Uncomfortable theories of education

[sabotabby]

Related to this.

There are some truisms repeated during the education of educators (and in discussions of education, particularly at the policy level), that I think are incorrect. Granted, my experiences in education may be atypical, but the following points, I believe, at least need to be considered:

1. Not every child wants to learn.

We are told repeatedly in teachers' college that every child wants to learn. Everyone agrees that the system is flawed and/or broken, and these flaws are responsible for why, by the time they reach high school, many children do not seem to want to learn. It is assumed that children are, by nature, intellectually curious, and it is the system that beats this out of them.

I believe that the system is broken rather than flawed, and that it does quite a bit to stifle intellectual curiosity. However, I also believe that the truism that every child wants to be a lifelong learner requires further examination, and may indeed be a useful lie. (In that it is useful for teachers to believe this and perform their jobs as though it were a law of nature, but it may very well be pure fiction.)

I am a reasonably intellectually curious and well-educated person, and yet I frequently default to laziness. Whether this is a function of brain chemistry, fatigue, or innate tendency, I'm not sure, but if I'm smart and I would often rather just watch TV, what does that mean for people who struggle with learning? Remember that people who utter the mantra, "every child wants to learn" are reasonably educated people who like learning. It's stupid to generalize the experience of the minority who complete post-secondary education and then choose education as a profession to the entirety of the population that moves through K-12.

2. Everyone has different learning styles. This may be irrelevant.

The Ontario educational system currently recognizes around nine types of intelligences, and operates on the basis of there being four major learning styles. While this may have some basis in reality, it does not logically follow that if a student is stronger in one particular type of intelligence, the other ones should be ignored. You should still know how to write an essay even if you are a musical genius, and even if you will never write a particularly good essay.

3. There is no such thing as an educational model that has not been tried before. Currently trendy models of education are nothing new.

If you think Differentiated Learning is substantially different from the theory of Seven Intelligences, you are not very intelligent.

They need to learn more/they need to learn less/they need to learn specific facts/they need to develop critical thinking skills/they need to learn learning skills/they need more arts/they need more maths/teacher-centric education/child-centric education/phonics/whole language/just shut up already.

Which leads me to...

4. We actually know some of the things that work. They just happen to be expensive things.

Small class sizes, well-educated and passionate teachers, access to resources, variety of instructional styles, activities, and assessments, parental support, groupings according to ability and interest rather than age. There, I just solved the education crisis for you. Now give me money.

Comments

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

Spot on on all counts I think (especially no.4 - the experience of fee paying schools proves it).

I suspect all kids want to learn something but that something may well not involve Jane Austen, differential calculus or the agricultural output of the Ukraine. I'm not convinced that schools as currently configured are the best place to learn tool making or the trombone though they seem well adapted to imparting the skills needed for a life of crime. I can't think of a better place to learn the mechanics of drug dealing than a Toronto high school.

[sabotabby]

At least the drug dealers are getting some maths skills.

Are you telling me that kids don't want to learn about the agricultural output of the Ukraine? Off to the gulag with you!

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

Many years ago there was a British TV sitcom set in a fairly awful Secondary Modern. One of the kids was "dead thick" until asked to work out the winnings on some fiendishly complex bet involving multiple horse races.

[loolica.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I tend to agree that everyone wants to learn something. Whether those some things lead to the learner becoming a Productive Member of Society (tm) is something else. A kid who'll spend hours getting killed in a video game until he figures out how to clear a level is clearly motivated to learn something. Hell, you could even argue that sitting through an entire TV show means you want to learn how the story ends.

I think where the lie comes in is when the leap is made from acknowledging that a kid is really motivated to figuring out a video game to believing that therefore either (a) that same kid will be really motivated to figuring out how to play a video game that is set during the French Revolution and will actually learn about history that way and/or (b) that the video game player is really a budding computer programmer and we should get her going in that direction. Clearly there are going to be kids who have no desire whatsoever to learn anything the curriculum wants to teach them.

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

The biggest lie of all: "it's not a matter of throwing money at it." Well, actually, it is.

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

It's like the charter schools movement here - in NY public schools, they're carving 'charter schools' out of the existing schools. Literally. Like, "clear out of this room, this one and the adjoining two are now a charter school." There's lots of empirical evidence about charter schools: they don't work. But parents think they do, and so do voters, so the administrations at least pretend they do - and they're a great way of smashing the teacher's union, which is what they really want. Someone recently said that American education policy is now the recognition that we're just not going to pay for schools that teach, and that every parent and student who has any investment in that idea - and enough of a fiscal head start in life actually to succeed - has already left the public schools. So anything spent on the schools is a waste. We have to clear away all the obstacles to paying as little as possible for prison-warehouses for the children of the working class, who, whatever their abilities, simply don't have the money ever to do anything in this life. Since nobody actually expects teachers to teach anymore, why do we need a teachers' union? Any thug would be fine standing up at the front of the room.

[terry-terrible.livejournal.com]

Literally. Like, "clear out of this room, this one and the adjoining two are now a charter school." There's lots of empirical evidence about charter schools: they don't work. But parents think they do, and so do voters, so the administrations at least pretend they do - and they're a great way of smashing the teacher's union, which is what they really want

I think it's also a strategy of not just destroying unions, but the system of public education for the poor in general. If you look what's going on with NCLB or "Race to the top" they're giving vouchers to parents in low performing schools and the ones who bother to get arrange for the vouchers and move their kid to a charter school are most likely going to be the most invested in their kid's education and correspondilty, statistics bare out that these kids with involved parents are likely to be the best performing students. So that empties out already low performing schools of their best performing students.

Then under NCLB or race to the top, these schools are given a mandate to "shape up or shut down", however it's hard to institiute a program of improvement when they've been emptied of their best students, so then they naturally stagnate or sink even lower, giving the district or the state the incentive to shut the whole school down. After a while what we'll have is a system of high-performing, well-funded (off of property taxes) and free suburban public schools and virtually no schools in poor areas. The poor kids who perform well or are lucky will get vouchers to private charter schools or transfers to suburban public schools while the people living in poor areas who dobn't qualify to the standards of a charter school will be left to rot with little or no recourse.

If you really think about it, it's a really brilliant plan to profit of the education of the poor and provide free education to an already privileged class of kids. It's too brilliant in my mind that it's a coincidence or accidental result.

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

It's funny - there's no actual empirical evidence that 'learning styles' exist in a way that can be usefully addressed in a school. It's an idea everyone thinks is completely established but it's just another ideological phantom.

Personally I think there are learning styles, but they're not dictated by the brains of the students, which are plastic - they're dictated by the subject matter, and what subjects can be taught in what kind of school is an ideological matter. I mean, who would argue that there's a 'non-tactile' or 'non-kinetic' way to learn to fix a car? Or paint a picture? Or bake a pie? But I'm not sure there is usefully non-discursive way to teach things like logic and mathematics.

What we can't seem to address is that not every kid is good at or will ever care about the same things. But despite our lip service to intellectual and cultural diversity, late capitalism is still an engine for absolute conformity - ever more so.

[sabotabby]

The biggest lie of all: "it's not a matter of throwing money at it." Well, actually, it is.

It is. Oddly enough, my school board is not ashamed of throwing money at some things. They are not educational things.

Union-bashing astounds me. Not being American, I can't imagine that the teachers' unions in the U.S. are that powerful. They're certainly not powerful enough to have overcome NCLB or the charter schools. I imagine they're the same kind of weaksauce business union that we have here, or worse. Hardly the big obstacle standing in the way of Great Public Education, but I suppose it's useful to have a scapegoat.

It's funny - there's no actual empirical evidence that 'learning styles' exist in a way that can be usefully addressed in a school. It's an idea everyone thinks is completely established but it's just another ideological phantom.

It's promoted as Scientific Fact. One of the things that routinely pissed me off about Educational Psychology was the idea that certain recent theories were laws of nature that we have always known about.

Personally I think there are learning styles, but they're not dictated by the brains of the students, which are plastic - they're dictated by the subject matter, and what subjects can be taught in what kind of school is an ideological matter. I mean, who would argue that there's a 'non-tactile' or 'non-kinetic' way to learn to fix a car? Or paint a picture? Or bake a pie? But I'm not sure there is usefully non-discursive way to teach things like logic and mathematics.

I agree. We are supposed to provide "differentiated learning," but this makes no sense at all in tech studies. Again, it's the generalized application of something with limited use to all students in all subject areas.

[kadath.livejournal.com]

It's funny - there's no actual empirical evidence that 'learning styles' exist in a way that can be usefully addressed in a school.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "learning style" in this context, but I know that if I have to get by entirely on listening, I lose out substantially in class. I need written or visual material in order to absorb information. Were you talking about something higher-level than that?

[lokilokust.livejournal.com]

ayup.

[shelestel.livejournal.com]

Very uncanadian, all this blasphemy. The way it should be is well known: "Remember, this is Canada. You'll still end up with A". This is exactly how I want my Canada to be. A paradise of lumberjacks with lumberjacks' theories. Please don't destroy this unique refuge.

[sabotabby]

Shouldn't you be reading about incest on the Prairies or some such?

[sabotabby]

Oh God, yeah.

[(Anonymous)]

Every time I go for PD lately, I want to quit teaching because there is so much buzzword BS that only seems to tell me that I'm not doing my job right and contradicts the truth of my teaching practice.

[sabotabby]

I loathe buzzwords. I used to do plain language workshops for city employees, and someone needs to do the same thing for education.

[ironed_orchid]

I think you're right about everything, especially 4.

[deanarae.livejournal.com]

Admittedly, I have not read the other comments, and admittedly, I am drunk... actually I haven't even finished reading the post yet, but have this to say:

I think that the argument is not that all children want to be lifelong learners, but that all children are naturally curious. They're not necessarily in it for the long haul, but I think that as children we are all naturally curious/learners. Well, maybe "all" is going too far, but I suspect it's the norm.

Ok. I'll finish reading your post and refill my glass and we'll see what happens.

[sabotabby]

I admittedly don't know many young children, but I remember there being not-particularly-curious children when I was growing up. Certainly, by the time they reach me, many are not remotely curious.

[deanarae.livejournal.com]

Yep. #4. I would give you money except I don't have any on accounta they don't pay me nothin.

[sabotabby]

Well, there's that. But I mean, everyone wants a better public education system. For free. It isn't going to happen.

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

I would qualify #1 with "parents affect their children." I think it's a huge, egregious fallacy for people to assume that only teachers have anything to do with what a child does in school. Aside from that, I'm gonna hush up, on accounta my secular-homeschooler background making me cranky about industrial education.


Well okay: #4 is also something I want to repeat to everyone, especially in California, which has its own education crisis. This education crisis is worsened by the "cut everything but the salaries of the highest-level administrators" policy.

[sabotabby]

It's unbelievable that parents with no interest in their children's education raise children with no interest in being educated.

California is a fucking disaster. So is New York, and that is the model of education that's being exported to Canada.

[bike4fish.livejournal.com]

I suspect one of the biggest factors affecting curiosity (and a number of other developmental areas) is how much parents read to younger children. I know that figuring out what the words on the page were for was one of the motivators for me to start reading. Of course, when I got to first grade, my mother was surprised when my report card said I had difficulty reading. My problem was that I couldn't read slowly enough to read out loud.

I'm not going to project my experience in the US on Canada, but my grade school teachers pretty much fell into one of three categories. 1) Those that liked to teach and whose priority was to get kids to learn. 2) Those who got a teaching degree because it was the only degree with low enough standards for them to graduate. 3) Those whose primary motivation in teaching seemed to be a need to have power over others, even if others were just a bunch of kids. I suspect most of the members of group 3 started out in group 2 - they generally seemed to be older. My 1st and 4th grade teachers were 3's, my 3rd and 5th grade teachers were 1's, and my 2nd grade teacher was a 2. In fact, (I believed so then and I do so now) I knew more science, geography, and English grammar than my second grade teacher did. While I was already on a path of curiosity that couldn't be stifled (it got me into trouble more often than not some years), I can only imagine that the terrible quality of teaching I encountered some years could have terrible effect on kids that weren't already self-motivated. So I do believe that there might be a number 5 - Not everyone with a teaching degree is fit to teach. The problem with trying to evaluate teacher performance is that evaluations focus on the wrong things, and when they aren't "objective", are used to punish teachers who do things differently that what the school administration wants - and often it seems that the best teachers wind up on the short end of that stick. I would at least like to see teachers tested for their knowledge of subject matter before they start teaching.