Makeovers run out of gas eventually. In this post I want to cover some education history as a basis for considering whether we should continue efforts to “remodel” or whether it would be best to “demolish and rebuild” our education system. The first question to ask is, will a remodel suffice in the future? To answer that we must look carefully at the roots of our current education system and judge whether “tweaks” to the edifice built in the early twentieth century will “fix” the problems adequately.
The most succinct discussion of our education history I have found is in David Klein’s, A Brief History of American K-12 Mathematics Education in the 20th Century. (2003) If interested the same information is discussed in many other places. I am using the Klein work as it is most comprehensive in the shortest form. While Klein’s focus is on math, the same problems are there for other subjects as well.
“With roots going back to Jean Jacques Rousseau and with the guidance of John Dewey, progressive education has dominated American schools since the early years of the 20th century. That is not to say that progressive education has gone unchallenged. Challenges increased in intensity starting in the 1950s, waxed and waned, and in the 1990s gained unprecedented strength. A consequence of the domination of progressivism during the first half of the 20th century was a predictable and remarkably steady decrease of academic content in public schools. “
“Reflecting mainstream views of progressive education, Kilpatrick [Dewey protégé and Columbia Teacher’s College professor] rejected the notion that the study of mathematics contributed to mental discipline. His view was that subjects should be taught to students based on their direct practical value, or if students independently wanted to learn those subjects. This point of view toward education comported well with the pedagogical methods endorsed by progressive education. Limiting education primarily to utilitarian skills sharply limited academic content, and this helped to justify the slow pace of student centered, discovery learning, the centerpiece of progressivism. Kilpatrick proposed that the study of algebra and geometry in high school be discontinued ‘except as an intellectual luxury.’ According to Kilpatrick, mathematics is ‘harmful rather than helpful to the kind of thinking necessary for ordinary living.’"
“In the 1930s the education journals, textbooks, and courses for administrators and teachers advocated the major themes of progressivism. The school curriculum would be determined by the needs and interests of children, as determined by professional educators, and not by academic subjects. It became a cliché in the 1930s, just as in the 1990s, for educators to say, "We teach children, not subject matter." The Activity Movement of the 1930s promoted the integration of subjects in elementary school, and argued against separate instruction in mathematics and other subjects.
“’...those who make up the staffs of the schools and colleges of education, and the administrators and teachers whom they train to run the system, have a truly amazing uniformity of opinion regarding the aims, the content, and the methods of education. They constitute a cohesive body of believers with a clearly formulated set of dogmas and doctrines, and they are perpetuating the faith by seeing to it through state laws and the rules of state departments of education, that only those teachers and administrators are certified who have been trained in the correct dogma.’ From Madly They Teach, Mortimer Smith.”
“One of the signal events of 1999 was the release of Liping Ma's book, Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics. Ma compared answers to elementary school math questions by 23 U.S. elementary school teachers to those by 72 Chinese elementary school math teachers. Of the U.S. teachers, 12 were participating in an NSF sponsored program whose "goal was to prepare excellent classroom mathematics teachers to be in-service leaders in their own school districts or regions." The remaining U.S. teachers were interns, each with one year experience teaching. The interns were to receive Masters Degrees at the end of the summer during which interviews took place. By contrast, most Chinese teachers had only 11 or 12 years of formal education, completing only the ninth grade in high school followed by two or three years of normal school. In spite of their fewer years of formal education, the Chinese teachers demonstrated much greater understanding of fundamental mathematics than did their U.S. counterparts. Ma masterfully explained the interrelationships of pedagogy and content at the elementary school level and drew important lessons from her investigations.”
While Klein’s article is (47) 8.5X11 pages long I think the quotes above give you the picture. The progressive principles were put in place and are still strongly defended by educators. They have built the defensive walls strongly and that is what has led to a “fiefdom” mentality; defensive, delusional, insular and inbred. I call it the Band-Aid curtain because so many Band-Aids have been applied over the decades to try to improve education performance that you can’t see the unyielding fortifications underneath. The conclusion is clear, until the fiefdom walls are breached so that truth and reality can enter, no positive change can happen. The educators have been kept in the dark for over a century and protected by the fiefdom walls (and the dogma mentioned in the Madly They Teach quote) from having to face the truth of their performance. The fiefdom is an immovable entity with the only motivation for strong action being “is our place at the public trough safe or not.”
Thus, the important question to consider is “will the current progressive design of our education system prepare our children for the intensifying global meritocracy they face in futures where content knowledge is vital?” Many commentators have observed that the motivation of the progressives in their education design was to “socialize” children not to really teach them subject matter. My conclusion is that the lack of content taught by the current system puts our kids far behind their best global competition. The fact that Liping Ma found the Chinese elementary math teachers much more competent in math foundational knowledge even though they had much less “education” than the American participants in her study is telling. The American teachers were selected from the best to be in a program to prepare to become in service leaders for their schools in math education and from masters candidates who would receive their degrees at the end of the summer when the interviews took place. This reinforces the conclusion that the discovery learning principles put in place by the progressives prevent in-depth understanding of subjects. This lack of ability to train effective content teachers inevitably results in students who will not learn the foundational concepts they need to succeed at higher and higher levels of education.
The answer to the question of renovate (more Band-Aids) or demolish and rebuild is to rebuild. The renovate approach has been tried without success for many decades now and has not been successful. Any improvements have come at a glacial pace while our competitors are moving swiftly to improve their educational performance. Thus we are falling farther and farther behind.
Now, as to the design of the new education edifice, what should it look like? I don’t have all of the answers there but do have definite opinions on some of the elements. I would like to solicit input from readers via the blog comment facility to get ideas you have regarding an optimum design for the 21st century and beyond. This is what is called a "clean sheet of paper" exercise. If we had no education system now but needed one, how would we design a new one. An example might be technology use. Would it differ from our usage in the current system? These could take both positive and negative form. That is, it should or should not include ___________. I am looking forward to your ideas.
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