Education Rant
“Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire” W.B. Yeats
Excuse the rant but I am outraged by the state of the U.S. education system. We have let the pilot light go out and we are failing our youth. It is time to move beyond public policy debates and institutional rugby scrums to try new solutions. What we are doing now isn’t working and far too much of the federal stimulus investment is being spent to sustain the current system.
A report last year from the nonprofit network America’s Promise Alliance showed that 1.2 million students drop out of high school each year. Only about half of the students served by school systems in the nation’s 50 largest cities graduate from high school. The U.S. public education system, especially in the country’s urban centers, must be transformed.
Only about 40% of the U.S. adult population earns a college degree. That may have been fine in the 20th century when an industrial economy supplied good jobs to those without post-secondary education. It is not fine today when a post-secondary credential is a necessity for a good job.
Our education system was built for the 20th century.
Everyone loves to point fingers at the other players in the system as the cause of the problem. Observing our education system today is like watching an intense rugby scrum that is moving in slow motion hoping the ball will pop out. Finger pointing and incessant public policy debates galore. We love to admire the problems: It’s the unions that are getting in the way. Teachers are resisting change in the classroom. Administrators don’t understand what is going on in the classroom. Parents are not engaged. Public policy makers can’t make up their minds. If only private sector companies were more engaged. Students are unruly, undisciplined, and disrespectful. Everyone is blamed and nothing changes.
The simple idea of “lighting a fire” expressed in Yeat’s quote says it all for me. Teaching is an important means to an end. Creating passionate life long learners is the objective of education. Content, subjects, jobs and requirements, will all change over time. The pace of change is accelerating and the half-life for assumptions and usable knowledge is decreasing. It has become a life long challenge to stay relevant. The only thing that is sustainable is a fire inside to keep learning
The objective of education is to light a fire for learning in every single youth. When the pilot light is on, everything else is possible. For starters, lets recognize that individuals have different learning styles. One-size industrial education models are not working and must be transformed. We have the enabling technology available to us today to create and scale an education system that provides access to killer content and experiential learning opportunities tailored to individual learning styles for every student. It is time to demonstrate that we can and will change our education system. Our country’s youth is waiting.
I am excited to be part of the Business Innovation Factory (BIF) community focused on real world experimentation for new education systems and solutions. In BIF’s Student Experience Lab we are bringing the voice of the student into the education innovation conversation and creating a network of innovators motivated to explore new system solutions. Join the conversation. The water is fine.
Lets reignite the pilot light and demonstrate that there is a better way to light a fire for learning in every youth.
yay.
I hope you’ll pardon my jumping in here right off the bat, but this is one of my soapboxes. I’m the daughter of a school teacher; I have most of a masters in education and I homeschool my children (12 and 15).
Our educational system was built for the 19th century … e.g. when it’s graduates were expected to take jobs in factories and perhaps offices or more likely, agriculture. It has paid lip service alone to innovations of the 20th century and cannot keep up at all with the 21st century; hence one of the primary reasons I homeschool my children. The other being that I want my children to learn how to learn (ignite the fire) rather than stuff them full of facts and call it successful.
Our educational system must not merely be transformed, it must be destroyed and rebuilt. The edifice which is in place now serves the masters and not the students. We need to find what children are interested in and let them learn from that. Allow more growth and investigation to arise from their innate curiousity … this might make things more difficult for the teachers, but then the school doesn’t exist for them.
“Learning can only happen when a child is interested. If he’s not
interested it’s like throwing marshmallows at his head and calling it eating.” - Barbara Lamping
“Creating passionate life long learners is the objective of education.”
I agree - however, of those within the identifiable educational community, how many understand that is an objective?
I believe most people are already life-long learners, however the focusing, discipline, guidance, and personal mentorship of critical leadership is what’s missing. For instance, kids learn a ton on the Internet, but their practical experience doesn’t always translate, and realistically their content communities become isolated, complete with languages, customs and frames of reference. While many have talked about diversity, what’s actually critical to outstanding educational achievement is unity.
Uniting people into a single common vision still remains the most sought after, and valued skill, while being a person of outstanding integrity remains the most desired of personality characteristics.
These things can be learned, but it’s not classroom work. And the truth is, when it comes to teaching these things, the less technology, and more personal mentoring time, the better.
If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend watching the Bill Gates talk at TED on the research his foundation has done on what makes a good teacher. Another good chunk of research/experience is the book “The Trouble With Boys” Good stuff, I’m glad to see you taking on this effort.
Saul,
As always you share a thought-provoking and a dead-accurate perspective. I wonder about the challenge for us in corporate learning… what we need to do to create passionate life-long adult learners? (Since they don’t leave the education system feeling that way!) Instead, I feel like we ignore that and instead focus on what we need them to learn. Imaging the change resilience and performance lift we could get if we turned on that ‘pilot light’ within the souls in corporate-land.
@AmandaFenton
My brothers and sisters in bringing down the current educational system, absolutely designed for the 19th century (as Sonja notes),
Amen! I just returned from the largest alternative educators conference in the country, and these good folks, democratic schoolers, homeschoolers, free schoolers, http://www.educationrevolution.org/aboutus.html are well worth checking out. Those of us involved in this work need to join together to create political pressure on those in Washington.
Thank you for this wonderful post.
Kirsten Olson, author of Wounded By School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up To Old School Culture (Teachers College Press 2009)
This really resonates with me: “Creating passionate life long learners is the objective of education. ” So true. And the fact that we continue to use educational models that were created for a totally different social reality is nothing short of a true failure. As educators and as a society, it is important that we find ways to continue observing the relevance of what we teach, how we teach, who we teach. When kids reach their teenage years, we should be seeing them want to actively change the world. It is their time. If we see them feeling powerless, we are surely failing them!
This is a great conversation, it has been going on for a long time…how we we go from talking to action? Where do we start? Now that our country is on the high stakes testing - data crunching bandwagon how can we move towards creating life long learners? So many youth have succeeded despite the system, and the system has failed about the same number. How can we work together for change?
In today’s OnPoint conversation about re-imagining higher education (http://www.onpointradio.org/) several points were made about the deficiencies in k-12 as an entryway to college I apologize if this sounds off topic, but I believe that it’s worth re-examining the whole concept of k-12 as a non-profit entity. I’ve written a short piece about this (http://www.kairostcheck.com/2009/06/12/idea-of-the-day-how-to-fix-k-12-funding/) and would welcome feedback.
Meanwhile, the BIF looks great but it too seems oriented toward improving post-secondary education. Where’s the emphasis on earlier grades going to come from?