It's Time to Revolutionize Education
Challenging the Nature of School and the Purpose of Education
The world has radically changed in the last two centuries, yet the way schools prepare our children has remained largely static. It is still modeled on the needs of the industrial age. When you look at today's school, it is still pretty much organized like an assembly line: ringing bells, separate classrooms for each subject, unidirectional transference of knowledge, learning by age group. This outdated model reflects the cultural biases at that time; it is based on questionable assumptions. For example, is it valid to assume that students should be grouped in a similar age bracket? Looking at various perspectives is an effective way to respond to challenges.
As Albert Einstein correctly observed, “we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
It is with a similar mindset that I want to tackle challenges in education. I am interested in examining forward-thinking education systems and learning models, particularly those in which individual talents are acknowledged and nurtured.
Education paradigm
My concern about education was awakened in 2006, when my father died suddenly. Of course, his death profoundly affected my entire family, but most profoundly my youngest sister, Laura. She was eleven at the time; I was twenty-three. In barely six months, I witnessed Laura crumble utterly. Once a lively fun pre-teen and a model student in the classroom, she now looked like a phantom family member, and another "just watching the clock" adolescent.
One night, when she was arriving home unusually late, I found us face to face. I will forever remember her expression — a look proclaiming a deep suffering and angst that seemed to have been simmering there for awhile, just under the surface. Her wordless confession felt like a bomb was striking my mind — a bomb with the same blistering detonation as the one that hit me when my mother told me on the phone that my father had passed away. This particular evening echoed like I had broken through a new layer of consciousness. I could tell Laura reached a dreadful threshold in her distress. By the end of the school year, she had floundered badly, and the rigid school system had completely failed her. Clearly, our family hardship had caused a complete reversal of her ability to function in a “classic” school environment.
Aside from concern for Laura’s radical behavior change, I was flabbergasted with the failure of the school system — and obviously with our family too — to keep Laura not just on track but simply “alive”. Laura’s environment was clearly missing creative outlets that would have supported her individual intellectual, creative and emotional expression and learning. My perception of education drastically and permanently changed as a result of witnessing Laura's spiraling downturn which explicitly uncovered the limits of the “one size fits all” school model. I could no longer remain the powerless spectator I was in front of such a pitiful tragedy. I had to do something. I wanted to change something.
As a result, I volunteered for several education projects. I co-created and led a tutoring program in my childhood Junior High School in France, with the objective of supporting my sister and other teenagers in need. Happily, a year later, at the request of the teachers and parents, and with support from the city, we hired additional tutors to expand the program to a group of students twice as large. Later, I also gave advanced French classes to foreign guides at the Louvre Museum. This program was a compelling opportunity to experience a project-based approach to learning and to grasp aspects of different learning models. Most recently, through the WriterCoach Connection program, I tutored students from Berkeley High School on their writing assignments. The inclusiveness of this program, which distinguishes itself by its one-on-one coaching sessions with each student, reinforced what I had experienced in the past: differentiated learning remains an elusive goal in most public schools, and yet clearly valuable. That exposure led me to think about how to replicate personalized learning on a much larger scale.
After several years of immersion in education, I recently began to re-examine the education field from a more analytical angle, in order to clarify and expand my understanding of the workings of the system. My skepticism about the current education model led me to start with one basic question: why school? I suspected our approach to schooling failed to recognize the individual student as a whole. Using this perspective, I’ve begun researching fields of child development, psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience. Simultaneously, I have earned a certification in UX Design, and worked on UX Research projects with Acumen-ideo.org, Mozilla, Salesforce, and Eventbrite.
By taking a comprehensive outlook at the education environment through hands-on projects and reading, it is becoming clear to me that our long standing approach to education as the accumulation of information needs to be adjusted.
Sir Ken Robinson rightly writes, in his book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, “Given the challenges we face, education doesn’t need to be reformed — it needs to be transformed.”
Why school?
We’ve been alienating so many kids who no longer see any purpose in going to school. For that reason, it seems a good time to revisit the nature and purpose of school, a purpose that is attuned to society's current needs.
First, let me clarify what I mean by “purpose”. A meaningful purpose is one that is never fully reachable, but is, instead, aspirational. Now, imagine tomorrow’s school as an ecosystem that stimulates students to discover and nurture their own unique gifts. This is an ambitious mission and not an easy job, as the film clip with Jack Nicholson illustrates below. And yet, such a vision acknowledges each individual student as a unique whole; it goes far beyond basic scientific literacy or English language skills. Don’t get me wrong; I am not saying that the Common Core, the government standards that establish topics which students should master by the end of each grade, is not important. I am just attempting to convey that this is not enough to grow a fulfilled intellect and soul.
School needs to be more responsive to the differences among students, whether it be their abilities, their interests, or their cultural backgrounds. School needs to enable children to become adept not only at regurgitating the minimum information needed — machines are way better than us at that, anyway! — but also and more importantly at using their knowledge to conceive, to create, to think critically, and to work collaboratively. School needs to support students’ learning experience and engage students by fostering their curiosity and energizing their creative thinking. School needs to provide an innovative framework that equips our children to deal with the established and the unknown. School needs to implement a pleasurable and stimulating environment which encourages children to thrive and succeed in an ever-changing world. The challenge now is how to transform the current structure and processes of our schools, and to re-imagine them.
How to re-imagine school?
How do we want the school's purpose to be expressed? In other words, what classroom features, what tools, what kind of environment support an education for life, an education that is a lifelong pursuit rather than an ending state? I suppose there’s not just one answer to that question. It seems to me that the options are infinite because the human being is unique by definition. The goal is not to raise techies, nurses, or spaceline pilots but to leave doors open for children.
Here are some first thoughts about broadening the perspectives of an education for life.
- What about incubating and cultivating creativity in school through more discovery projects and practical work in order to acknowledge multiple types of intelligence?
In the same vein, I deeply resonate with the distinction “How are you intelligent?” versus “how intelligent are you?” from Sir Ken Robinson.
- What about approaching learning through a context that is closer to the daily routine of the students?
- What about diversifying the Common Core by implementing social-emotional learning to develop skills such as:
> grit, perseverance, resilience, charisma as a key of success
> leadership as a trait of entrepreneurship
> aptitude for failure as the mother of innovation
> self-esteem and perspective as part of a growth mindset
> emotional intelligence such as empathy and body language as a way to strengthen relationships
> respect, listening, attention, self-control, self-awareness as a path to foster mindfulness
> personality style and interaction as a step to better understand oneself and others.
The organization CASEL does exceptional work in this arena.
- What about stimulating more learning outside the classroom through local community initiatives?
- What about re-visiting assessment standards by focusing more on the student's learning journey, efforts, and progress, and less on the outcomes and the skills that are supposed to be mastered at the end of the school year?
These are reflections that genuinely drive me everyday.
This discussion also questions the role of the school teacher. In fact, it positions the teacher more like a course designer, a creative instructor, a guide, a facilitator, a peer, a mentor, and a challenger at times. The Flipped Classroom pedagogical model highlights this shift of instructional strategy very well, and it is refreshing in that sense.
If we want to recognize the individual student as a unique whole, it is critical to blend the results of studies made in fields like cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience in a school’s curriculum. It is time to challenge the unconscious beliefs and assumptions that our current education model is based upon, and to go beyond historic models of schooling. It is up to us to make school 2.0 a novel place which provides each student the navigation tools (s)he will need to embrace his/her life journey.
