Some of us who are carrying some extra pounds around can avoid thinking about it too much by wearing loose clothing, avoiding large reflective surfaces (like mirrors or plate glass windows), and generally imagining that things aren’t so bad. Then one day, we have to see a doctor, so we have to get on a scale, and we can no longer avoid facing the fact that we’ve let things get completely out of hand.
That’s a lot like what’s going on with remote schooling.
Whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing depends on whether we’re inspired to do something to correct the situation, or resigned to rationalizing it away. (‘Well, I did have my gun, and a lot of stuff in my pockets, and some pretty heavy boots, and I had a lot to eat last night, so that isn’t really what I weigh…’)
Which of those paths are we going to take with regards to schooling?
When listening to teachers talk about their experiences with remote schooling, I often hear about the difficulty of ‘delivering the curriculum’ to students outside of the normal classroom environment. For example: I’m making videos for each of my algebra classes, each day, but they’re only 8 minutes long, which isn’t enough time to deliver the curriculum.
Let’s set aside for the moment whether, in a world with Kahn Academy, the Teaching Company, and a zillion other providers of high-quality, low-cost content, there’s any reason for this teacher to make such videos.
The more interesting point is that everything in the curriculum is in the textbook for the course. Really, all he needs to do to ‘deliver the curriculum’ is hand out textbooks. So he must be talking about something else. What?
I remember a series of ads for some company (REI, perhaps) that sold outdoor equipment. Each ad showed someone doing something exciting — climbing a glacier, kayaking in the wilderness — and had a caption that said something like Adventure: Not Available In Stores.
You can buy equipment that will help you have an adventure — pitons and ice picks, a kayak and paddles — but no one can sell you, or give you, the adventure itself. You have to go out and get it.
The same is true for education. You can buy equipment that will help you get an education — computers, modems, software, and even books — but no one can sell you, or give you, the education itself. You have to get it.
But this is not the model on which our schools operate. In that model, the student sits in a classroom while the teacher ‘delivers the curriculum’, like it’s a package from Amazon.
That model is a workaround for this problem: More than half of our students are below basic proficiency in reading, which means that a student given a textbook probably wouldn’t be able to use it. Instead of directly addressing this problem, schools pretend that it’s not really a problem. There is a technical term for this: codependency.
That is, delivering the curriculum is a euphemism for enabling illiteracy. The teacher reads the book to the student, so the student doesn’t have to read it himself, or feel bad about not being able to do that.
We have been, for some time now, in the grip of a mania called ‘preparing every kid for college’. Increasingly, it appears that this may not be such a good idea, but let’s pretend for the moment that it is.
When you get to college, does it matter what you already know? Not much. You can always catch up, with remedial classes, or just some extra reading. Does it matter whether you are able to learn new things on your own? Yes, it does. In fact, that’s pretty much the whole game, right there.
Not to put too fine a point on it, a kid who can figure out that he wants to learn something, and then learn it, without requiring someone to supervise the process, is ready for college. And a kid who can’t, isn’t.
But — as parents are finding out, through the educational equivalent of having to step on the doctor’s scale — this is pretty much the opposite of the experience that kids have been getting in school, where ‘delivering the curriculum’ (i.e., focusing on content instead of process) has made them more, rather than less, dependent on their teachers.
Where preparing kids for college is concerned, what we’re doing isn’t so much providing an opportunity as imposing an opportunity cost.
The same is true where preparing kids for life is concerned.
What if instead of the Amazon model, we applied a more traditional apprentice-journeyman-master model to education? What would that look like, and how would it change things?
Very briefly, an apprentice works on developing basic, fundamental skills, and requires close supervision. A journeyman has enough knowledge and competence to work independently, with only occasional supervision. A master is ready to supervise his own work — something he demonstrates by producing a masterpiece.
But we’re not talking about creating pitchers from pewter, or carving sculptures from marble. The art we’re talking about is the art of learning.
This means that ‘graduation’ would require more than just accumulating credits or seat time. To graduate, you would have to demonstrate that you can do something. And since we’re talking about having mastered self-directed learning, you would have to pick something that you want to learn, and then, without the supervision of a teacher, go ahead and learn it. That would, in effect, be your masterpiece.
And the entire process of schooling would be directed towards getting a student to that point, in as little time as possible. Each step in that journey would be focused on gradually transferring responsibility from the teacher to the student himself. The student succeeds by becoming his own teacher. The teacher succeeds by making himself unnecessary.
So that’s what it might look like. I’ll leave it to the reader to imagine how it would change society to gradually populate it with graduates like that.
Albert Einstein said that ‘In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity’. That’s certainly the case here. Unprecedented difficulties are presenting us with an unprecedented opportunity to re-think the relationship between schooling and education.
But will we take advantage of it? Or will we just keep spending money on the educational equivalent of XXXL sweaters and caftans?
