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Archives -
August, 2008
Disruptive
Innovation: Moving Toward Life Learning – August 26, 2008
A few years ago, my mother’s trailer home was falling apart around her (at age
91, she hadn’t planned on outliving it). She was still relatively independent
and not yet ready for a nursing home, so we invited her to move into a townhouse
we were vacating but weren’t ready to sell. Since it was in a condominium
project, we sometimes referred to it as “our condo.” She had never visited
us there. When she saw it on moving day, she was upset because she had expected
it to be a highrise apartment; she had seen photos of the interior and because
it had many similarities to her trailer home and neighborhood, it never occurred
to us that she might not expect a townhouse. I tried, unhelpfully, to explain
that condo meant a style of legal ownership, not a style of architecture, nor
was it going to change her lifestyle or attitude toward life in any fundamental
way.
In the same way, charter schools, public schools and
homeschools differ in the details of their legal and organizational structure;
but all three can – and sometimes do – provide very similar types of
educational experiences. If one views education as something that is done to
people, that view will structure one’s educational experience, no matter the
location or the organization. And until enough people understand that learning
must be in the hands of the learner, education won’t change, in spite of all
the tinkering that happens in the form of lower teacher-student ratios, more
computers, more money, different textbooks, more testing, and so on.
I’ve been reading a book about how that paradigm shift is
actually happening – by stealth, if you will. I’ve been predicting and, more
recently, watching this happen for years, as computer technology puts control
into the hands of learners and frees us from the straightjacket of someone
else’s agenda. But Clayton Christensen in his new book Disrupting Class: How
Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns (2008, McGraw Hill),
brings a lot of clarity to the process. Christensen is a professor of Business
Administration at Harvard and, therefore, might seem an unlikely choice to write
about radical education reform. But he uses his well known business theory of
“disruptive innovation” to explain how technology is allowing young people
to learn at their own speed, in their own style, when and where they want, and
what they are motivated to learn. But more than that, he demonstrates how this
disruption is bound to demolish the current legal and organizational structure
of schooling, just like Sony’s transistor changed (and, ultimately, put out of
business) the old tube radio companies like RCA, and how Canon disrupted Xerox
and Japanese car companies disrupted North American car companies. This is just
a part of what I see as a confluence of thought that will inevitably move us
away from the antiquated warehouse style of schooling toward life learning.
Posted: 2008/08/26 2:29 PM
Priorities in the
Right Place – August 21, 2008
A few Sundays ago, a propane storage facility blew up here in Toronto. The fireball and blaze were hugely destructive. A firefighter and an employee
of the propane company died. A whole neighborhood of people was forced to flee
their homes in the middle of the night and some are not back home yet because
their houses are too damaged. Obviously, it was a traumatic time for the
residents of the area and a bit of a wake-up call for the rest of us.
The city’s mayor David Miller was on vacation at the
time. The crisis was handled by the acting deputy mayor while the mayor rushed
back home. After a few days, he resumed his vacation, keeping in touch with the
clean-up efforts by phone, for which he was criticized in the media and on the
street. In response, he says that he is a father first and foremost and that he
wanted to be with his daughter as she celebrated her 13th birthday.
Good for him! He wouldn’t be much of a mayor (or leader of any sizable
organization) if he didn’t have an effective team in place to deal with
emergencies or other issues in his absence. And there is no shortage of
politicians weighing in with their opinions about what needs to be done to shut
the door now that the horse has fled the barn. I am probably in the minority on
this one, but I think this is a man who has his priorities straight.
There’s an odd sense that when a crisis hits a city or a
country, the head politician needs to be there to console his or her
constituents, perhaps to indicate that someone is in control of an
uncontrollable situation. Remember Rudy Giuliani? During and after the 9/11 crisis, the New York mayor was treated like some sort of secular
saint, the embodiment of the tragedy and heroism associated with the attacks on
the World Trade Center – in spite of his highly unpopular pre-9/11 reputation.
Why do we value the veneer of
patriarchal leadership in times of crisis? Why don’t we feel empowered to deal
with crises without a father figure hovering? And why do we not value a leader
who wants to be with his kids?
Posted: 2008/08/21 11:20 AM
How Do They Know That? – August 2, 2008
Ever since our daughters began to learn without school over 35 years ago, I have
wondered about something. I’ve not been curious about how learning happens,
but about why so many people need to know. Reporters, relatives, colleagues,
other parents and the merely nosey have all, over the years, expressed a burning
curiosity to understand how my children learned to read, write and multiply. I
used to say that it happened by osmosis. Interestingly enough, I’ve never once been asked how they learned to talk or
walk.
But why does it matter how children learn? Or adults, for that
matter? So much of educational research is aimed at finding better ways
to teach things (and, of course, better ways to artificially motivate children
to be receptive to that teaching)…things that would be learned anyway without the
teaching and better, in some cases, without what amounts to interference
masquerading as helping. I think that mostly comes from academic elitism, an
adult arrogance that says we can help them do it faster or more efficiently than
if they left to their own devices. We also need to understand (and control)
the process of learning because we think it is difficult, a belief seemingly reinforced by
most school experiences. However, children who have the opportunity to learn
informally instead of attending school demonstrate that much learning happens
effortlessly without adult interference when the time is right – meaning
the motivation is present – and usually without the learner being aware it is
happening. And when the motivation is present, even inherently difficult
information can be mastered with joy in the absence of planned pedagogy or
professional organization.
Or maybe we misunderstand what learning really is. Much of
what is supposedly learned in school is mostly material that has been memorized,
whether history dates, mathematical formulae or the difference between a verb
and a noun. Absent any interest in learning the material and any context for it,
as well as sufficient time to experiment with, adapt and apply the information,
this process cannot be called learning. Rather, it is memorizing, regurgitating and forgetting. (Why else would teachers and some parents bemoan
the “ground lost” during summer vacation?!)
When supporters of informal and home-based education try to
understand how learning happens, their motivation is somewhat different. For instance,
British academics Alan Thomas and Harriet Pattison researched and wrote How
Children Learn at Home (Continuum, 2008) in order to challenge many
of the assumptions underpinning educational theory and to demonstrate the
efficacy of parent-modeled life learning. And their book does that well, largely
by quoting parents who admit often to not having a clue how their children
learned something! And I think that’s just fine, especially if it helps us
learn to trust the children and the process.
Thomas and Pattison write: “If we begin with a child’s
eye view of the learning situation, asking what attracts children’s attention,
why, and how they then go about exploring these things, we begin to be able to
see learning as a form of growth in which children add, flexibly and
organically, to their understanding of the world around them. Such a view
further enables us to see how learning is structured by the child’s day-to-day
environment and is accomplished as an ongoing facet of the things that children
do.” Just like adults learn.
Posted: 2008/08/02 7:10 PM
Learning (in) Fear –
August 1, 2008
Once upon a time, I thought that compulsory schooling was the ultimate in
coercion. Now, I think it’s having armed police in schools. This tyranny
cloaked in protection is happening in many places and now, it’s going to
happen in my home town of Toronto this fall. The school board chair said recently that it’s in the name of
improving safety in a system that has been plagued with guns, knives and
violence, and in the name of building relationships between teens and the
police. He said it will involve a casual and low-key presence of “guys in blue
slacks and golf shirts meeting with kids” to build trust and respect. The
police chief, on the other hand, says no officers of his will be wandering
around dressed that way, and that they’ll be in uniform and armed…in order
to build trust and respect (for themselves, presumably, rather than for the kids
in the schools).
Carrying a gun is not the way to build trust and respect
– that’s the code of the street lived by those who have been terrorizing the
schools! And one of the reasons they are behaving that way is that they have
experienced a huge dose of lack of trust and respect, coercion and fear in their lives.
That’s why I am horrified to realize there are many
people – perhaps the majority – who welcome the use of armed police, drug
sniffing dogs, security cameras, hall monitors and worse in schools. Perhaps
they don’t realize that kids’ lives are already highly controlled, that they
are routinely mistrusted and assumed to be guilty, that their freedom of
movement is already severely limited, that they are coerced to be places where
they don’t want to be and that are irrelevant to their lives, and where they
regularly experience failure and frustration. Much of that
happens in the prisons called school, all in the name of attempting to force
them to learn certain academic information…as if that were possible, even without the atmosphere of
fear.
As Tim Gill writes in
his book
No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk Averse Society (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2007), children want adults to help them
stay safe and we must accept that responsibility. But, he writes, “rather than
having a nanny state, where risk aversion dominates the landscape, we should be
aspiring to a child-friendly society, where communities look out for each other
and for children.”
Then we might have a chance of creating a truly democratic
society, which sees all people (of all ages) as valuable and responsible, which values cooperation
and collaboration, which abhors misuse of power and which tries to solve conflict
non-violently. It’s not a simple goal and it won’t be reached by something
as simple or relatively inexpensive as putting armed police in school corridors.
But we must pursue it.
Posted: 2008/08/01 5:53 PM
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