I wrote a blog post not long ago about my beliefs on education titled, My Learning Manifesto (Tompkins, 2020). I am revisiting the topic in this post because I feel it’s important to discuss the good and bad parts of our current educational system, and possible ways to fix or enhance these issues, to complete my manifesto.
In my manifesto I stated that I believed:
students need to engage with math and with their peers
math education should include real-world projects for the students so they can find why math is important to them
students need to be made aware of the benefits of a growth mindset
every student needs access to a digital learning device and the internet.
Education has come a long way in the past 100 years, but still has strong roots in the educational system popularized during the industrial age (Harapnuik, Thibodeaux, & Cummings, 2018). This educational system could best be described as a factory model of education. Children go to school and are taught what they are told they need to be taught; though the teaching is mostly lecturing from the front of the class to a group of uninterested students. It is a system that is both painful for the learner and the teacher. Teachers want their students to want to learn, and students want to learn something of interest to them.
So how can we solve this issue? Dewey suggested that students learn best when they can work on real-world problems that relate to them. (Dewey,1916, 1938; Harapnuik, Thibodeaux, & Cummings, 2018) Our current educational model isn’t set up to teach students in this manner. The current system is built to produce workers who all have the same basic level of education so they can all fill the same kinds of jobs. The jobs of the future will demand different types of education.
I do agree that some students benefit from the current style of education. They are the students who love to learn anything. They could almost function without a teacher using only the internet. They are already driven to learn whatever they are presented. Other students need to understand their why. As I pointed out in my Learning manifesto video, I didn’t truly enjoy learning until I found why education was important to me. Then I found my way through topics as I needed to learn them.
There are potential problems with directing students to learn based on their why:
Learners need experiences to discover their why. Without a strong foundation in the possibilities of the world, how can a young person know what they are interested in? I didn’t truly find what I was interested in until I was in my 20’s. It would be difficult to structure learning around their interests when they don’t know what their interests are. And, if we base their learning off what they’re interested in when they are 5, and they lose interest in the topic, will they lose interest in learning?
Once a student has found their why and their learning is structured around issues important to them, how do we ensure there are no gaps in their learning. By this I mean that if a student is interested in cars, spends their entire adolescence becoming an expert at all things related to automobiles, what happens when they aren’t in school but find they want to open their own shop. They need business training; they need to have a good command of the language and know how to write proposals and letters to get investors. Our current system, while flawed, does offer a rounded education where students get a little of every core topic.
To combine these observations about education with my beliefs, I think a blended model of education could be a possible solution; a model where some classroom time still exists for core skills needed in society, but where the learning is progressively more directed as students discover their why.
When students are young, I feel they should play more, and spend more time experiencing the world so they can find something that drives them to learn early in life. During this time, they could learn core subjects important to all learners, such as simple math and language skills. I think that as they find what drives them to learn they should spend more time in a maker-space type of environment where their interest directs their learning, but still have time with basic skill building in math and language. There is amazing potential for these core skills to overlap with their larger field of learning.
These ideas fall in line with my beliefs in that in a maker-space environment, students would be able to engage with their peers to discuss real world projects they are working on. They would have access to the internet to research their issues and enhance their learning, and a teacher/mentor who would preach the benefits of the growth mindset when they experience setbacks.
Restructuring education in this way can also solve issues on the horizon of not having skilled workers for the inventions of the future. Right now, education is structured as a pipeline to college. Not every student needs or wants to go to college. We will need people who are experts at maintaining devices we haven’t even conceived of yet. And taking a Shakespeare class to round out the 9 hours of literature needed to graduate with a B.S. will not necessarily do anything to enhance this person’s worth or skills.
These changes to our educational system would require a massive undertaking to convince politicians, educators, and those in the business of making money off the current system that it would be t their benefit. Changing the minds of politicians requires changing the minds of their constituents and donors. Changing the minds of those in the business of making money off education means helping them find a way to make money in a new system. And changing the minds of educators is a matter of educating them how the change is possible and how it can help their learners. It is possible to make these changes though. If we all make little changes in our system now, we can work toward a better way to educate our students.
References:
Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education: An introduction to philosophy of education. New York, NY: Macmillan.
Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York: Macmillan
Harapnuik, D., Thibodeaux, T., & Cummings, C. (2018). COVA. Creative Commons License. Retrieved December 15, 2020, from http://www.harapnuik.org/?page_id=7291
Tompkins, R. (2020). My Learning Manifesto [Web log post]. Retrieved December 15, 2020, from https://rtompkins7.wixsite.com/eportfolio/post/my-learning-manifesto
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