Blogg-Ed Indetermination

One of the hallmarks of factory automation models is the need to standardize parts, procedures, and work flow. It’s no coincidence then that when universal education started to become realized in the U.S. in the midst of the industrial revolution, the best minds of the time brought the industrial model of thinking to bear on schooling. Take a certain set of inputs (students),  apply a standardized manufacturing process (curriculum, teachers, classrooms), and at the end you get a standardized product: a high school diploma, indicative of a certain set of minimum skills.

It seems silly to us now to apply such a simple model to something as complicated as human beings, but I think there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that the current model of American education is not that far different than it was one hundred years past.

Thirty-some years ago as a Ph.D. student at Michigan State University, I was fortunate enough to live near a very innovative middle school in nearby Okemos, Michigan. Education at that time was in the midst of very interesting changes. Open-schools, behavioral psychology and teaching machines, block-scheduling, enforced integration, ethnic studies, peace studies…. It was a fertile time for educational experimentation.

Which model should of that time embrace? Which of these competing ideas and ideologies was anything more than a passing fad? What would colleges do with students coming from “different” programs? How could a school accommodate all this diversity?

Kinawa Middle School in Okemos, MI had an idea. Embrace them all, or at least most of them. Working with a creative staff, a daring principal, and a supportive Education Department at MSU, Kinawa created several different programs and provided teachers, students, and parents with the opportunity to choose the program that they wanted to participate in. Several “schools within a school” were the result.

Sadly, I lost track of what was happening at Kinawa after I completed by graduate studies. A quick glance at the school’s web site suggests nothing of this type of experimentation being conducted currently.

But the idea behind Kinawa has stayed with me these many long years.

I am a great believer in the marketplace of ideas. It was now always so. In my youth I could be a zealous, overbearing, and sanctimonious twit. (Some may think that my blog is evidence that I haven’t changed all that much.) But I like to think that I have, over time gained some modicum of patience. I have had the satisfaction of watching my more corn ball ideas be kindly forgotten by friends, and my better ideas come to fruition, albeit often in a more mature and better form.

And so we come to 21st century learning, and my discomfort with the either-or-ness that seems to sometime characterize the discussion:

• You are either full technology or you are against it.
• You are either innovative or stuck in the past.
• You are either global or parochial on your thinking.
• You are either an environmentalist or a you don’t care about our planet.
• You are either a promoter of social justice or a capitalist pig.

We talk a lot about the polarization in politics, and indeed there is ample amount of that to deserve discussion. And yet we fail to see the polarization in our own midst: teachers versus administrators, parents versus the school, teenagers versus adults.

We do not need a new model of education for the 21st century. We needs hundreds, thousands of new models of education for the 21st century. Each school, each classroom, each teacher, and each student has to create their own model of 21st century learning and teaching. The marketplace of ideas will separate the wheat from the chaff.