always been a place that gathers frustrated people whose unkind words are often heard on the playground, library, classrooms and the office! John Medina, in his book Brain Rules, has as his 8th rule "stressed brains don't learn the same way."

When frustration is released with unkind words, stress is one of the side-effects and learning is the casualty. The Red Robin Foundation is doing something about this problem by providing grants of up to $15,000 with their U-Act program.

The goal of the Red Robin Foundation U-ACT Program is to encourage kindness among students and help create a sense of neighborliness inside and outside of school settings. U-ACT which stands for Unbridled Acts, or random acts of kindness, is a character-building initiative specifically for middle and junior high schools with grades six through eight, which aims to inspire and energize students about the value of being kind to others.

You can find out more at http://www.redrobin.com/rrfoundation/uactprogram.aspx
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Ebooks for education

Google, Barnes and Noble and others are preparing digital books and hardware anticipating the educational digital book market. California is testing electronic textbooks that can be viewed on e-book readers and is planning to bring free digital math and science etexts to schools this fall. The move to digital books in schools in education is underway.

As a school librarian I have been anticipating this movement for several years. As printed text books became more expensive and schools invested heavily in technology ebooks seemed inevitable. As I discussed this inevitable change with teachers and other educators, there was a lot of resistance to the idea. Mostly from people who love books (most teachers love to read books) and can not imagine technology can give them the same feeling while they are reading. Students, on the other hand, accept the idea and do not have the same sentimental attachment to printed books as adults. Educational publishers have been producing ebooks for the library and commerical market for a number of years and they are certainly convenient, although in my experience they were not widely read, Many students I have worked with in the last 10 years do not really care to read for pleasure or information.

I have often thought about the impact upon libraries if schools were to purchase their libraries as ebooks. The space taken up by printed materials would be available for other uses and students would not have to leave their class to check out a book. Man hours spent physically checking in and reshelving books could spent in other pursuits. School libraries have already cut back on certified librarians and with ebooks they could probably cut back on library assistants. So there would be a savings of space, use of time and maybe money.

Money seems to be driving the California initiative and it is certainly driving Barnes and Noble, Google and other players in the e-book publishing game. My experience with ebooks in the library is that they are not appreciably cheaper than printed books. They are easier to update and certainly easier to handle but once the printed book is no longer the norm, ebooks will cost about the same as a print book. In addtion, some educational publishers charge a yearly fee for access to their ebooks. States may be able to hold costs down for etexts by negotiating with edubusiness, but I believe there will be other associated costs that will cause the price of textbooks to continue to be high.

What about the ereading hardware? Education will have to be sure that there is a standard format for ebooks and etexts if they are going to use them. Sony has a reader, Kindle is Amazon’s reader and certainly the lure of government money will cause other entrepreneurs to try to dip into the pool. How will schools ensure that whatever they buy can be used with whatever they own? I expect there will have to be a big investment in new technology in order to be ready for digital books.

The investment in hardware will mean more of the budget goes to the technology department. Those laid of library assistants will probably be replaced by more people in the technology department. If my experience in education is any indication, there will be misspent money, unused technology, broken equipment, poorly thought out plans, noncompliant students and resistant educators. The change to ebooks will not happen smoothly nor will it be quick. Most likely by the time all the technology, training and attitudes are in place, there will be a new movement that will replace ebooks.

Ebooks in education are inevitable, I hope that educators and school boards proceed cautiously and do something novel. That is to put learning at the forefront of their educational plans. Right now with print texts and books, we put information at center of our curriculum. All the information in printed books, textbooks and digital readers are only secondary to a useful education in the 21st century.