One of the most common criticisms of schools is that they are too much like assembly lines in factories. But assembly lines are one of the greatest inventions ever, in terms of actually getting things done effectively and efficiently… provided that you use them properly.
There’s nothing wrong with setting up schools as assembly lines… provided that we do it properly.
Bob works on an assembly line. His job is to install a radio in each car that comes by. Each car arrives in the proper state of completion, with a slot for the radio and easy access to the necessary wiring.
Bob’s job is a breeze. It’s straightforward, efficient, and largely error-free. He can install radios in a hundred cars in a single day.
Carol works on a different assembly line. Her job is also to install a radio in each car that comes by. But each car arrives in a completely different state of completion. A car might show up with no dashboard, or a dashboard that hasn’t had the opening for the radio cut out yet. A car might show up with no wiring, or with wiring that is hidden by parts that shouldn’t have been installed yet. A car might show up in which everything has been done except for installing the radio, requiring some previous steps to be undone before installing the radio, and redone afterwards. And so on.
Carol’s job is a nightmare. She won’t really know what’s going to be needed until a car shows up. Then she’ll have to diagnose and solve a bunch of problems before she can start working on what she’s supposed to be doing. She’s lucky if she can install half a dozen radios a day.
Bob’s job is a lot like the job done by one of the lessons at, say, Kahn Academy. Where Bob installs a radio, the lesson installs some very specific piece of knowledge — for example, how to add two fractions with different denominators, assuming that you already know how to add two fractions with the same denominator, and assuming that you already know how to change the denominator of a fraction while keeping the value of the fraction unchanged. It’s short, focused, appropriately targeted, and consequently, it’s effective.
Carol’s job is a lot like the job done by a typical classroom teacher. Like the Kahn Academy lesson, maybe the goal is to teach how to add two fractions with different denominators. But few, if any, assumptions can be made about what the kids already know, or what they’re ready to learn. Some kids may show up who haven’t really mastered multiplication, or addition, or maybe even counting. Some kids might already be learning algebra at home. Some kids may show up who aren’t willing to provide the teacher with access to their brain space, because they have other things they’d rather be thinking about. Some kids have already learned the skill being taught in a different way, or learned it incorrectly. And so on.
To make the assembly line model work in schools, we need to do something about the four kinds of kids who make classroom teaching more like Carol’s job than like Bob’s:
- Kids who don’t know enough.
- Kids who know too much.
- Kids who don’t want to be there.
- Kids who shouldn’t be there.
Groups (1) and (2) are the result of a fetish that we’ve developed for organizing kids into cohorts by age, and assuming that all the kids in a cohort should learn the same things at the same time. We have a word for this: ‘astrology’.
But a kid who lacks the necessary prerequisite knowledge is going to flounder. And a kid who already knows what’s being taught is going to be bored. And each of these kids, in his own way, is going to divert teacher attention away from the students who showed up ready to learn what the teacher is ready to teach. Each of them should be somewhere else along the line.
Group (3) is the result of mandatory attendance laws. Those laws are the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of tax-funded schooling, as articulated by our state supreme court:
An adequate public elementary and secondary education in New Hampshire is one which provides each educable child with an opportunity to acquire the knowledge and learning necessary to participate intelligently in the American political, economic, and social systems of a free government.
Being given the opportunity to do something is very, very different from being forced to actually do it. We ignore that difference at our peril.
Group (4) is the result of a bizarre legal requirement to seek the ‘least restrictive environment’, rather than the ‘most effective environment’, for students with special needs. It is, when you stop to think about it, a requirement to prioritize feelings over learning. And it leads to predictable results, because the least restrictive environment for one student is often the most disruptive environment for everyone else.
The whole idea of an assembly line is to minimize special cases. You use the assembly line to deal with the typical cases, and you set up a ‘custom shop’ to deal with special cases. This reduces costs and production time for the former, and improves quality for the latter.
Now, we might decide that we really, really want to keep the special cases mixed in with the rest. But if we do that, we also need to understand that the whole assembly line structure of school has to go away, because it’s simply inappropriate, and can only make things worse rather than better. This means an end to cohorts, an end to standard curricula, an end to lectures… an end, really, to pretty much everything we’ve become accustomed to think of as ‘school’ — except, of course, for continually increasing costs.
Or we might decide that we’d rather improve our outcomes while reducing our costs. But if we do that, we also need to embrace the assembly line structure completely, instead of continuing to half-ass it. That means identifying kids who don’t fit in with that structure and dealing with them in a custom shop environment, either until they’ve achieved as much as they can; or are ready to be returned to an appropriate place on the line; or are allowed to simply leave.
What we can’t do is continue to pretend that there is some ‘middle ground’ between the two. Because there isn’t. Trying to do both sets form squarely in opposition to function. It’s a prodigious waste of money, and an even greater waste of learning capacity.
To sum up: If we drop the cohort delusion (and switch to using readiness rather than age to place students in various classes), excuse the kids who don’t want to be in school, and use custom shops to deal with the kids who don’t fit the assembly line model, we could be getting the results we claim to want, at a fraction of what we’re paying now.
Of course, we don’t have to do any of that, and given our current political climate, I suspect that we won’t. But it’s important to realize that what we’re trying to do here isn’t like building a colony on Mars, or curing cancer, or pursuing some other goal that we might not be able to achieve. We already know that a literacy rate of nearly 100% is achievable, because we had that when America was still a collection of colonies.
So the good news is: The only real obstacle between us and a successful educational system is our willingness to get out of our own way. Unfortunately, that’s also the bad news.
