Redesigning Childhood Education (2 of 4): A Failing System
(continued from Intro)
The modern K12 school model was adapted from Prussia by Massachusetts Secretary of Education Horace Mann and implemented by the state’s legislature in 1852, quickly spreading to other US states thereafter. Frederick the Great had enacted this “Prussian model” in 1763 as a means to provide the masses with basic skills to enhance the Kingdom’s educated labor base during the Industrial Revolution while maintaining their obedience to hierarchy (conscious to avoid education leading to too much independent thinking and questioning of authority).
As many reform advocates have outlined since, this model didn’t just rise during the Industrial Revolution, it’s structure embodied that revolution: it mimics a factory assembly line, pumping a cohort same-age children through the same process at the same pace. Its specific details for implementation around the US — number of grades, content to be covered in each grade, etc. — was standardized by a National Education Association working group of merely ten people (all university presidents): the 1892 “Committee of Ten”.
The world has changed a whole lot since the 1800s, but our school model hasn’t. We haven’t fundamentally progressed beyond “shut up, sit still, and memorize this for the exam”…in fact the well-intentioned but misguided focus on quantifying academic achievement through national and state-level standardized tests has only exasperated it.
In one ear, out the other. | There’s very little long-term learning occurring in schools. Most of school is a repeating pattern of daily ~45 min periods building up to one test at the end of ~3 weeks, after which almost none of the content is ever addressed again. “Learning” to a child means one’s ability to memorize and regurgitate content well enough to get a high score on the next exam or essay. There’s little continuity in exposure to topics, subjects are taught in abstract silos rather than in their highly interconnected, real world context, and there is very little hands-on learning by doing.
Perhaps the most irrational component of K12 schools that’s still firmly in place is the concept of “Grades K-12” itself…that completion (within a year and across all 13 years) is based on time sitting in a chair rather than mastery of subject matter. This defies both research and common sense anecdotal experience. Developing an understanding of new concepts and an ability to then tap into that knowledge for independent thinking and problem-solving requires a building-blocks approach. You need to first fully learn core concepts then move on to continually more advanced concepts that build on the prior ones. If you only understand 70% of a core concept, you shouldn’t move on to the next step just because of an artificially-imposed time limit.
What you gain in K12 education due to this structure is mostly a scattering of memorized information but little understanding of what it actually means and how to apply it in a real world context. To quote Khan Academy’s Sal Khan, it’s “Swiss cheese” education filled with gaping holes in understanding.
It’s worth remembering, by the way, that information memorization is easy for computers to do. In an era when even people in a poor, remote village on the other side of the world can search Google on their phones, being a walking information database isn’t a marketable skill that will benefit people in the workplace. The deeper, contextualized understanding of concepts and abstract thinking and application is where humans are still needed.
Independent thinkers need not apply.| School teaches youth that there are right and wrong answers for nearly everything and it’s always bad to provide an answer that turns out to be wrong. The testing and grading environment (where even daily homework is graded) discourages risk-taking; it discourages thinking differently and experimenting with new approaches to problem-solving that aren’t a rote regurgitation of what the book says.
Students don’t have control over their curriculum to learn about what they’re interested in or even learn about required topics (say, algebra) through the context of what they’re interested in. Any level of personalization might sound implausible to you at first, but only because the default classroom environment remains one teacher commanding a room of students on what to memorize or how to execute a certain activity. It doesn’t have to be structured that way (and it hasn’t always been that way).
The better understanding of what a teacher’s role should be is that of a coach guiding students through their own development rather than commander drilling it into them. This concept is seeping into progressive private and public schools but struggling to fit within the restrictions of the existing structure. If you understand the importance of “teacher as coach,” however, you would craft schools entirely differently, based around guidance of student-driven projects and collaboration between students of different ages and mastery levels.
Moreover, because the teacher is always the authority on what is right or wrong, young people are taught external validation and intellectual dependency — that they need others to validate their intellectual worth and tell them definitively whether they are right or wrong. It also makes the student a passive recipient of learning rather than the driver of it.
Children grow up with a hierarchy reaffirmed in their heads daily that there are tiers of people, objectively demarcated by academic grades. All language in schools frames performance in traditional academics as capacity for achievement in life beyond. If you’re not getting the highest grades, you should adjust your expectations for life accordingly. The problem with this, however, is that academic performance is a dictator of success only if your career is in never leaving academia. Many schools formally track students into tiers for each subject too, setting them on different paths (starting in middle school or early high school) with ever widening gaps that inhibit mobility.
Look at the paradox of “gifted students” — young people put on accelerated tracts (and often dedicated schools) and treated as young geniuses because of abnormally high scores on academic or IQ tests. If these students are geniuses capable of making such a bigger impact than the rest of youth, where do they all go? They are a rare breed to find at the highest levels of governance, business, arts, or even science. Having a brain that excels in an academic setting, doesn’t necessarily translate to intellectual breakthroughs, leadership capacity, or ability to apply book knowledge to real world situations…it makes one a great worker bee.
On the other hand, children who act out — who question authority, have too much energy to sit still from 7:30am to 2:30pm, and learn better in a hands-on environment — are slapped with an ADD/ADHD sticker then drugged into submission with amphetamines. These are kids with the potential to drive the world forward with outside-the-box thinking and obsessive passion, but our school model crushes them. Even at many of the most progressive public and private schools, we implicitly tell them they’re messed up and discourage their behavior…rather than embrace their learning style schools (again with positive intentions) focus on helping them squeeze back into the box. They end up with a 10x higher rate of depression and 4–5x higher rate of suicidal behavior during adolescence than their peers.
Worst of all | The most destructive thing about the Prussian-inspired school model is that — through all the factors mentioned above — they manage the incredible feat of making children think that learning sucks. Because school frequently does suck. And growing up we’re taught that learning = schooling. What’s never emphasized is that learning is an exhilarating, self-driven pursuit that they’ll continue every day of their lives based on our own interests.
A child researching fancy sports cars and how they work is learning; a child obsessed with the history, game tactics, and player stats of football is learning; a child who loves listening to and performing music is learning. When we embrace this comprehensive perspective of where childhood learning really happens, we can integrate important concepts into the context of what children are eager to learn about…explaining basic physics, math, and chemistry through sports cars, for example. Neuroscience tells us that when you do that, humans can learn radically faster, retain knowledge longer, and approach problem-solving with a vaster deeper, more creative understanding.
There’s a distracting debate that happens when you criticize schools: people push back by identifying instances where things work out. This is implying a false alternative: that K12 would be replaced with a vacuum of no formal schooling. Few people argue that the current model is the best option available. There are plenty of people who had good lives in the 1800s, but it’s fair to say that innovation replacing much of what they used then has resulted in a radically better life (and for more people) today. Why shouldn’t schools also undergo this innovation?
The most important skill to have in the 21st Century workforce isn’t what you have learned, it’s your ability to learn and thrive is an environment that’s constantly changing. This is not what the existing K12 model was built for.
