What Do Teaching, Learning, and the Death Penalty Have in Common?

The answer is: Susannah Sheffer.

Susannah is my friend and colleague who edited Growing Without Schooling magazine for 16 years and she has a new website that brings her beautiful and diverse writing together in one place.

Of particular note to homeschoolers is this page, where Susannah’s work with GWS, adolescent girls, North Star: Self-Directed Learning for Teens, and her insightful writing about teaching and learning is gathered:

http://www.susannahsheffer.com/teaching--learning.html

Susannah is also involved with death penalty and prison issues, and her new book, Fighting for Their Lives: Inside the Experience of Capital Defense Attorneys, is coming in March 2013. Here is how it is described:

Intimate conversations with the dedicated lawyers who try, but too often fail, to prevent executions.

How do those who represent clients facing the death penalty cope with the stress and trauma of their work?  Through conversations with twenty of the most experienced and dedicated post-conviction capital defenders in the United States, Fighting for Their Lives explores this emotional territory for the first time.

I know Susannah has been working on this book for a few years and I can’t wait to read it and tell you more about it. I hope you’ll buy it and read it too.

Alfie Kohn on Why Numbers Trump Human Feedback in Education

Our ability to manipulate our world by using numerical data has led to some impressive acheivements as well as to some horrible developments, particularly when people get reduced to numbers and are treated as such. This has been happening for over a century in our schools and we've now reached a point where one's grade point average has become a shorthand for one's social worth in many situations.

Alfie Kohn has written a good rebuttal to this situation in school with this essay in Education Week: Schooling Beyond Measure. Here's a quote from the article to whet your appetite:

In education, the question "How do we assess kids/teachers/schools?" has morphed over the years into "How do we measure ... ?" We've forgotten that assessment doesn't require measurement, and, moreover, that the most valuable forms of assessment are often qualitative (say, a narrative account of a child's progress by an observant teacher who knows the child well), rather than quantitative (a standardized-test score). Yet the former may well be brushed aside in favor of the latter by people who don't even bother to ask what was on the test. It's a number, so we sit up and pay attention. Over time, the more data we accumulate, the less we really know.

Educational One-Upmanship and Magical Thinking

Despite all the talk about how education is the way for people to school themselves out of poverty and other social problems, people still know and act as if education is essentially a game of dog eat dog. Viewed this way, as a parent, it is natural that you want to be sure your children are the diners and not the dinner in this situation, but some very competitive adults take this to an extreme.

I learned from Derren Brown, a magician I follow (magic and illusion is a passion of mine), about how Chinese parents were defrauded by an education company's promises to turn their children into academic superstars. This is from an article in the Guardian, "Chinese parents defrauded by 'perfect' education:"

For ambitious Chinese parents, the opportunity was too good to miss – even with its 100,000 yuan (£9,950) price tag. Their children would learn to read books in 20 seconds and identify poker cards by touch. The most talented would instantly see answers in their heads when presented with test papers.

Around 30 pupils aged from seven to 17 were enrolled for the Shanghai summer course. But 10 days later their "special abilities" had not materialised. "I found that my child learned nothing except how to cheat," one parent complained.

The tipoff for the magician that this was a major scam is the poker card trick. This trick is a classic of card magic and has numerous variations, but for parents seeking an edge, and trusting in the authority of educators, it must have appeared as a powerful bonus in addition to the other skills this outfit promised.

Here, though, the fraud of promising special abilities upon completion of the educational program is plain and obvious. In our society we, too, suffer from magical thinking about education. We believe that just progressing through the system creates knowledge, despite millions of graduates who are not  able to speak a foreign language, do more than basic math, or understand science after years of passing classes in those subjects. 

Schools versus Prisons

One of the funniest sections of the movie The War on Kids for me is when a chorus of children try to identify photos by noting which is a school or a prison; the humor occurs because it is so hard to tell the difference. The movie then sadly shows, in a variety of ways, how much like prison modern schooling has become. The saddest thing, to me, is that most viewers support this vision of education, feeling that school should be prison-like (though a humane, soft prison) because children can’t be trusted to learn anything worthwhile unless forced to do so. As a result, the word education has been misconstrued to mean something done to us rather than something we do for ourselves with help from others, and school, which was a leisurely activity for ancient Greek aristocrats, has been turned into a form of jail for most children.

The original meaning of the word education is something every person and animal does: nurture and rear children. The Oxford English Dictionary notes the Latin word educare is the root of the word educate, and defines it this way: “To bring up (young persons) from childhood so as to form (their) habits, manners, intellectual and physical abilities.” This is not the same meaning as the often used and substituted word educere—to lead forth—that is related to our modern word, educe, and is typically used by schools to justify their compulsory and authoritarian methods. By confusing the origins of the word educators give themselves license to lead, or draw forth, whatever they feel they need to put in or pull out from a student. This is totally different from the suckling, nurturing educational relationship of the original word.

Is it no wonder then that today our politicians talk about educating the public about their positions, meaning to convince the public to support them? Dictators in various regimes use educational techniques like compulsory attendance and rote, or entire facilities, such as the Vietnamese re-education camps, to make the public believe or see reality as the government or other institution wishes them to. The ironic use of the word education hit a new height for me as I read about the problems associated with the Community Education Centers, a for-profit company that operates halfway houses for prison systems in different states. By taking a word like education and continually using it to refer primarily to obedience to authority we lose sight of its original meaning—growth through nurturing from concerned adults—and replace it with compliance to a mandatory process that has very little to do with nurturing natural growth and everything to do with managing the contents of another person’s brain.

PS

Columnist James Altucher wrote a column about unschooling recently and he compared schools to prisons. Here is his list of similarities, FYI.

Learning Without Us

A new article in Educational Leadership was brought to my attention: Preparing Students to Learn Without Us by Will Richardson. As I read it I thought, once again, here is an educator willing to entertain this thought as long as the teacher remains in charge of how the learning occurs, in this case by linking a student’s personal interest in something to the core curriculum in whatever convoluted way necessary to achieve the goal.  The main point that John Holt, Ivan Illich, and others make so often—learning is the result of the activity of learners, not necessarily a result of teaching—always seems to get quickly lost in all school reform discussions. Instead, how teachers and schools are altered by technology that can personalize learning becomes the issue, and we ignore the human disruptive innovation—people learning from situations and other people outside of conventional schooling—and focus on the machinery: how technology will make existing schools continue as they are, only better. The important insight provided by Jacques Ellul and later Illich, that schooling itself is a technology used to control a population, is glossed over or not even considered in the rush to claim the latest technology that will change schooling.

However, unschoolers and some alternative schools have, for decades, supported independent learning for children, without using any of the latest educational technology as their justification for doing so. They use people in their families and communities, classes, projects, volunteering, and other opportunities to live and learn; they aren’t being tracked and assessed dynamically through cookies and cameras, but rather engage and discuss their situation with those working with them in order to know how they are doing. Many homeschoolers do use online courses, but I think not nearly as much as they use offline courses and learning opportunities (I wish there were more research about homeschoolers and their use of distance learning compared to how school uses it now and proposes to use it in the future. Does anyone know of such studies?). It is interesting to me that trusting people to decide what, when, how, and from whom they will learn is palatable to most educators only when they can use technology to control and predict what learners are doing. Technology is truly, in this instance, a double-edge sword.

The few dissenters cited at the end of the article give me hope that some in the teaching profession feel they should not be in the people-shaping business—trying to mold individual students to fit into job slots determined by their performance in school—and have not lost sight of a student’s humanity, dignity, and unique powers to learn.

The article starts off, as many do today, by paying lip service to the idea that we are learning all the time and that school interrupts that process. Unschoolers, in particular, can use or take heart from the arguments being made in support of letting learners control more of their learning and, who knows? Perhaps among teachers who think as the dissenters in this article do, we have allies who want to help create a learning society built around democracy and free will rather than a regime of mandatory continuing education, built around the plans of others and controlled through technology. Here are some excerpts to give you the gist of what I’m trying to convey about this article, which can be read in its entirety: Preparing students to learn without us.

The ability to learn what we want, when we want, with whomever we want as long as we have access creates a huge push against a system of education steeped in time-and-place learning. Notes McLeod,

Between adaptive software that can present and assess mastery of content, video games and simulations that can engage kids on a different level, and mobile technologies and online environments that allow learning to happen on demand, we need to fundamentally rethink what we do in the classroom with kids. (personal communication, October 1, 2011)

That rethinking revolves around a fundamental question: When we have an easy connection to the people and resources we need to learn whatever and whenever we want, what fundamental changes need to happen in schools to provide students with the skills and experiences they need to do this type of learning well? Or, to put it more succinctly, are we preparing students to learn without us? How can we shift curriculum and pedagogy to more effectively help students form and answer their own questions, develop patience with uncertainty and ambiguity, appreciate and learn from failure, and develop the ability to go deeply into the subjects about which they have a passion to learn?

. . . ."It requires a totally different skill set on the teacher's part," Stutzman says. "We have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, because we don't know the exact direction that a class will go when we walk in. Depending on student questions, reflections, or activities, our plans could quickly morph into something we never dreamed would happen at the outset."

In other words, it's risk and reward. "It's scary not to know exactly where your students will go if their curriculums are potentially different, and it requires a lot of adjusting," Stutzman explains. "But the benefit is that students get to see our genuine reactions to new discoveries as well as to challenges, and they see us model the learning process together." Students understand that there is no one "right" answer that the teacher expects, that there are many answers, and that the teacher and students will likely discover many of these together.

. . . Assessment changes as well. Donhauser says that the emphasis moves to assessing in the moment rather than at the end of a book or unit. "Rather than having a defined product that I receive from 25 students," she says, "I receive 25 individual assignments with their own unique content, insights, and styles." Using Google Docs, students continually update their progress, and she provides regular feedback. Students also give one another feedback on their plans as they go. Everyone follows a rubric that covers such areas as standards, learning outcomes, artifact explanation, blog posts, learning activities, work ethic, and research.

. . . Despite the promise of personalizing learning and some teachers' best efforts to give their students more agency in the education process, many educators wonder whether the concept goes far enough in preparing students for the wide array of learning opportunities outside the classroom.

Many educators cite an important difference between "personalized" learning and "personal" learning—the latter connotes a deeper degree of autonomy for the learner. Some, like Stephen Downes, a senior researcher at the National Research Council of Canada and a longtime education blogger, see that as an important distinction. "Autonomy is what distinguishes between personal learning, which we do for ourselves, and personalized learning, which is done for us," Downes (2011) tweeted last fall.

. . . It's a potential summed up nicely in the white paper The Right to Learn (Anytime Anywhere Learning Foundation, 2011). The authors write,

We need to shift our thinking from a goal that focuses on the delivery of something—a primary education—to a goal that is about empowering our young people to leverage their innate and natural curiosity to learn whatever and whenever they need to. The goal is about eliminating obstacles to the exercise of this right—whether the obstacle is the structure and scheduling of the school day, the narrow divisions of subject, the arbitrary separation of learners by age, or others—rather than supplying or rearranging resources. (p. 6)