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Musings, meanderings, wonderings and wanderings about unschooling, natural parenting, sustainable living and more by Wendy Priesnitz. Archives - August, 2008 Disruptive
Innovation: Moving Toward Life Learning – August 26, 2008 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. Priorities in the
Right Place – August 21, 2008 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? How Do They Know That? – August 2, 2008 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. Learning (in) Fear –
August 1, 2008 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. Return
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