On Robert Epstein’s “Let’s Abolish High School.” Part Two
In his EDWeek article, “Lets Abolish High School,” Robert Epstein lists four “fatal legacies” from the past.
They are:
1) The school system by and large does not take into account the child’s readiness to learn. Whereas every piece of steel is “ready” to become a fender not every child is ready to read.
2) The mass productive techniques of the factory have given us mass education. Whereas effective learning—learning that benefits all students—is necessarily individualized and self-paced.
3) The schools would cram learning into the first two decades of a child’s life. Whereas we know that real learning, or education, is a life-long process.
4) Schooling is compulsory in most states up until age 16. Two more years, up until age 18, is usually enough to obtain a high school diploma. But how much time one spends in school or other learning situation ought to be directly proportional to the time needed to acquire the desired skills and knowledge. It’s not of course. There is in fact little direct relationship between the time spent in school and the competencies acquired thereby. Witness the highschool senior who has studied French or Spanish for four years.
I have just a couple of things to say about all this.
First, as Epstein points out, effective learning has to be individualized and self-paced. Furthermore, the teachers, as well as the students as they get older, know this. But they do nothing. Epstein says that unacknowledged awareness is the “elephant in the classroom.” A big object that you pretend is not there.
Epstein might very well have said that the other three “fatal legacies” are no less “elephants,” or “bodies” that occupy most of the learning space, but are never directly confronted by the teacher and students, leaving thereby little or no space for real learning to take place.
When one looks at our educational system, oblivious to these “legacies,” it does seem incredible, doesn’t it, that our schools go about their business as if the readiness, or the motivation and interest of the learner were not all important, as if learning could be anything but “individualized and self-paced,” as if one’s learning were limited to one’s time in school, and as if time in school (“she has perfect attendance,") rather than acquisition of competencies were the best measure of school success.
Second, what ever happened to competency based learning? Epstein tells us that a 1852 Massachusetts law required that all young people between the ages of 8 and 14 attend school three months a year—unless they could demonstrate that they already knew the material; in other words, the law was competency-based.
Boy, have we come a long way from that! Why so? Growth in student competencies are what all reforms would bring about. The failure of all reforms to do this is perhaps their failure to recognize increased competency as the true goal of their efforts, substituting for the acquisition of competency such things as school choice, a longer school day, national standards, better teacher training, etc. as the principal ends of school reform. They’re not.
What typically does the teacher now do when she sees that her 25 different students are approaching the day’s lesson from 25 different perspectives? There will be those who already understand, have even mastered the lesson materials. There will be those who will probably need additional class of other help just to grasp the rudiments. And there will be all the others at different points in between.
The teacher will avoid this classroom elephant, that is, the widely differing degrees of readiness of her students, and speak instead to the level of understanding of this or that student, and of course during the process more or less losing the others.
Under a competency based system this wouldn’t have to happen. Schools could be structured around their students acquiring competencies, in school, out of school, at home, or elsewhere, not as now based on their students being present in class for some five or more periods a day, during a six hour day and a five day week.
In a more reasonable and more realistic school structure, one that recognized kids as they are, the “elephants” would have to be acknowledged, one after the other and all together, with the result that schools as we know them would probably disappear.
Perhaps this is what keeps any real reform from ever taking place. It would be too big a change in the status quo, thus raising the resistance of the present holders of power. Also, there is probably too much that is not known about what would happen if we publicly acknowledged the elephants. There would be the inevitable unexpected consequences, and this makes us afraid.
Why if kids were ready to learn, if their education were individualized and self-paced, if their learning were not confined to the school building and to the first years of their lives, and finally if they actually became competent in this or that skill or subject matter area, there would then be no stopping them.
As in the middle ages we might now see a real children’s crusade, as the kids, no longer only being a burden or charge on the rest of us, took back their rightful position among us, standing from a very young age as they once did, on the ground along with us, interacting with us, teaching us as well as learning from us. Once again, there would be no stopping them. Nor would we want to.
April 18, 2007 at 8:11 am
Well said, Mr. Waring. A pleasure to read.