Innovation in Education is Easy, Unless You Make it Difficult

IMO, the only stuff that everybody needs to know is how to read, how to write (or more generally communicate) and math up through about Algebra I or Geometry. After that, everything else is an elective. Simply structuring the schools to make sure everybody got that core down by 8th grade, and then make high school nothing but electives, would go a long way towards making the education system much more effective.

That could be done within the constraints of the existing public school system. I've read Holt and Gatto and generally agree with them. (Both my kids were homeschooled K-12). However, what they are talking about is less redoing school and more redoing society. It's too much to ever get done. However, cherry picking the ideas that can work with what we have now is a much more doable project.

And administrators and politicians make it their business to make it difficult. You can always find a few flowers growing in the cracks in a parking lot but that's hardly a trend. Most public school teachers I know have no time or budget to do anything other than do what the school board and state and fed guidelines demand of them.

It's hard because in every class you need to accound for the opinions of a teacher, students, parents and administrators to account for. One person's "innovation" is another persons waste of funds.

I'm hardly a Luddite but when my kids' middle school rolled out a 1:1 iPad program I was uneasy and not a bit resentful about having additional parental responsibilities heaped on me. The last thing my kids need is another screen to stare at and now I'm in the position where I have to monitor what they are doing.

I think the most innovative thing we could do in our classrooms is to give teachers only a blackboard and chalk instead of trying to compete with all the online distractions our kids are dealing with already.

Sugata Mitra's new experiments in self-teaching -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk60sYrU2RU

The problem with proposed solutions for improving education is that they all beg the question in a somewhat subtle way. They all assume the contemporary system of public schools, classrooms and standardized testing is correct and simply needs refinement.

This is incorrect, in my mind. Compulsory schooling is an obsolete remnant from the days of Prussian militarism, and later revived by the large industrialists so as to breed a workforce that will fill the necessary quotas for such a society to work.

The day of combination is here to stay. Individualism has gone, never to return.

-- John D. Rockefeller

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We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

-- Woodrow Wilson

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In our dreams, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions fade from their minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning, or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have an ample supply…The task we set before ourselves is very simple as well as a very beautiful one, to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are. So we will organize our children and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way, in the homes, in the shops and on the farm.

-- General Educational Board, Occasional Papers No. 1, 1913

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So on and so forth.

Compulsory schooling was never about intellectual satiation or real learning, but to instill a Pavlovian routine and to raise citizens within a framework that rulers at their respective times see fit.

All attempts at educational reform that try to "fix" the problem within the confines of the current system are doomed to failure. It's insane just how well people have been raised to think that classrooms and strict routines are the only conceivable way to educate people. Not so, and the famous quote "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education" rings even truer today.

Nowadays with the rapid technological advancement of society, the necessity to abandon antiquated and ineffective compulsory schooling practices and replace them with more natural concepts: free schools, democratic schools, the deinstitutionalization of pedagogy, is more critical than ever.

But most important is to breed a strong feeling and desire for autodidacticism in people. This is what is truly lacking. Achieve this, and the problems will be solved more smoothly.

To figure out more about where I come from, read the works of John Holt, Ivan Illich (Deschooling Society), John Taylor Gatto, Charlotte Iserbyt and others. I cannot recommend them enough, especially the middle two authors.