Why do we let the general public decide what should be "taught" in school?

An article caught my eye the other day which you can read here

  

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/09/how-alcohol-conquered-russia/279965/

It contained the following paragraph:

Ivan the Terrible encouraged his subjects to drink their last kopecks away in state-owned taverns to help pad the emperor’s purse. Before Mikhail Gorbachev rose to power in the 1980s, Soviet leaders welcomed alcohol sales as a source of state revenue and did not view heavy drinking as a significant social problem. In 2010, Russia’s finance minister, Aleksei L. Kudrin, explained that the best thing Russians can do to help, “the country’s flaccid national economy was to smoke and drink more, thereby paying more in taxes.”

Now this column is about education what could this have to do with education?

There is a cynicism in government that includes the idea that the people really aren’t that important. “So they die early, but at least they pay taxes.” This isn’t too far from “so they are stupid and can’t think clearly, but at least they pay taxes.”

Do most governments want their citizens to be stupid? Here is a link to article in the New York Times yesterday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/education/creationists-on-texas-panel-for-biology-textbooks.html?pagewanted=all

The headline of the article was: Creationists on Texas Panel for Biology Textbooks. In summary, a committee of people with a religious agenda is deciding how biology should be taught in Texas. 

In today’s Time magazine, we see the following:

http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/09/30/atheism-added-to-irish-school-curriculums/

The headline of this one is: Atheism Added to Irish School Curriculums A new lesson plan will teach 16,000 Irish schoolchildren about atheism, agnosticism and humanism.

I was reminded of the famous remark made by Mark Twain (about 100 years ago).   

“In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.”

Why do we let the general public decide what should be taught in school? The answer is because we really don’t care what they are taught. We also don’t care that they are taught. By this I mean that the verb “to teach,” when used in a school context, means to tell students what is true so they will believe it. What does it mean to teach atheism (in Ireland) for example? It means people will attempt to teach ideas that oppose Catholicism which is what dominates the schools there. I am sorry but did it ever cross anyone’s mind that both sides are wrong?

Schools should not “teach” anything. Why not? Because what we really mean by “teach” is “indoctrinate.” We want to tell students what to think. Little thought (but much lip service) is devoted to teaching them how to think. We want to “teach” students to be good citizens, to “teach” them about our history, to “teach” them math and science. These last ones are not exactly indoctrination. But what they actually are reminds me of the story I started with about drinking in Russia.

Math and science are meant to teach thinking (or so it is said). They could actually teach thinking of course, but when the scientific questions are given to you, and the right answers are taught to you, science ceases to be about observation, experimentation, hypothesis creation, and reasoning from evidence, and becomes memorization to get good scores on multiple choice tests. 

How does this relate to Russia’s drinking problem? Those who follow the rules and memorize everything they are told to memorize will probably turn out to be obedient tax paying citizens. It is all the same idea really.

Yesterday I was watching NFL football. The face of Sal Khan came on -- I don’t know how many times -- talking about videos that Bill Gates and now Bank of America are backing. Why do they back these small lectures that are meant to get the current high school curriculum banged into student’s heads? Why national TV ads? Because those in power want everyone to do what they say, memorize what they say to memorize, and avoid thinking hard about real issues. Cutely done math tutorials are the latest thinking in how technology can fix education. No one thinks about changing a curriculum that was written centuries ago.

You can’t fix something that doesn’t want to be fixed. You can help those who have bought into the system do math better and aid their chances of getting into Harvard. But what about all the rest of the people? As long as they shut up and pay taxes, Bill Gates, Sal Khan, and now Bank of America, will be happy. No one really cares about the average Joe (or Ivan.) 

They never have.

why educate the elite? a lesson from yale and george bush while hanging out in Spain

I have been doing press conferences lately on behalf of our new XTOL Europe which is offering our learn by doing courses. You get some strange questions whenever you talk to the press, but today I got one that was not only odd but set me thinking about something new. In Spain, which is where I am as I write this, there has been a lot written about me, so reporters come armed with what they read about me in some other press coverage. The question that set me off was this:

“You say school was designed to educate the elite classes and you don’t care about them. Why don’t you care about educating the elite?”

Gee, I had never thought about it that way. I have been  saying that Harvard, Yale etc can get away with letting people major in History, English, and Classics etc., because historically their graduates were the sons of the rich and ruling class and no one expected them to get a job. While that is no exactly true today, believe me Yale and Harvard haven’t changed that much. But truly I have never been concerned with changing those institutions. I loved my time at Yale, and kids don’t exactly come away ruined from spending four years there. My complaint has always been that all the other universities have copied this elitist model. In fact, in Spain, one hears constantly about the value of studying literature in a society with massive unemployment amongst youth precisely because so many students have studied relatively useless subjects.

I don’t worry about the education of the elite classes. I worry about average Joe who can’t think clearly and whose skills have not been enhanced by school.

But this question made me think about the elites. What should we be teaching them? Harvard and Yale keep graduating future presidents, supreme court justices, governors, and business leaders. What should we be teaching them?

Amazingly, literature etc still doesn’t come to mind. Yes, of course, we would like our President to not say “who” when Dickens is mentioned and not say “what” when the Peloponnesian War is mentioned.

But what should we be teaching them? Oddly, George Bush, famous Yale graduate, come to mind (pick either one here.) Was our problem with these men that they weren’t well versed in the classics? 

Here is a thought. Neither seems to know much about average Joe’s concerns, what it was like to work for a living, what the average schoolroom is like, or for that matter how the economy works or how to govern.

A little more knowledge of history wouldn’t have hurt either, I have to admit. But what history should they have known? I would have hoped they might have known more about Arab society or the history of Iraq or Afghanistan. Why do I feel confident that they did not study the MIddle East at Yale?

I used to be on US Army’s subcommittee on distance education. As part of that I had the occasion to attend the Army War College for a couple of days. I was with a group of majors and colonels who were learning about the history of Islamic revolution. I doubt that the Bushes took that course at Yale either.

So, yes I am worried about the education of elites. I think they should learn how the other half lives (maybe by living with them).  I think they should learn how to govern (maybe by running a smaller country first -- I am joking -- sort of). I think they should learn real economics and how to diagnose a problem and how to say things that are more than sound bites. They should learn how to lie less, and how to manage on less.

I realize this will never happen, but I think it's fun to think about. The French by the way, do have a school for training future political leaders, but I get the idea it hasn’t worked out that well.

Want to give a back to school message to students? Try this one

In the last week or so, many people have been looking at my post entitled “back to school message to high school student who hate high school.” Curiously, it is clear that most of these are principals and teachers who were preparing a “back to school message” for the first day of school for the students. My post is not useful for these speech givers since it is about why the subjects students are learning are out of date and irrelevant. Google just finds “back to school message” and offers them my post no matter what else they may actually asked.

That having been said, I propose here a back to school message that teachers and principals can give to returning students. One that actually is in tune with the reality of our times. Here it is:

Welcome back students. I know that most of you wish you were still on summer vacation and that very few of you are happy to be back attending classes (although you may be happy to be back to the social and athletic aspects of school.) But here you are and there is nothing any of you can do about it. The government requires that you sit here, bored or not.

That having been said, what you should you be thinking about now that you are back? Whether you want to think about it or not, there will be lots of tests. The testing companies have sold the government on the importance of testing, so this year there will be more tests than last year.

But you should not be particularly worried about these tests. Why not? Because they don’t matter. Oh, they matter to the teachers whose salaries may depend on them, and they matter to the principal whose job may depend on them, and they matter to the school boards who will close, open, repair, and otherwise obsess about which schools are doing better than which other schools. And they matter to parents who don’t understand what the testing is all about but who are sure they want their kids in the best schools (with the best average test scores) and, of course they want their kids to have the best test scores (so they can brag to others about it.) 

But test scores don’t really matter at all to you. Why not? Here is why:

1. Nothing bad happens to you if you get bad scores. Oh people may say stuff to make you feel bad, but nothing bad will happen to you in any way.
2. Something bad does happen if you obsess on getting good test scores. You will spend time memorizing stuff that will never matter to you and you will be good at test taking, but you will not get any better at learning, thinking, creativity, or having fun.
3. No matter what, you will go to college. (If you want to.) There are 4000 colleges in the U.S. Most of them will take anyone who applies.
4. You may not get into the special school that takes only kids who have great test scores, but think about what those schools are like: full of kids who study all day and do exactly what they are told to do in order to get ahead. That’s not who you want to hang out with.

So what should you do this year? Most of all have fun. Follow your passions whether those are in school subjects or things that have nothing to do with school. Make friends. Have a social life. Learn to communicate better. Learn to get along with people better. And, learn to think better. Challenge yourself with things that are difficult to do and try try again to accomplish them.

Oh, and stay off the phone. There isn’t much to be learned from staring at someone else’s party pictures.

Measurement in pre-school? Measure this! Ten things to measure

 Testing in pre-school? I thought pre-school existed so kids could have fun in a safe place while their parents did something other than watch over them.  I guess I was wrong.

Last week I had a conversation with my 4 year old granddaughter in which she told me she knew the names of all the planets and proceeded to name most of them. I asked her what a planet was. She had no idea. I asked her older brother. He said they were like big rocks.

Does anyone ever wonder about all this? Must we continue ramming facts down kid’s throats so that the people who make tests can get rich?

Below is a piece from the Washington Post that appeared today:

The (D.C.) board set out to provide parents with a clearer picture of how charter schools compare with one another. It also wants to provide educators with a way to measure progress toward the goal of better preparing children for school, a goal that led city leaders to make a historic investment in universal preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds.

So we will test in preschool now? So more testing companies can get even richer. Last I looked there was $300 million being spent on simply grading tests in Florida alone.

And now preschool? Aren’t the testing companies rich enough? 

And what is all this preparation they talk about supposed to be for? If you listen carefully it is really about preparing kids for college. At 4?

When I talk about education one on one with a professional adult, I often start by saying: I don’t know where you went to college or graduate school or what you studied, but let me make a guess: none of what you do every day in your professional or personal life you learned in school. I have never heard anyone respond with anything stronger than “well maybe a little bit.”

Let’s be clear about what schools are for. Schools are not for education. We have deluded ourselves so greatly with this myth that we actually think we are measuring something about how well it is working.

You want something to measure? Measure what schools really do:

1. Is my kid being kept safe so I can work (or play)?
2. Is my kid learning to control his impulses and sit still for long periods of time?
3. Is my my kid being fed lunch?
4. Is my kid being properly indoctrinated to be a model citizen who can say why the US is a great country?
5. Can my kid defend himself from the bullies?
6. Does my kid have the right clothing so that other kids won’t make fun of him?
7. Is my kid being taught enough meaningless stuff to memorize so that he doesn’t look foolish when asked who George Washington or Abraham Lincoln was?
8. Are they making sure that my kid is really afraid to express an outlandish thought that no one he knows agrees with?
9. Are they making sure that if there is something my kid really wants to do that it will be designated an "after school activity?"
10. Are they making sure that my kid believes that only losers don’t go to college?

I suggest we start admitting that these are the real purposes of preschool or any school. Maybe we should start measuring schools on how well they do at teaching them.

Why not use the principles of prison reform to help the schools?

Last week I met a man who was interested in investing millions of dollars in fixing education. I was happy to meet with him. But, within minutes it became clear that his idea of fixing education and mine were very different.

This man was concerned with making the system more efficient. He had no concerns about making school fun, interesting, useful in later life, offering more choices, forcing fewer requirements and getting rid of tests. No, quite the opposite. He wanted to test everyone and everything all the time. He wanted to use computers to efficiently deliver tests, grade test, evaluate teachers, deliver materials, and so on. 

Here is a summary of what he was discussing:

1. As with any government program, the public school system must be transparent and include performance measures that hold it accountable for its results.

2. Colleges, along with the public and taxpayers, are among the key “consumers” of the school system; their interests should be prioritized when determining appropriate education goals.

3. The education system should emphasize personal responsibility, work, following the rules, and remediation while supervising students.

4. An education system works to reform underperforming teachers and students and put students on the right path.  

5. Because incentives affect human behavior, policies for both students and teachers must align incentives with the goals of economic growth, good citizenship, increased  college attendance, and cost-effectiveness, thereby moving from a system that grows when it fails to one that rewards results. 

6.School reform should not be used to grow government and undermine economic freedom.

He never actually said any of this. He reminded me so much of someone who was interested in running an efficient prison. I looked up “prison reform principles” and  adapted what a set of prominent conservatives have written on the subject.The original can be found here:

http://www.rightoncrime.com/the-conservative-case-for-reform/statement-of-principles/

I think school reform and prison reform have a lot in common. As long as we think of schools as a kind of prison, where students and teachers do what they are told, when they are told, with no freedom at all and constant assessment, maybe we should should adopt prison reform ideas wholesale and simply forget about caring about children or helping them think clearly. No one wants a prisoner to think after all.

Faculty putting their existing courses on line is a bad idea: kind of like filming a play to make a movie

Faculty in many universities are now attempting to build on line courses. When many people want to do something, businesses rush in with ways to help them. Unfortunately, all the authoring tools being offered to faculty have the same thing in common. They are trying to take an existing university course and put it on line.

What is wrong with that?

It assumes that the courses that we offer currently in universities exist because education and learning naturally take place in one particular way: with lectures, with classrooms, with tests, with texts to read and sometimes with group discussions of material. So it is no surprise that authoring tools attempt to allow faculty to put all these elements into their on line course.

But, step back for a moment and ask four questions:

1. is that how YOU learn on a day to day basis? Do you attend a class or a lecture every time you want to know something. Thinking back to college, what did you actually learn to do by listening to lectures vs. by applying knowledge and skills to real problems?
2. should taking courses and passing tests be what defines a successful student? Are the most ultimately successful students those who have gone to lots of classes and passed lots of tests?
3. wouldn't we all design education differently if we didn’t have so many students in a class and a pre-defined set of material to cover?
4. isn’t the private mentoring model, (one where students are working on something the professor is there to help, and what the student has actually produced is what needs to be evaluated) what faculty really believe in? Isn’t this the sort of apprenticeship by which faculty train their advanced graduate students (and by which you were trained)?

On line courses should not be replicating existing courses which were meant to handle large numbers and not meant to nurture students as they actually produce something and naturally learn by doing. 

Socratic Arts has produced many on line full length masters degrees and even more short courses for various universities and corporations. These courses are always experiential in nature. They do not contain lectures or tests. However, they do require frequent deliverables from the students, and they emphasize teaching in the form of performance support provided by the course and mentoring provided, as needed, by the instructor to help a student to learn knowledge and skills as they are relevant to what he or she is doing.

So, we have begun to build a tool meant to enable subject matter experts to build on line experiential course directly or to enable a course developer to work with a subject matter expert to produce such a course. 

The idea behind our Story-Centered Curriculum approach to course developmnet is that any good curriculum should tell a story. That story should be one in which the student plays one or more roles. Those roles should be roles that normally come up in such a story. The curriculum is intended to teach the student how to do something. The roles should be ones that the graduate of such a program might actually do in real life.

Stories have been at the center of human consciousness for a long time. People tell stories, and the stories they tell shape who they are. People hear stories and remember those that resonate deeply with them. And, people live stories. The stories they live become part of them in a deep way. While we may easily forget everything about a course we took in college, we can hardly forget the roles we have played in real life experiences, especially when those roles went on for a long time and had emotional impact on us. The central argument here is that good education requires good stories but not solely stories that one has been told, however. A good education relies upon the creation of stories in the mind of the student. This means that there must be an experience to tell a story about, that that experience must take a significant amount of time and effort, and that that experience must include others. 

Students do not work alone in an SCC. They work with others who are playing roles the student will have to deal with in later life, and that the roles the student plays in the stories must relate to the future roles that the student might play in real life.

An SCC is made up of a set of simulated activities that compose the bulk of the work done by the student, and a series of events that occasionally interrupt or augment those activities.

Our new learning by doing authoring tool encompasses a set of steps that allow a course author to create an SCC. The first question is what a student should be able to do at the end of the course. The end goal might be the production of a computer program to do something specific, the design of an airplane, a financial analysis, a marketing plan, a contract with a business, a treatment plan for a patient, etc. The author knows what constitutes success, in terms of the project of achieving that goal, and builds the SCC such that it will help the students complete that project successfully. Success is defined as the teacher seeing students doing something from a realistic starting point with no more help than they'd get in real life. That means repetition (because the first time or two they might get a lot of help), critiquing (to see what's happening), and reflection on the problem-solving experience. An SCC is not about one-shot exposure to problems. 

For some fields this idea of a final work product is easy enough to imagine and sometimes even common. In others it is unusual and creative. (For example, we developed a course in art history in which the students’ work product was an analysis of whether a painting attributed to Rembrandt is authentic or a forgery.)

The design of a story-centered curriculum starts with the determination of what the story will be. Then, within the context of that story, faculty decide upon the sequence of tasks necessary to achieve the overarching goal and the deliverables corresponding to each task. The faculty must decide what must be learned just-in-time, when to provide support via performance support materials, and when to provide it via live mentoring.  The faculty must  also insert obstacles that are likely to cause the student to fail and, thus, to learn from the failure.  Finally, the faculty author must determine not only the storyline, but also the denouement: that moment when the student knows he has won.

In a classroom teaching means information transfer. In a mentored SCC, teaching means just in time help, either by the on line course itself by students helping each other, or by the faculty meeting with students (on line) to re-direct them when they are lost.

The tool itself therefore:  

1. helps the author define a module structure with scenarios, tasks, deliverables, and learning resources, but not lectures, quizzes, and papers 
2. helps the author build  an interview-based guide with examples that helps authors think about what those pieces should look like
3. helps the author determine the deliverables to be produced by the student
4. helps determine the story that provides the context for those deliverables
5. helps determine sub tasks on the way to producing deliverable
6. helps the author create fictional documents that start the work
7. helps the author provide just in time help in the form of video experts
8. helps the author provide just in time help from existing web sites
9. helps the author provide just in time help in the form of a general plan of attack

Embedded in the tool are examples of all of these kinds of things, so that the author can use them as a guide as to what to create in the new course.

The tool itself helps the author to define an appropriate story of professional practice, including

1. a set of top-level goals and problems
2. a sequence of tasks necessary to achieve the goals and solve the problems
3. a set of prioritized performance objectives for each task. 

With the story defined, the tool then helps the author create the many detailed components of the course, including

1. fictional documents for the course as a whole and for individual tasks
2. fictional messages assigning tasks, in the form of emails or video scripts
3. step-by-step guides for each task, with just enough detail to keep students on track
4. links and references to appropriate learning resources, both online and physical
5. embedded expert tips to address likely student mistakes at each step, in the form of texts or video scripts
6. checklists to enable students to self-check their task deliverables before submission
7. reflection questions for students to consider at the end of each task and of the course as a whole.

The tool itself provides a step-by-step guide for creating a Story-Centered Curriculum, expert tips for each step, a range of examples of all course components, and checklists for self-checking the completeness and quality of course components. Course content is created via “what you see is what you get” editing. The tool is built on top of a modern content management system that provides version control for multi-author teams and also manages the workflow of course development, quality assurance review, and deployment.

(I had help writing this outrage -- ray bareiss, chris riesbeck and hana schank all contributed(

Truth and The Internet: critical thinking vs editing

  

In the old days it was easy to find the truth. Truth was taught in every religious institution. Typically one was sent there as a child and one learned the truth. Over time, truth was to be found in school, later in books, still later on television, and today, truth is to be found on the internet.

Of course there is a problem with this conception of truth. Religions tend to get people when they are young and instill in them truth they may never question. Schools do the same. The truths given out by schools aren’t typically very harmful. Memorizing the quadratic formula doesn’t actually harm anyone. Believing Abraham Lincoln was the greatest president in U.S. History, doesn’t do much harm either.

When I was on the Board of Editors of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, I learned that that board  “knew the truth.” They worked hard to ensure that their volume of books held the truth, which I think it probably did more or less. They also wanted to have just the right amount of truth. For example, they had no interest in say, doubling the size of information contained within the set of books. You might have thought this was an economic issue, but it really wasn’t. The editors had a sense that literature say, was more important than say computer science, and space was allotted accordingly.

What I learned from being on that board was that the board members performed a real service: vetting out a great deal of unimportant (in their minds) stuff also made sure what was in those volumes was correct (at least as far as they could tell.)

I told the Britannica people that they would be gone soon enough, and of course they now are. What I envisioned in their place has never happened however. I would like to see a board of editors for the internet.

Now I know this is a heresy of some sort. The freedom to say whatever you want on the internet is sacrosanct. No one is crying out to stop people from posting misinformation.

But, and this is an important but, as long as the schools don’t change, the internet may have to. As long as we teach young people to memorize and pass multiple choice tests, and fail to teach them how to know if what they are being told is true, then we will have trouble. 

One of two things has to happen. Either people need to be taught to reason critically, to ask hard questions, to be able to discern if what they have just heard on TV or read on the internet is true, or we had better fix the internet.

How to fix it, is, of course, the question.