Teaching, Learning, Time & Issues of 21st Century Schooling

By Jeff Bloom

 Much of schooling is focused around warped uses of time. By “warped” I mean trying to squeeze a lot of material into a short period of time. “Efficiency” is the key word that marks this insidiously warped use of time. Another aspect of warped time involves a set of assumptions about learning. These assumptions include viewing learning as (a) something that only happens between an authority figure (teacher, parent, boss, expert, et al.) and the “learner;” (b) something that happens during a discrete period of time, such as during a 50-minute class period or even over the span of a particular course (e.g., one semester); (c) a linear process from simple to complicated or complex; and (e) another subset of misleading or naive concepts and theories that do not really hold up to scrutiny, many of which are hold-overs from past folk lore and paradigms that are no longer useful. 

When I talk about schools in this post, I am generalizing about the vast majority of schools. I’m talking about the institution of schooling in this country (the United States) and those in many other countries. This “institution” is the ephemeral, fuzzy bordered context of schooling that includes public, private, and charter schools.  This view of schools is basically a political, corporate hegemonic spider web of stuckness. There are, of course, exceptions. Courageous teachers who buck the system. And, the odd schools that manage to do their own thing in the midst of their district’s craziness. Or, the occasional charter or private school that manages to break away from the hegemony of schooling, but then these schools bring up other problems of undermining the public system and serving elite populations. But, in general, when I talk about schools and schooling, I am talking about that big fuzzy institution of schooling and the schools that fall within this context. 

The underlying push of schooling is “efficiency.” Schools and teachers have to be efficient. They have to cover the curriculum in the shortest possible time that will result in the highest student test scores. Time is the big issue in schooling. Time is marked by bells. Students’ lives are run by bells. Bells end classes. Bells begin classes. Bells tell when to go to lunch. Principals observe teachers with stopwatches. They go from one class to another to make sure all of the same grade level teachers are teaching the exact same thing at exactly the same time. Tests are timed. Some teachers set strict time-limits on activities, jumping from one activity to the next like grasshoppers going from one blade of grass to the next… except that grasshoppers actually stop to take a nibble or just take off in a completely different direction. (I really don’t want to insult the intelligence of grasshoppers, but our naive views of these creatures have led us to think that their behavior is more mechanical than intentional.)

In life, most of us have jobs that require showing up at a specific time and leaving at a specific time. Some jobs are very much like schools with bells or whistles for starting and stopping and for coffee breaks and lunch. I worked in places like that. They were factories, retail stores, construction jobs.. In fact, the ways schools manifest now were designed to train people to work in factories. They haven’t changed much, even though the majority of jobs that children will eventually get have changed from factories to offices and other settings. But, the attitudes and characteristics of being obedient and compliant haven’t really changed. Corporations and politicians do not want people to question or challenge authority or to think critically about the issues they face in their everyday lives.  

From the perspectives corporate executives and politicians, they play the game that appears like they care about education by promoting higher standards, accountability, and measures of success. But, standards, accountability, and measures are all ruses. In fact, they are worse than ruses, they actually do the exact opposite of what one might think they are supposed to do. They prevent deep, meaningful, extensive, and complex learning, which is just what corporations and politicians have wanted throughout the history of education in the United States. 

And, then on top of all of this, the time constraints on learning in terms of efficiency may be the greatest misuse of time. Real, deep, meaningful, relevant learning takes time…. maybe lots of time. In fact, some learning about a particular my continue for decades or a whole lifetime. To speed through a curriculum is just another way of preventing real learning from taking place. Real learning is a way of…

With real learning there is no hurry…. The longer… the better. 

al learning gives us the tools to make difficult decisions. And, difficult decisions take time. We need to ponder possibilities and see things from different perspectives. Some real critically important decisions are going to be presenting themselves to our children in their lifetimes. Many of these issues and problems are already happening. They are only going to become more intense. And, our children have had no models of how to tackle such decision-making processes. We certainly don’t see this sort of deep, reflective, and complex thinking among politicians and almost all of the talking heads in the media (no offense intended to The Talking Heads band). Schools never take the time to model such processes. Schools pretend as if everything is going to be just fine in the future. They keep teaching the same old things as if life will just keep rolling along like it always has. When sea levels rise and parts of this country disappear, when food sources begin to disappear, when droughts become so bad that nothing will grow and people become desperate for jobs and water, when states are fighting over water rights, when diseases plague vast proportions of the population, and when energy resources can’t supply the demands – what tools have we given our children to cope with these problems?  

The problem with schools and schooling isn’t the teachers. It isn’t the curriculum. It isn’t the children. It isn’t the parents. The problem is a systemic problem of faulty assumptions about what learning is, what schools should be, and what we want for our children. And, one of these assumptions is time. What about time? We all need time for   pondering, wondering about, questioning, testing, applying, reworking, playing with, and making sense of ideas. We need time to look for patterns, relationships, and interdependencies. We need to see how an idea may apply to or affect other ideas and other idea in different contexts and subject matter areas. And, we need time to do nothing in particular, where ideas can gurgle beneath the surface. We need time for recursive spiraling through new and old ideas while providing time and space for new insights to emerge.

The problems are not necessarily with schools or teachers, although major re-working of the whole nature and intent of schools needs to be undertaken. And, teachers are increasingly hamstrung by politicians who know nothing about learning and teaching and by the power-structure of schooling agencies and institutions. The problems are deeply systemic. For the most part, current schooling is not about learning to think deeply and critically. It’s not about developing deeply and intricately interconnected understandings. It’s not about learning how to learn on your own beyond schooling. It’s not concerned with how to care for and about our living world, including how to appreciate, value, support, and work with diverse humans and their cultures, beliefs, values, and so forth. It’s almost never about learning and thinking transcontextually, where “knowledge and ideas” are not broken up and isolated in separate cubby holes, but are seen as occurring in intricate, interdependent matrices. This sort of transcontextual learning is critical to tackling the problems we face now and will face in the future. 

We can’t decide to bomb some country and expect everything to be “okay.” Every action we take, doesn’t just have a singular and simple reaction, every action affects and has ramifications across multiple contexts, such as health, well-being, education, religion, economy and employment, families, ecosystems, global ecology, and so on. Some actions are like opening Pandora’s Box. Without transcontextual understandings and transcontextual ways of thinking, we are proceeding not only blindly, but recklessly..  

© 2015, 2025 by Jeffrey W. Bloom

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