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Why School Sucks

Reading through some messages on a mail forum today, one particular message really hit me, and encapsulated what I find so “wrong” about our Higher School Certificate… (and not just the NSW HSC either, but all forms of centralised, Standards based, high stakes testing)… The idea that our HSC (and by extension our entire system of schooling) does not encourage a “love of learning”, but rather a “what do I need to do to pass?” attitude.

The notion that a learning journey should be kept within the tight boundaries of a restrictive syllabus, where certain concepts HAVE to be covered in specific degrees of detail (whether they are actually relevant or not), certain concepts have to be emphasised/de-emphasised (not based on student interest, but on what the syllabus says is their value), and that there is content that need not be covered at all (it might be valuable and interesting, but it’s not in the syllabus so we leave it out completely). It just seems so counterproductive to me that our system puts such a strait-jacket on the idea of learning for the sake of learning. Yes I know, you’ll say “we need to have standards” and “how will we decide who gets to go to university?”, etc. It just makes me really sad that our system does so much discourage learning for the sake of learning, and instead put so much focus on learning a preselected set of facts. This email was referring to some syllabus changes that will phased in over the next two years, and even the notion that we should say that one version of the facts is relevant for a particular year, but a modified version of those facts is going to be relevant for the following year… The notion that some content is relevant while other content isn’t… The notion that there is content that “need not be covered”… it’s all so wrong to me.

It makes me sad/annoyed/angry that we have a situation where top-down decisions are made about what knowledge matters and what knowledge doesn’t, and that we have built a whole school system around enshrining that ridiculous notion. Every good teacher knows this total focus on an end product is not what a true education should be about, and yet we accept it. And it impacts on everything we get to do in our classrooms. Everyone I speak to acknowledges this focus on end-product is restrictive and limiting to real education, but we still go along with it. I just don’t get it.

I’m sure I’ve quoted this before, but Doug Noon once wrote in his blog…

“My classroom doesn’t work the way I want it to. In the Age of Accountability, I still focus on process, and see product as a secondary concern. I’m an ill-fitting peg, uneasy about participating in what, for me, amounts to a charade – emulating archaic practices designed for kids from bygone eras. Looking at the group I’m with now, thinking about them, and not the generic, bloodless beings called Students, statistical incarnations of demographically catalogued learners, I feel more strongly than ever that I owe each of them more than mere delivery of the curriculum, and concern for where they stand relative to a standard that I don’t endorse.”

Amen to that.

By the way, as standards-based testing goes, the NSW Higher School Certificate is actually one of the better implementations of the concept. There is at least some flexibility for pathways and options built into it, and there are many similar systems around the world that are far worse. But it still depresses me.

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Movers and Shakers

The more I hang around this thing we call the blogosphere, the more curious I become about it’s inner workings.  I’m intrigued by the notion that people are so willing to spend their valuable time and energy to write so much incredible stuff and just “put it out there”, usually for no material gain.  I’m intrigued that there is such a huge audience wanting to read all this stuff that others write, an audience who enthusiastically consumes content written by complete amateurs on some incredibly niche topics.  I’m intrigued that so much of this content is not just pretty good… some of it is amazing, insightful, witty and important!  I’m fascinated that so many regular people are finding their voice, and expressing themselves as titans of their very own media empires.  I’m in awe of the networks and communities and  conversations that just spring up out of nowhere, creating the most incredible streams of ideas that would have never surfaced without this environment to nurture them.

If you are also fascinated by this phenomenon we call the blogosphere, you might find it interesting to peruse this list of the worlds Fifty Most Influential Bloggers.  It’s been put together by NxE – a “Blog about Blogging” as they describe it – and whether they are actually in a position to make any sort of authoritive statement about a top 50 list or not, I found it an interesting list to browse.  As the NxE site says…

Why do you need to know who they are? Because if you want to see the shape of blogging future, the trends that show us where blogging is heading, then these are the people to watch and listen to. Their success stories hold for us a key to and an inspiration for our own success.

Certainly, these are people who are shaping the nature of new media.  And when you see the people behind some of these huge blogs, read their stories, see how young they are, realise how influential they are, it really makes you think about the nature of the beast.

There probably still exists a line between journalism and blogging, but it gets blurrier all the time.  Maybe that EPIC presentation was on the right track after all.  Either way, it’s fascinating to watch the balance shift between traditional media and new media, between the mainstream press and the Long Tail of the blogosphere. The next few years will be really interesting, and there are still lots of people who are sleeping through the whole thing, who will wake up one day like Rumpelstiltskin and wonder where their comfortable world has vanished to.

Oh, and I never made the list.  Maybe next year.  😉

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The Fall of the Wall

We often talk about the need for schools to change, to become more relevant to the needs of the 21st century learner. And sometimes we talk about it like we know it’s something that ought to happen because, well, the times they are a-changin’ and maybe we should start change with them. But I think we need to start talking about it more in terms of this change being an imperative. The need for this change is quickly becoming not optional. Schools are becoming dangerously irrelevant to many of our students because we continue to focus on ways of doing things that simply don’t connect to the way many of them see the world.

I was browsing through YouTube tonight and I stumbled across some old footage of the collapse of the Berlin wall back in 1989.

This video got me remembering a quote about education I once read from Seymour Papert. It was this…

“I think that it might be useful to think of the collapse of the Soviet Union. I think that seemed to be a system that was as unchangeable as our education system seems to be. It’s a system, I think, that was becoming increasingly incompatible with the modern world for reasons not very different from those that operate in the education system. It tried to run a country as a production line, as a top-down command economy in which what people made would be determined by a committee somewhere. We try in our school systems to decide what people will learn in this top-down, centralized way, and, for the same reason, it is not compatible with the complexities and dynamic possibilities of the modern world.

I think the subject is increasing strain. The decision to be made is not whether we will continue with school or change it. It will collapse. Our question is whether we’ll wait until we’re driven to the wall and the system collapses from within from its own internal contradictions before we decide that we’re going to create conditions that will allow a new system in which there’ll be diversity of learning paths, diversity of teaching methods, diversity of subjects to be learned.”

You may think that a comparison between the former Soviet Union and our current education system is a little drastic, but I think there are many valid comparisons. Traditional school systems are usually very top-down organisations, and still many teachers believe that running a classroom is all about maintaining control. Our schools are still filled with systems that try to control and direct most of what students do… we have timetables to manage what our students should be doing at any given moment of the day, and we ring bells to tell them when they can change what they are doing. We lead them through a preplanned curriculum, lockstep, progressing from grade to grade at a rate designed for the average student, drip feeding them content that we think they need, whether they need it or not. We insist that they dress a certain way and follow certain rules, even if many times we have forgotten why the rules were there in the first place. We ban mobile phones and iPods because they are a threat to the established order. We track every movement our students make across our networks and we block any websites that we think might not be “educational” enough.

Then, when our students go home everything changes. They engage with a range of ideas, usually all at the same time. Our students are great multi-taskers. They follow their own interests, learning what they need to know, when they need to know it. They build networks of friends, many of whom they have never met but who share similar interests and ideas. Our students may not all be highly organised when it comes to school work, but many of them manage a hectic social life and a part time job. Many of them live online, constantly connected to their networks, relying on communication technologies like their cell phones, instant messaging, and their social networks like MySpace and Facebook. Track the out of school activity of the average student and compare how much overlap there is with what school tries to tell them is important. There isn’t much.

So we talk a lot about the need for school to address this gap. We talk about introducing new technologies into our classrooms to “engage” the students. We keep hearing about “Digital Natives” and “Digital Immigrants”, and while it’s an interesting way to think about the generational differences, the fact is that the world these kids live in has become one big digital neighbourhood and everyone needs to get comfortable with that idea, whether you are a native or an immigrant. Being able to have that distinction is a luxury we can no longer afford.

I agree with Papert. This incompatibility between “school” as it so commonly stands, and the “real world” that engages our students has to be addressed, and soon, or we will face an unavoidable backlash in the next few years. The need for drastic educational change is on our doorstep, and it cannot be held back for very much longer. As Victor Hugo wrote, “An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.”

How we manage the tension between these two ideologies will be critical to our success. But we need to start really rethinking what “school” is about because our students are starting to gather on one side of the wall right now. The cracks are starting to appear. This always-on generation is armed with picks and shovels in the form of their social networks, their communication technologies, their access to instant information, and they are eager to smash this wall down, drive through it and explore the big world on the other side.

As teachers, the question facing us is this… will you be there helping them swing the pick-axe and encouraging them to tear down the wall, or will you be standing in the middle of the stampede trying to force them back? If we aren’t part of the solution, we might just be part of the problem.

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