Learning, a Bell or normal curve
Learning is no longer an exchange between the student and a mentor or tutor. Instead, we have made learning (or at least schooling because it’s highly questionable whether it’s mostly learning that goes on in the schools) an exchange between some number of students, as many as 30 or more in some inner city public school classrooms, as few as 10 or 15 in some suburban, private, independent schools, and a teacher (not a mentor or tutor because the many-to-one ration rules out that possibility).
Most if not all of the problems of our educational system stem from this many-to-one student teacher ratio. For whatever is the subject to be learned the student achievement in regard to that subject matter or skill will fall somewhere on a normal or Bell curve intended to measure the amount of learning that has taken place. The result is, of course, that there will be winners and losers, high and low achievers and everything in between.
Furthermore, no amount of trafficking with this situation, as long as the many-to-one ratio holds, will change things. Reformers beware. For no reforms have up until now changed the fact that in this situation individual differences, individual strengths and weaknesses, inevitably become subservient to something else.
The something else is most often (and at best because there are much worse things that go on in the classroom) a teacher devised and directed activity such as solving a word problem, writing an essay, expressing oneself in another language, carrying out a science experiment etc., activities that never arouse substantial interest or effort on the part of the students for whom they were intended.
When school does work, for it does work in some situations, that which accounts for its longevity, its now nearly 200 year life, when nearly all the students in the classroom do learn, as in the early grades, it’s because what students do have in common, that which is in the early years a shared ignorance of the alphabet and of numbers, trumps their differences.
However, and most of all, after the early years of school, the differences, especially in regard to talents and interests, will trump everything else, and the teacher will rarely if ever, in any meaningful manner, reach all her students during the classroom lesson. And for too many students it’s all downhill from there on.
Why? Well there is simply no way that the multi-varied individual lives of the students can be kept alive and thrive within a large classroom situation. Instead, the students are made to go along with certain widely held assumptions, for example that what is important for all of them, as well as for each one of them individually, is achieving literacy, or growth in the ability to use words and numbers.
And of course they will achieve quite differently as represented by the Bell curve. Some students will fall at one end of the curve, and will never, at least while in class, learn to read or use numbers proficiently. And others will fall at the other end of the curve, reaching, even within the very first years of school, adult literacy levels. Most, of course, will fall somewhere in between.
Our school people will go on thinking that by their efforts, by in many cases their increasing their school budgets, they can alter this situation, have everyone become word and number proficient. Of course this won’t and doesn’t happen, and nation-wide a quarter or more of the students in our high-schools will not graduate with their classes.
People bemoan the so-called dropout situation in our schools. How can we allow this to go on, and for several generations now, since we first became aware of it in the seventies? How can we allow tens of thousands of our young people to go without high school diplomas and therefore not qualify for the job situations and salaries, and the resulting good things, that high school diplomas (and even more college diplomas) promise?
For me school dropout numbers mean something else entirely. They are rather witness to the toughness of our species. For kids, who learned in elementary school that they were not able to successfully compete with their classmates in the word and number skill games, mostly what was played in the schools, these kids hung in there for years, through elementary and middle school, right on up into the first years of high school, and didn’t dropout, but hung tough and resisted, went on going to school, going to class, without for the most part rebelling when they had more than ample cause to do so.
These reflections are not, of course, original with me. People, writers on education in particular, have for a long time known all this. The even more devastating reflection is that we’ve even known for an even longer time the solution.
And that is to restore the one-on-one learning situation, the only learning situation that works for everyone. But up until now, of course, we’ve never been able to find a way, other than outside of the schools, in our families perhaps, and in our work places, of bringing this about.
