The School I'd Like

I rarely respond to internet memes or challenges, but this one struck me as interesting. If I was designing a school, if I was creating my educational utopia, what would it look like?

The schools I see are almost all failures. Not because of bad teachers, as Newsweek claims - there are bad teachers - but many more great and very frustrated ones,  and not because of unprepared students, though students who come from struggling American homes abound, and not because of a lack of competition, equating education with Walmart is just sad, but because we live with a fundamentally flawed design for education.

So, "my school" would seek to address those fundamental problems.

Summerhill School

I have to admit, it would not be on-line, though much would happen in "the cloud." I think that there is value in creating a safe learning place, apart from an increasingly intolerant-to-kids-and adolescents world. This is part reversal of our current norm, and part not. Our schools, as destructive as they are to many kids, as intolerant (by design, we proclaim "zero tolerance") as they are of mistakes and failings and differences, are still refuges for many - places where violence and disrespect and even hunger can be left behind. So I like the physical place. I like a physical place filled with spatial and environmental options - noisy to quiet, outdoor to indoor, light to dark, private to collaborative, active to passive...

I believe in creating beautiful educational spaces, spaces which encourage, uplift, inspire. So many of our schools look like brick and block bunkers - increasing the prison metaphors - and I want to do the opposite. And I like schools which sit at some kind of divide, campus and city, or commercial and rural, or land and sea, because I think there's wonderful inherent tension there, as students straddle two worlds, learning the essential art of code-switching through every day experience.

There is an art to this, and it should be an endlessly changing art, with students empowered to use spaces as they need - think Black Box Theatre more than fixed purpose spaces.

And this community learning space must exist freely in time as well as space. It must at least embrace the traditional long university day, and perhaps be a 24 safe place. Students should, certainly after a certain age - if not always - use it as they require, the fixed schedule is a sad hold-over of the industrial revolutions, and has no place in education.

Likewise, the school would float within the calendar, not govern it. I don't believe in semesters or "marking periods" or whatever. Learning does not work in artificial school time divisions at all. I know I usually get most interested, most connected, to a course's content, or to a project, after about ten weeks. It is at that point that I could really roll. Of course, at that point its time, in most schools, to wrap it up and abandon the topic. Students in my school could could sit down with teacher-mentors and plan a path, and perhaps a timetable, but of course they could adjust that as it went along.

No grades, No grades

The two "grading systems" would be gone. They are both destructive and useless. I imagine a K-12 school, maybe a K-14 school, with two divisions - K-4, and 5-12 (or 14). Within these divisions children would progress at their own rates, and they would work with groupings based on interests and capabilities. There would be no "grade level expectations." No "standardized" testing. No students "retained" or "promoted" apart from their age group. (One of the most bizarre arguments in American education is the objection to "social promotion." The entire education structure right now is based on age-linked cohorts, of course we have "social promotion.")

And there would be no grading either. Call it "A" "B" C" or "100" "95" "90" or "4.0" "3.5" 3.0" it is all meaningless. In "my school" students would evaluate themselves, peers would review their work, faculty would review their work. They'd either go on or go back and rethink. We should be teaching, not accepting failure.

No subject divisions

Everything a student can study can, and should, bring every "subject" into play. Shakespeare? There's literature and writing, history and citizenship, sciences from construction through lighting, the mathematics of sightlines, the geography of England. Bridge Design? There's math and physics and chemistry and environmental science and politics and history and art and literature. Anything can include anything if the teacher-mentor pushes questions which need to be answered. And technology now allows students to reach out to information and people who can help with all of these things.

Few things damage education more than the artificial divisions the "Carnegie Units" created, it is time to consign these to the past.

Students at the College of the Atlantic

Technological Freedom

The students in "my school" would have technological freedom, they would be encouraged to discover the best ways to use media and ICT to support their learning, to build their "Toolbelts." The school could be wireless, or it could be open to 3G networks, but it would be open to the world of today, and to the world which is coming. Just as a vast paper library indicated a "great school" in 1970, an openness to the world's resources indicates a "great school" now. And just as good students learned how to use those paper libraries 40 years ago, good students today must explore the many ways to access the world's information systems now.

We wouldn't have an "Apple School," or an "iPhone School" or a "Google School." We wouldn't even be 1:1. We'd have far more devices than students around, including the student owned devices. We be linked and connected, and offer choices at every turn.

All materials would be available in multiple representations, and students would be encouraged to choose the representation system which best worked for that student in that moment. In these ways we'd be constructing lifespan learners, and lifespan technology users.

A part of the community

Students need some separation from "society." They need to be in a safe place where mistakes and failure are fine. But they cannot be "apart" from their society. Students come in to school with the world clinging to them, we owe it to them to let them find explanations, solutions, answers. We owe it to them to help them become their own change agents.

Connection also provides opportunity, as Neil Postman wrote in 1969:

"Let us assume that the City of New Rochelle, like many other cities, has serious problems with traffic control, crime and law enforcement, strikes, race relations, urban blight, drug addiction, garbage disposal, air pollution, and medical care. Students would be formed into teams, each team consisting of a teacher, a high school senior, perhaps a lay member of the community, and ten or a dozen students. Their task would be to select one of these problems for study, with a view toward designing authentic, practical solutions to it. They would do whatever they needed to do in order to learn about the problem (including previous attempts to solve it) and to communicate to others their own solutions. For example, imagine one team has selected the "crime" problem for study. Some students could spend two or three weeks at the police station, serving in some capacity that would allow them to observe the problem from the perspective of the police. (Some might even go out on calls with police officers.) Others might report regularly to the criminal court, observing the problem from that vantage point. Students could spend many days on interviewing assignments: insurance men, police officers from other towns, ex-convicts, prison wardens, merchants, town officials, et al. Students could review the available literature (both non-fiction and fiction), correspond with prisoners, write to law enforcement officers in other countries. The classroom would be used as a place of assembly when students needed to assess their findings, and to plan and organize additional inquiries. It is important to stress here that the activities described above do not constitute "field trips." Most of the students' "school life" would be spent outside the school where the realities of the problems being studied are to be found. However, included in the process must be a serious attempt to offer solutions and to communicate these to the appropriate people. This might require meeting in school for the purpose of writing resolutions, letters, pamphlets, handbills, etc. Or the students might wish to publish a newsletter about the problem, or produce an audio-tape for broadcasting on the local radio station (in which case some students might spend a week or two at the radio station), or produce a film for presentation to the town council. The possibilities are almost inexhaustible."

A willingness to change

Nothing is bigger than this. "My school" should always be willing to change - in fundamental ways. Yesterday Alec Couros linked me to this quote:

"It is interesting to me how many progressive and leftist scholars one can find in the academy, and yet so few of them actually challenge the terms of the debate within the academic system. Progressives who turn a critical eye to all the other institutions in society often seem unwittingly to assume that the academy is either a neutral or benevolent institution that simply needs personnel changes or different policies and procedures. Because the actual structure of the academy goes unquestioned—from tenure processes to grading systems to academic hierarchies—even progressives get trapped in the academy’s meritocratic myth, which either makes them insane or turns them into fascists. All the collective action we support outside the academy seems to disappear inside it—as we slave away in our offices in order to make sure everyone knows how busy and hardworking we are. Instead, we could be working together to support each other, build community, demystify the academic industrial complex, swap survival strategies, and promote life for all of us." (Smith, 2007, pp. 144-145) Complete reference: Smith, A. (Fall/2007) Social-Justice Activism in the Academic Industrial Complex. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion - Volume 23, Number 2, pp. 140-145

And this illustrates the trap so many educators fall into. They build, or enter, a structure, and then accept that structure as a "natural" and unchangeable experience. It should be neither.

Great schools change as students need them to change.

My own dream? Trinity College, Dublin. Any job openings?

I could say much more, but I'll leave it there. And ask you: What does the school of your dreams look like?

- Ira Socol

Crossing America: An Education

Michigan is firmly in the US Midwest, but, despite the feelings of both Midwesterners and Northeasterners, the Midwest is firmly in the "East." No, not the "Euro East" of the New York Megalopolis, but a land Europeans would recognize, did recognize, and did settle in their own self-images: Green and scaled to towns separated by a day's walk, a place in which the works of God and the works of humans are clearly differentiated in form and color.

"Fishtown" - Leland, Michigan

When you leave Michigan and head west, first entering "The Prairie" in Illinois, the world begins to change, and thus, so do the ways in which people see, hear, think, and learn.

For a long, long time I have been aware of Europe's great divide (a split which has come to define the 1840s-designed US education system), that is the split between Protestant and Catholic cultures. And I have known and understood Europe's other "thought divides" - Colonized States v. Imperial States, Places once within the Holy Roman Empire and those without. Places once within the Soviet Empire and those without - but despite much previous North American travel this month's journey began to help me understand why mass education fails so often in the US in ways I had not deeply considered before.

Near Santa Fe, New Mexico. The third oldest European city in the United States, and longest continuous "capital" city in the nation (1610).

Educational "reformers" and administrators rarely consider environment as a prime issue in learning, consigning the idea to "primitive thought," "pre-rational thought," and "pre-scientific thought." After all, Mike Bloomberg and Michelle Rhee will tell you, there's only one right way to add 2+2 or spell "tomorrow."

And the inherent "truth" of that creates one of the great fallacies of our current educational debate. Yes, there is only one right way to add 2+2 or spell "tomorrow," but there are hundreds or thousands of ways to perceive both "2+2" and "tomorrow," and as many different ways to learn about both.

The world looks different if you grow up observing a place with the subtle colors of a desert or a place where all houses are the same color, or where houses may not have square corners. Where you can step out of your back door and observe the curvature of the earth on dry land, where the "neighbor" is five miles away.

The world looks different and so your learning is inherently different. If you grow up with ocean outside your door you know one set of facts. If you grow up on the desert, you know another. If you grow up in a valley it is easier to perceive the world as flat - if you grow up on a seacoast the roundness of the planet is obvious. If you grow up attending Mass at your choice of times, punctuality means something different than if the whole community gathers for worship at the exact same stroke of the clock each Sunday morning, and thus, time means something different.

If you grow up watching things grow from the earth and watching animals being born and dying you will approach learning differently than if you grow up in a sanitized suburban neighborhood where Trader Joe's is your impression of "natural foods." It is not just that your knowledge base will differ in these two childhood locales, but your filtering systems will as well, as well as your interaction with media. The suburban child can not have the same sensory experiences. The rural child will likely not have the representational dependence.

These children will be fundamentally different in their learning styles long before they get to school, even without the endless individual differences which define humanity. The notion that we can educate them by some mass production script is ridiculous. And this is not just true if we compare the Northeastern and Southwestern United States, but within states - say, Boron and Palo Alto, California, or within cities, say Mott Haven and the Upper East Side [pdf download] in Mike Bloomberg's New York City.

This matters in school. It matters in all communication. A wonderful professor from my undergraduate experience once told me that Americans were completely dangerous in Central Europe because they could not understand the importance of the old eastern boundary of the Holy Roman Empire. Americans were blindsided by the collapse of both Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia because they didn't even know what to look for. Robert Putnam, a brilliant Harvard professor, could write Making Democracy Work and completely miss the cultural learning differences born of this ancient boundary through the center of the Italian peninsula. This lack of appreciation of cultural and physical environment on the process of education makes our teachers and our political leaders look like fools. And it results in diplomatic and schoolroom disaster.

We know that our tastes in food and even our food allergies are being determined from a a point a couple of months prior to our birth. We know that children are born able to hear all the sounds of all the world's global languages but lose most of this before they are two-years-old. Yet somehow we think that where a child "comes from" should have no impact at all on how our classrooms function. And that seems counter-factual to me.

So next time you recommend a "global" solution in education, in your nation or in your classroom, consider if your "globe" is the same one your students know. And if it is the same globe for this student, or that student, or that student...

- Ira Socol

America Lost

Digital friend, distinguished professor, and ed blogger Jon Becker likes to quote a Thomas Friedman New York Times column from 4 November 2004. Friedman, describing his post election depression, says, "We don't just disagree on what America should be doing; we disagree on what America is."

The conversations about Barack Obama's broadcast to American schoolchildren (coming Tuesday) have proven both the truth of this, and the dangers we face.

This is not just laughable. Yes, of course it is "funny" that those who, ten months ago, would have howled in fury about "disrespect for the Commander in Chief in time of war" now insist on "disrespect for the Commander in Chief in time of war" (ah, what a difference a bit of skin color can make). And I suppose it is expected that the party of Mark Sanford and David Vitter objects to students being told about "personal responsibility." And, yes, I'm amused that I, who disagree with every thing the Obama administration has done re: education, who views the President, in educational terms, as "Bush III," has spent a week arguing for his presence in our schools, but... it isn't funny at all.

The United States is a fragile nation. Always has been. It really is more Yugoslavia than France, and has been from the start. In 1787 party-hardy New York, and feudal Georgia had little in common, except language, with dour Calvinist and mercantilist New England. They were joined together out of the need, in a colonialist world, for mutual economic and military protection, and the borders were somewhat random. Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations wasn't really interested for a long time. "Upper Canada" (what we now call "Ontario") probably should have been included. The Great Lakes region? Just a treaty bargaining chip. As I said, more Woodrow Wilson's bizarre ideas of nation-construction than any nation-state of the 18th Century, save perhaps Switzerland.

So, America's first hundred years were spent trying to either split up or stay together. Insurrections (meet John Brown, to whom The Battle Hymn of the Republic is dedicated, or just look at the Whiskey Rebellion), rebellions (Civil War), wars on native populations, internal occupations, attacks on neighboring nations in attempts to build patriotic fever, and huge struggles over minority group rights completely define the US through the third quarter of the 19th Century.

Like Spain after the Civil War or the United Kingdom after the 1707 Act of Union, things "settled down" afterwards, but really only on the surface. The "settlement" was essentially one of "leaving each other alone." So New York and California became socialist republics - free universities and hospitals - while the south re-feudalized (Jim Crow), and both were seen as "quaint" - the way Londoners view the Scots of the Hebrides and vise-versa. But whenever the cultures met - the Scopes Trial, the Civil Rights movement, the resistance to secular law, the response has been every bit as violent as anything the Basque Separatists have done.

And today, after two decades of everything from massive bombings to political assassinations, the US is as polarized about its President as it was in the winter of 1860. Not just because his skin color is seen as a threat by so many who feel "left behind" in this 21st Century, but because that skin color represents an America they do not believe in, and want no part of - urban, diverse, tolerant, with at least a hint of being a meritocracy. If your self-image is entirely tied to the privileges of being white and the notion that "granddaddy worked hard," none of this is good.

That the biggest explosion of the moment should come around the issue of school is no surprise. Our education system was largely designed to combat most of what "Obama" (the image) represents. US schools were supposed to "protestantize" the Catholic and "whiten" the Irish. They were supposed to train children in the culture as it existed. Everything from Catholic Bibles to any foreign or native languages were banned. Behavior patterns developed for Calvinist church services were made law in the classroom. Culture was transmitted through fantasy history.

And now a tall Black male, a big city guy, with an immigrant parent from "the dark continent," who was born in Hawaii (surely that can't be a state, unless we pretend - for purposes of those historical fictions - that it was in 1941), wants to "walk in" to your neighborhood school and talk to your children! If Barack Obama is not dangerous to children, then the America as understood by those "left behind" isn't real, and that is a hard thing for the barely educated (or educated in isolation) to comprehend or accept. So, he must be very dangerous indeed.

The map of the divide is not simple - no matter what liberals (American term) think. But the divide is very real. In today's global economy the US has no more reason to stay together as a nation than Czechoslovakia did. I know that most New Yorkers would rather be part of the European Union and I know that Oklahoma would rather be politically allied with Saudi Arabia (extraction economy, extreme conservative religiousity) - though few in either place could understand why.

Other bloggers have written excellent discussions of the educational issues involved, at Will Richardson, at SpEdTeacher, at Principal's Page. But I'm here simply to suggest that this is one more bit of evidence that the two parts of the United States are preparing their children to be the citizens of separate nations. And that divorce takes a big step forward Tuesday, noon Eastern Time.

- Ira Socol

Walter Cronkite and "the way it [was]"

Would Walter Cronkite be happy with the way Walter Cronkite's death has been reported?

And what does that say about the way in which we understand history?

Don't get me wrong. I think anyone would recall Cronkite as a fabulous journalist, one of the greatest ever. The man covered the great moments of history from the London Blitz through the tumultuous end of the 1970s. And he did it magnificently. But was he the most watched newsman in America?

Only after he waited for the most watched newsmen in America to retire.

Anyone remember Chet Huntley and David Brinkley this weekend?

NBC's Huntley-Brinkley report competed with Cronkite's CBS Evening News for eight years - a period covering the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy, the riots convulsing America's cities and campuses, the Vietnam War, the 1968 Democratic Convention, and the moon landing. More Americans watched Cronkite than Huntley-Brinkley for one of those events - the moon landing. NBC won the ratings war for more than six of those eight years.

None of this is to take anything away from Cronkite or his memory. But it is to say that "history" is usually a construction of the present, not a window on the past. Whether Cronkite was the most trusted man in America on that awful day in November 1963 is arguable, but we know more in the nation turned to NBC News that day. The best seller lists of the 1920s were not dominated by Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, or Ernest Hemingway. Lincoln couldn't get 40% of the vote in 1860. The U.S. did not really practice "precision bombing" during World War II.

History is recalled as we wish it had been.

Of course there is no excuse for this kind of history anymore. If your students all had computers or netbooks or smartphones in their hands, every one might look up a different facet of a historical event, might even translate foreign language sources, might watch YouTube or visit museums around the globe, and might share all this via Google Doc or VoiceThread or Wiki, and the community cognition resulting would be something to see.

We might even get away from myth a bit, and toward a reality which really explains things (why were Huntley and Brinkley more popular? what does that suggest about viewing habits?).

So you can surely watch this... and you should

But your students should also be listening to wechoosethemoon with the full, real-time, minute-by-minute record of Apollo 11 communications - because - that's the way it really was.

- Ira Socol

International Space University
Museum of Broadcasting
NASA