Developed by Jeff Bloom
In the United States, we love to blame someone or some “thing” for any of our social problems. In terms of education, we blame teachers — the front-line workers, the actual interface between students and whatever subject matter is being taught. But, I’m afraid it’s not quite so easy to lay the blame on teachers or anything or anyone else, for that matter. In fact, any effort to point a finger at a problem with schools is much more complicated and much more complex than we think. “Complicated” is a kind of entanglement within a specific phenomenon, much like a “Game of Thrones,” where the plot lines and characters are woven into complicated entanglements. It took me three seasons to begin to understand who was whom and what was happening.
“Complex” involves the nature of living things, where all of what we might think of as “systems” are not only entangled, but interdependent, while contributing to the self-maintaining continuities and discontinuities that make up what we call life.
In the case of schools, there are aspects that are complicated. The bureaucratic systems, the testing, the curriculums, the scheduling, and so forth are complicated, but not necessarily complex. The complexity of schooling is much more slippery. Our whole education system is not a singular, distinct, and self-contained entity. Everything about education is intertwined with politics; corporate economics and interests; personal and family economics; neighborhood economics; the multiple cultures within the society; the hugely diverse social contexts in the society; all of the personal and larger cultural beliefs; the diversity of assumptions and experiences held by all of the individuals who are in one way or another affected by the education system; religious and spiritual contexts; the media — both news and entertainment; technology that is used within the educational system and used outside of the educational context; health and welfare of students, teachers, and members of the community; and so forth. All of these different contexts and systems are interdependent and cannot be disentangled from any of the other contexts. If something changes in one context, say politics, that change has ripple effects to one degree or another throughout all of the other contexts.
So, if we come up with some big idea about what is wrong with schools, that “big idea” is faulty from the start. If we come up with some great “solution” to the problems in schooling, it is dead before it starts. Time and again, we have seen new curriculums, new standards, new ways of holding teachers to account, new school designs, new classroom management approaches, and so on, and all of these new “solutions” end up having a half-life that ranges from zero to maybe a few years, while not making any positive difference to anything in the educational context. Other than the differences in subject matter content, technology, the appearances of school buildings and classrooms, and other relatively superficial features of the teaching — learning enterprise, not much has changed over that last century or even longer. Schools still operate much like factories, which supposedly prepare students for their future workplaces. And, the approaches to schooling still seem to prepare students for factory-type work, where the ideal employees conform to a particular standard of appearance and behavior, don’t question authority, are obedient, and, in general, are subservient to those at higher levels of authority. As much as schools may assert that they prepare students to participate in a democratic society, nothing that is done in schools is at all close to being democratic. In fact, the whole approach is authoritarian.
Of course, there are exceptions. Some creative, visionary, and courageous teachers create their own mini-democratic communities in their classrooms. And, even fewer schools do so. But, the external pressures of schooling — politics — economics — society — community — ecology — culture are always bearing down on those few who veer from the same, well-worn path that has harnessed the complexity of our interdependent contexts or systems that comprise the meta- context of our lives.
The nature of complex systems is that they maintain themselves. If you get a cut, it heals. If you break a bone, it heals. If you are hungry, you eat. If there is a forest fire, the forest tries to grow back. If there is an oil spill in the ocean, the marine ecosystem attempts to repair the damage and regenerate the loss in life. Little events can ripple across one context and spread throughout the interdependent contexts. However, all of the affected contexts will try to reset themselves to their previous balancing point. This tendency to maintain a certain balance or a certain state is why schools have not changed dramatically over the decades.
The state of “balance,” for the lack of a better word, does not have to be what someone may think is a “good” state of balance. In fact, that state or status quo can be quite toxic, but once established, it continues to self-maintain, like a spinning gyroscope or spinning top, you can bump the gyroscope and it may wiggle, but it will return to its previous position. By the way, I do not like these mechanical metaphors for living systems, but I can't think of a better metaphor. Please forgive me, and keep in mind that this analogy is very limited in its applicability. In the gyroscope, the spinning wheel provides for the maintenance of balance. In a living system, and here is the complexity, there are multiple processes, many of which are difficult to identify and isolate, that contribute to the maintenance of the particular living or social system. In fact, because living systems do not occur in isolation, but rather occur in intertwined interdependencies, the maintenance of balance is distributed among this matrix of systems. If we try to make a major change in schooling, say by doing away with all forms of testing, which would be a great idea, the schooling system will eventually return to using tests. This return to testing will be due to many different pressures and processes, including, but certainly not limited to testing companies putting continued pressure on by politicians, parents, and teachers to return to using tests. Parents will put up a stink, since all they know about assessment involves testing like what they've experienced. Teachers will complain and resist using alternative approaches to assessment and evaluation. The cascade of pressures upon the entire matrix of systems surrounding education will eventually bring the system of schooling back to the way it was before the “big change.”
The history of education in the United States “reads” like a high stakes drama of power and control. As compulsory schooling gained its footing in the 1850’s, politicians, who of course knew nothing about learning and teaching, determined that the goals of schooling should be focused on:
“respect for authority, self-control, self-discipline... [and that] the properly reformed boy ‘acquires a fixed character,’ one that can be planned for in advance by authority in keeping with the efficiency needs of business and industry.”[1]
And, the drama gets worse and much more refined and insidious from this point. These “goals” are still very much alive and well in the schools of today, although they pretty much go unspoken. Every effort to reform the entire nature of schooling, such as the efforts of John Dewey in the early part of the 20th Century, were squashed by the tightly entwined forces of big money, big corporations, politics, and even religion.[2] The goals of schooling, which were expanded shortly after compulsory schooling began, included producing students who were literate, but whose intellectual skills were to remain undeveloped. Higher intellectual development of students was reserved for the few elite future leaders in business and politics.[3] And, from that period of time to present, the corporate and political elite have maintained a system of schooling that focuses on keeping the general public controllable. Those few original goals of schools have been expanded not only to include respect for authority, but also to not questioning authority, obedience, and conformity.[4] And, the matrix of interdependent systems entwined in education has been perfecting the “art” of sleight of hand, of masterful deception. They use such words and phrases of “holding teachers accountable,” “maintaining high standards,” “raising standards,” “science-based practices,” “evidence-based practices,” and so forth to hoodwink the public into thinking that education is about higher and more rigorous learning. But, the real agenda, is to use high-stakes testing, teacher-proof curriculums, and curriculums that provide only superficial and fragmented knowledge with little relevance to the lives of children, all of which leads to a mass dumbing down of students. It has been the scam of the last two centuries.
Meanwhile, the corporate entities involved, are raking in billions of dollars from textbook sales; from irrelevant, meaningless, and even incorrect and biased knowledge embedded in the curriculums and supporting materials they sell to schools; from the whole array of high-stakes tests and college entry tests they sell to schools and other agencies every year; from the technology that rarely has any meaningful impact on student learning; and from the vending machines and other non-educational tentacles of profit-making that are embedded in schools.
The story of the educational matrix goes back even further. From the times of Plato, there has been a desire to believe in an absolute, objective reality, which, of course, is often pitted against the beliefs in one or more deities who hold the ultimate truth. But, over time, there has been an interesting intertwining of these two kinds of beliefs. This intertwining occurred after the establishment of positivism as a way of understanding our world. Positivism asserted that there is one knowable truth that can be understood through scientific processes of observation and experiment. This assertion, by René Descartes set the first scientific revolution in motion. Several decades later, Isaac Newton not only cemented this paradigm of thinking into Western cultures, but established a companion paradigm of mechanism. Mechanism maintains that all of nature works like a machine. From plants to humans, we could understand how things worked by applying the principles of mechanics to our investigations.
And so, from this beginning, the notions of positivism and mechanism have crept into and dominated our worldviews. They quickly moved from westerns cultures to most cultures around the world. And, education systems latched onto these ideas, which often produced faulty understanding, such as eugenics, which dominated educational thinking from its notable inception in the late 1800’s until its horrific manifestation during the Holocaust. Unfortunately, the major themes of eugenics are still present, but discussed with different terminology.
However, these mechanistic approaches to understanding may work for physical machines, but cannot be used to understand complex living and social systems. Mechanism works with predictable physical phenomena, like the movement of planets or the operations of an automobile. Other than its usefulness in a few applications to understanding the physical stresses on bones, mechanism cannot be used to understand the whole of complex systems. Complex systems are not subject to linear cause and effect processes. And, unlike mechanical systems, they are not predictable. Yes, we can say that with some degree of certainty, we will go to bed tonight and wake up and drink coffee tomorrow, but we cannot predict with any degree of certainty the effects of some input into the living system. And, such inputs, such as a medication for headaches, may have completely unexpected effects with different individuals. The bulk of our medical systems are still embedded in mechanical thinking. Sometimes it works, but certainly not always.
Positivism and mechanism are still major guiding frameworks to our educational systems. Testing, linear curriculums, grading, and approaches to teaching, as well as the view of what learning looks like, are entrenched in mechanism and positivism. We still think that memorizing, which is a mechanistic process, is going to result in learning. Yes, we may remember some information, but in terms of having a deep as well as abstract understanding of that information and how it applies to and can be used in all sorts of contexts — memorization and other mechanistic approaches fail miserably. Tests, as used in schools, measure nothing. Learning has no quantity, no volume, no substance. It cannot be measured. We can, however, describe bits and pieces or glimpses of someone’s learning, but never the full extent of that learning, since much of it takes place below the conscious level.
If we are interested in helping our children develop deeper and more complex understandings and to help them refine many of their natural abilities to think deeply and abstractly, unless you are exceptionally lucky to find that rare school and rare teachers, parents pretty much have to provide additional opportunities for their children to develop more substantial understandings and refined thinking outside of school. This is not as difficult as one might think. And, it certainly is not overwhelmingly time-consuming. I will write more on this topic soon, but the steps you can take can be part of the time you already spend with your children.
Explorations
- Can you describe any experiences you've had throughout your schooling that are examples of authoritarian attitudes and behaviors? How do you think these experiences have affected you and others?
- Have you or your children, if you have children, had teachers who were visionaries, who did things differently from the status quo, who were willing and even eager to break the "rules" of how teaching is to be done? If you have had such a teacher or teachers, if you were particularly lucky, please describe the teacher and how this teacher did things differently. How did this teacher affect you and others?
- Of course, if you are or were one one of these teachers, please describe you experiences with your children, with parents, with other teachers, and with administrators. What were you trying to accomplish with your approach? What kind of effect do you think you had on your students? What obstacles did you encounter in trying to teach differently?
- From everything you may have experienced as a student at any or all levels of schooling, as well as from media coverage of various issues with schooling, what aspects of positivism, reductionism, and mechanism: (a) have been evident in what was taught and emphasized; (b) have been evident in the way teaching was done; (c) have been evident in the way classrooms and schools were run; and (d) have been evident in how students, teachers, and parents were treated?
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NOTES
[1] Page 282 in Gatto, J. T. (2002). Some lessons from the underground history of American education. In R. Kick (Ed.), Everything you know is wrong: The disinformation guide to secrets and lies. New York: The Disinformation Company.
[2] Marshall, J. D., Sears, J. T., Allen, L. A., Roberts, P. A., & Schubert W. H. (2007). Turning points in curriculum (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
[3] Gatto, J. T. (2002). Some lessons from the underground history of American education. In R. Kick (Ed.), Everything you know is wrong: The disinformation guide to secrets and lies. New York: The Disinformation Company.
[4] Sears, J. T., & Marshall, J. D. (Eds.). (1990). Teaching and thinking about curriculum. New York: Teachers College Press.
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Thanks, Carolyn! Hope you're doing well. Those first few years at NAU before you left were great. -- I'm going…