Life is Not Linear

... and education shouldn't be

Courtesy of eduwells.com

More people are talking these days about “false linearity” when it comes to thinking about time, for example — we seem to prefer believing that things happen in a straight line, including time itself. Right now, I’m pondering the many ways we have gone astray in thinking about schooling as a linear enterprise.

I have written here before about the fundamental mistakes we continue to make when talking about teaching and learning in the Western world. For example, we forget that:

• Learning is neither orderly nor sequential

• We all learn at different paces and in different ways

• Not everyone has the same set of learning tools

• Our bodies are integral parts of our minds

• To choose to learn, we need choices, a path to mastery, and a compelling purpose

The public education system we have devised has not been honest about its purpose.

From an article on “workforce readiness tips for teachers”

From the beginning of the industrial revolution and the sudden massive need for a labor force trained to do repetitive solo tasks all day, every day, for as long as needed, public schooling has been designed to resemble an assembly line.

Children were moved sequentially through “grades” until “graduation.” Schools implemented “quality control” through testing, weeding out the “undesirable” products by giving them failing grades and consigning them to lives of unskilled labor or plain old poverty. Children with non-typical neurosystems found themselves shunned or relegated to “remedial” programs that had no idea what to do for them.

The science of learning has advanced by leaps and bounds in the intervening century and a half, but public education has trapped itself in a never-ending cycle of “reform” that never reimagines teaching, but simply keeps mashing it into slightly different versions of the same wrong-headed system.

We know that it takes three to five years for a new initiative to fully take hold in any organization. We also know that most education reform initiatives run 1-1/2 to 4 years before the next one comes along. What this means is that teachers are constantly trying to learn and adopt new curriculum, only to have to let that go and try something else, before they ever master the previous system.

Compounding the problem is that these new curricula are usually designed and marketed by publishing companies (who also write and sell the tests based on the curricula). Their profits come from continually moving new products out the door, not from long-term investment in professional development, research, and documentation.

Teaching is an art form, not a rote skill. And I firmly believe that learning is also an art. To learn requires that we willingly participate in the process. You cannot impose meaningful learning on someone else. They must engage with the subject matter.

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”

— William Butler Yeats

Full participation in the act of learning requires that we engage our physical selves as well as our formidable cranial capacity. Mind is the combination of body and brain. It is extremely difficult to learn something complex while remaining in a seated position for hours on end. Our bodies have to participate in the conversation, and thought is not restricted to the brain, as science has conclusively shown.

The US Department of Education used to attempt to act as both a stabilizing force and a source of support for innovation. By setting standards for equity in access to education, administering grants to assist in developing teachers’ skills through professional development, and engaging in national research projects that addressed the huge diversity of this country, the federal government aided schools without controlling them.

One of the most important initiatives the Department of Education funded was for dissemination of grass-roots-developed education programs. Schools would try new approaches to teaching and learning and document the results. Those that they proved to be effective then became the source for other schools and districts to adopt those methods. But that’s gone now.

Now we have a US president who has appointed an unqualified Education Secretary to dismantle her agency, which our representatives in Congress established and which only Congress can lawfully remove. Both the Department of Education and the Department of Justice have ceased any investigation into or enforcement of civil rights laws that protect access to public schooling.

The Education Department’s web site offers a truncated history of the Department, and of course prominently features “President Trump’s First Year” on its splash page. It touts “Returning Education to the States” as some kind of accomplishment, which is kind of like “Reopening the Strait of Hormuz” when it comes to doublespeak. (Hint: Public education has always been locally-run. The federal government has assisted school districts and States, and the DOE’s charter specifically prohibits it from imposing curriculum or other rules on States.)

The entire effort, like EVERY course this president has embarked on, is designed to increase the amount of public money that flows into private pockets. By knocking the foundations out from underneath public education, the GOP hopes to entirely privatize teaching.

Not only will that result in a massive redirection of money into private and mostly religiously-run segregation academies, it will help rebuild the wall between white US residents and the people of different skin colors that MAGA vehemently resents having to share space with.

This is what MAGA means

From the point of view of a white supremacist who also wants to join the billionaires’ club someday, what’s not to like? And business loves being able to command education to produce the kind of worker they currently want or need — remember the big push to teach “coding” to children just a year or two ago? Now, of course, AI can code faster and better than humans, so, on to the next thing. The way we’re going at the moment, the new hot jobs may be in drone manufacturing and cyber defense.

Solutions? Across the United States, independent charter schools and forward-thinking school districts have been testing and proving them for decades. But powerful forces array themselves against truly re-making public education, because there’s so much money to be made from keeping things the way they are.

Corporations want to decide what students learn, and how. It’s only We, the People, who can change this ruinous course. The guy in the White House and his minions are doing everything in their power to keep us distracted, distressed, and exhausted by assaulting us with “everything, everywhere, all at once.”

We can’t let them make us give up. Run for your local school board!

🦉