Let’s Stop Lying about Learning
I realize that each of us has our own version of the 3
biggest lies and I’m sure that everyone’s list morphs over time depending on
their own experiences and disappointments. I say disappointments because there
are no happy outcomes from lies – even little white lies – so, by and large;
I’ve concluded that honesty remains the best policy. It would be nice if the
people who run our K-12 school systems (the management and the union
“leaders”) felt the same. But, regardless of whether they or anyone else responsible
will ever admit it, there are certain real-world
lies which persist – especially when they are repeated ad nausem by the highest politicians in the land - and these are so
pernicious that it almost seems like our civic duty to call bullshit on them
from time to time. As Thomas Jefferson said “a continual circulation of lies among those who are not much
in the way of hearing them contradicted will in time pass for the truth.”
Lie Number One,
of course, is that everyone can afford to and should own their own home. I feel
that this crock has pretty much imploded over the last few years although I
sense a creeping rebirth of the same kind of delusionary thinking when I hear
the President talking about how the JOBS
legislation is such a triumph of democracy (small “d” for sure) since pretty
soon every Tom, Dick and Harry will be able to buy and own cheap stocks and
their “piece of the American Dream” through new and virtually unregulated crowd-funding
vehicles which will let just about anybody with a “story” raise money from the
masses.
Do I even need to add “whether this new class of
“investors” can afford it or not” or “whether they have the slightest clue as
to what they’re investing in or the risks inherent in the investment”? Talk
about learning nothing from the fake financial statements and phony real estate
appraisals which let the crooked banks create huge numbers of bogus loans in
order to lend just about anything to anyone. Imagine how closely anyone will be
scrutinizing the net worths and required levels of sophistication of the tens
of thousands of cab drivers and convenient store operators who will now become
stock speculators on the side.
Lie Number Two – another
favorite of the DC crowd is that every kid in American needs and is entitled to
a 4-year college education whether they (and/or their parents) can afford it or
not. And, frankly, whether they want it or not; are capable and likely to be
successful in the pursuit or not; and/or whether they would be much better
served and far more likely to ultimately find a job if they pursued a shorter,
less costly, and better suited program to get some practical vocational
training and to get on with their lives without mortgaging their future with
student loan obligations. Since I have an obvious dog in this particular fight,
I won’t say anything more on the subject.
It’s the third big lie that’s really
killing our kids’ futures and, not surprisingly, it has nothing to do with
getting thru a college education- it’s all about the diminished likelihood of
getting to a college education. By the time many of these kids are of college
age, the damage is already done and they’re long gone from the system. And
honestly, the ones who remain are basically no better served by the continued
pretense that we’re effectively teaching them much of anything useful or of
value in today’s globally competitive world. So what’s the third big lie?
Lie Number Three is that in
education, and specifically in the classroom, that “one size fits all”. It’s
the job security lie that ignores how differently each of us learns and
pretends that a single instructor standing in front of a classroom full of kids
can effectively teach anything to all of them at the same time. It’s true that the one thing this approach will
convincingly teach each of those students is that we still think of schools as
industrial-style factories turning out standardized automans with a premium on
rote memorization and repetition rather than rigorous reasoning and problem
solving. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
All
it takes is an honest acknowledgement that the current system sucks and that
the solution is pretty simple. Not necessarily cheap; not universally available
yet; and not easy to implement in the face of the fierce resistance to change
which may be the only thing that many schools are still really good at – but a straightforward,
not complicated, and readily accessible approach all the same. We’ve got the
resources – the real question is whether we have the guts, the resolve and the
strength to implement the necessary changes before we doom another generation
of kids to lifetime under-employment, second-class citizenship or worse.
There’s
no magic here. It’s pretty simple. You can call it differential or
individualized learning or mass customization or a million other things. What
matters is not the name, but the undisputed fact that we all learn at our own
pace and often in dramatically different ways. The tools and technologies exist
to build a knowledge-delivery system that fits and serves the students rather
than trying to force every student to fit into an antiquated system that suits
no one.
Imagine
a class of students who are each is working with a device (could be a desktop,
a game console, a tablet, a phone, etc.) that are all wirelessly networked and
connected through the cloud to a dashboard for the “teacher” which shows each
student’s status, progress and level of success in real time. Instead of
pretending that one size fits all or teaching to the lowest common denominator
or having the smartest kids done with their work and bored in no time at all,
the teacher (empowered by the simple dashboard tracking tools and adaptive
learning programs) is able to track, react, and adjust the information being
provided to each student as well as that student’s learning experience continually
as needed and on the fly. Some students will be right on time and on track;
some will be looping through remedial exercises; others will be reviewing
extracurricular materials or taking individualized pop quizzes or exams. The
teacher can even share screens with individual students and provide hints,
suggestions and other coaching without interrupting anyone else in the class or
wasting anyone else’s time.
Sadly
today, our politicians mainly lie for a living and since they barely remember
the lies they tell, you can rest assured that they have no recollection
whatsoever of the promises they may have made. They can rant and rave all they
want about everything that’s wrong especially with for-profit education because
it’s easy pickings, but shouting a lie doesn’t make it any truer.
If
we’re going to save our children’s futures, it’s going to be up to us to face
the facts, tell the truth, make the necessary changes, add the crucial
technologies that create leverage and scale without adding costs to budgets
that are frightfully misallocated and hope it’s not too late.