My name is Vinícius Miranda, I am a Brazilian student moving to San Francisco and fellow of WISE, the World Innovation Summit for Education, where I collaborate with 32 individuals from 29 countries to create projects tackling pressing international challenges in education. As part of EdSurge Independent, I aim to discuss current trends in education through the perspective of a learner. In this piece, I focus on understanding the consequences of an standardizing approach to education and how it might compromise its end result, a topic that if undiscussed may leave essential gaps in our approaches to tackle current issues.
Education standards, ethics and efficacy
Many promising innovations are being integrated into our classrooms, ranging from whole new approaches, methods, and tools. Personalized, blended, student-centered, have all become new qualifiers for learning or education. All of them might improve the efficiency of the process, but seldom is efficacy mentioned as a measure of an intervention’s success. Too often do efficiency and efficacy blend into each other, mostly because it is very hard to have a real grasp of the end-goal of education in order to measure long-term results. As long as we lack a collective vision of what is the purpose of education, our interventions lose the opportunity of addressing structural and systemic problems.
Why do we educate children? To get a job? To be a good citizen? To fulfill their dreams? Different people are sure to get to different mixes of possible answers. However, while we discuss (or not) this problem, youth will keep getting formally educated, graded in their ability to fit to the system and meet a standard. In addition, these very standards hold palliative solutions we haven’t necessarily agreed to, as every system of evaluation and accreditation implicitly admits a student role model and a mission to the process of education, embedded in what it measures and what it does not measure. For as long as these assumptions are ingrained in the system without being problematized, not only the most representative feeling of the schooling experience will be alienation instead of fulfillment, but schools will also be strained by different demands and visions of its purpose. For not knowing exactly what to ask of our schools, we ask too much.
In parallel, education has always faced an underlying dilemma: that “not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts,” as said William Bruce Cameron. With the increasing adoption of edtech into our education systems, we are supposedly succeeding in getting people faster to wherever education is going to lead them, transitioning the ownership of the process from teachers to curriculum designers. That is great, insofar as we are secure of the efficacy of the system. Otherwise, to allude to Henry Ford’s famous quote, by creating faster and faster horses we are losing the opportunity to invent the car. Maybe, we are getting too good at making children conform to our expectations of them.
This might seem a heartfelt, abstract discussion. However, we all have been children once. How would you feel if your education had been driven by standards and unacknowledged assumptions? If your career prospects had been even slightly determined not by you, not by your parents, but the curriculum designers and educational experts at points in life when you didn’t have enough consciousness to be aware of the fact? We still live in a time that regards children and youth in general as unopinionated individuals, and one that has willfully taken the role of making decisions in their name. This is not limited to children alone, as almost any person subject to education has once felt disempowered to change its directions.
At the same time, we need to question ourselves how a standardized education meets the needs of an increasingly interconnected, volatile and uncertain world. In a time where diversity is so highly praised and so dutifully repressed, education may represent another form of normalization. We are willing to adapt and personalize learning insofar as it attends to our expectations, whoever may be going through it. We need a system of education that is capable of reinventing itself. A system that better accounts for the divergences towards itself, thus continuously improving. To what extent are we willing to try (and fail) to box in diversity of thought and behavior at the expense of one’s sense of empowerment and accountability towards his or hers own learning process? At the very least, how can we come with standards more suitable to the needs of our time?
More and more people are realizing that education, and especially edtech, has been overpromised and underdelivered. While an UNFPA 2014 report states that “Today’s youth have higher expectations than the generations before them for self-direction, freedom and opportunity,” these are hardly the adjectives someone would use to describe how we treat young citizens. Stepping back from our current assumptions might open a huge field of possibilities on how we could reinvent learning. While we don’t do that, many self-declared disruptive innovations will rise, fall, and the strongest factors predicting a child’s success will still be their ZIP code, their socio-economic status and their race.
