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Still, what really matters is whether the world will have an empowered, productive, fulfilled population in the generations to come, one that fully taps into its potential and can meaningfully uphold the responsibilities of real democracy.
In a word, I wanted to restore the excitement—the active participation in learning and the natural high that went with it—that conventional curricula sometimes seemed to bludgeon into submission.
In muddling toward my own approach to tutoring, then—in trying to match my methods to how I thought people really learn—two of my first precepts were these: that lessons should be paced to the individual student’s needs, not to some arbitrary calendar; and that basic concepts needed to be deeply understood if students were to succeed at mastering more advanced ones.
from the student’s point of view, it’s difficult if not impossible to avoid an element of confrontation. A question is asked; an answer is expected immediately; that brings pressure. The student doesn’t want to disappoint the teacher. She fears she will be judged. And all these factors interfere with the student’s ability to fully concentrate on the matter at hand. Even more, students are embarrassed to communicate what they do and do not understand.
Washburne introduced what became widely known as the Winnetka Plan. At its heart was the somewhat radical concept of mastery learning. What made mastery learning radical? Two things. First, it was predicated on the belief that all students could learn if provided with conditions appropriate to their needs; no one should have to be “held back” or put on a track that leads to academic failure. Second, mastery learning structured its curriculum not in terms of time, but in terms of certain target levels of comprehension and achievement. This turned tradition quietly but entirely upside down. In
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Bloom and Block suggested refinements in testing methods and the delivery of feedback, but their basic principles came straight out of the Winnetka Plan. Students learned at their own pace, advancing to the next concept only after reaching a prescribed degree of mastery over the previous concept. Teachers served primarily as guides and mentors rather than lecturers. Peer interaction was encouraged; peers helping peers was of benefit not only academically, but in character-building as well. Some students might struggle, but none were given up on.
Taking responsibility for education—responsibility on the part of students, families, communities, and nations—is of course a hot-button issue these days, approached and argued from all points on the political compass. Too often, however, the suggestion is made that “taking responsibility” is somehow an independent thing from the learning itself, and that responsibility can be put on the shoulders of parents and teachers without necessarily involving the student. Both of those notions are false. Taking responsibility for education is education; taking responsibility for learning is learning.
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I stress this because I believe that personal responsibility is not only undervalued but actually discouraged by the standard classroom model, with its enforced passivity and rigid boundaries of curriculum and time. Denied the opportunity to make even the most basic decisions about how and what they will learn, students stop short of full commitment.
Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous. —CONFUCIUS
I’m not just nitpicking here. I believe that the breaking up of concepts like these has profound and even crucial consequences for how deeply students learn and how well they remember. It is the connections among concepts—or the lack of connections—that separate the students who memorize a formula for an exam only to forget it the next month and the students who internalize the concepts and are able to apply them when they need them a decade later.
In gradually developing my own approach to teaching, one of my central objectives was to reverse this balkanizing tendency. In my view, no subject is ever finished. No concept is sealed off from other concepts. Knowledge is continuous; ideas flow.
Given that learning involves physical changes in each of our individual brains, and given that knowledge consists not of some linear progression but rather the gradually deepening comprehension of a vast web of concepts and ideas, a surprising corollary presents itself: No two educations are the same. There is a very refreshing irony here. You can standardize curricula, but you can’t standardize learning. No two brains are the same; no two pathways through the infinitely subtle web of knowledge are the same. Even the most rigorous standardized tests demonstrate only an approximate grasp of a
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Do you wish to be great? Then begin by being. Do you desire to construct a vast and lofty fabric? Think first about the foundations of humility. The higher your structure is to be, the deeper must be its foundation. —SAINT AUGUSTINE
By default, then, the ultimate responsibility for reviewing past lessons falls to the student. But will she follow through on this responsibility? Traditional classroom models make this difficult. The whole thrust of her education has taught her to be passive—to sit still, absorb, and eventually parrot back. Now she’s being asked to be thoroughly proactive, to diagnose her own difficulties and actively see to their resolution. That’s asking an awful lot of a student who has been trained to do the opposite.
Students are not naturally passive. Perversely, they need to be taught to be passive; the passivity then becomes a habit that makes them more tractable, perhaps, but less alert, less engaged in what they’re doing. This trade-off may be helpful for maintaining order in a jam-packed conventional classroom, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best way for students to learn.
Portability and self-pacing, then, are essential aids to active, self-motivated learning. For a student to truly take ownership of his education, however, there’s another resource that’s required: easy and ongoing access to the lessons that have come before.
The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement. —JOHN STUART MILL
Human nature being what it is, those who prosper under a given system tend to become supporters of that system. Thus the powerful tend to have a bias toward the status quo; our educational customs tend to perpetuate themselves, and because they interconnect with so many other aspects of our culture, they are extraordinarily difficult to change.
This led to a second, more destructive problem that still exists today. Once the pure search for truth was posited as the highest good, it followed that anything merely useful would be regarded as less good. Practical learning—learning that might actually help one do a job—was regarded as somehow dirty. And this prejudice pertained even to practical subjects—as, for example, finance or statistics—that are intellectually very rich and challenging.
Let me be clear as to why I raise this point. I’m not suggesting that people shouldn’t go to college. My contention, rather, is that universities and their career-seeking students have a deep-seated contradiction to resolve: On the one hand, our society now views a college education as a gateway to employment; on the other hand, academia has tended to maintain a bias against the vocational. Clearly, our universities are still wrestling with an ancient but false dichotomy between the abstract and the practical, between wisdom and skill. Why should it prove so difficult to design a school that
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All greatness of character is dependent on individuality. The man who has no other existence than that which he partakes in common with all around him, will never have any other than an existence of mediocrity. —JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
The Prussian philosopher and political theorist Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a key figure in the development of the system, was perfectly explicit about its aims. “If you want to influence a person,” he wrote, “you must do more than merely talk to him; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will.”
Former New York State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto has written that “the whole system was built on the premise that isolation from first-hand information and fragmentation of the abstract information presented by teachers would result in obedient and subordinate graduates.” It was not by accident that whole ideas were broken up into fragmented “subjects.”
By design, order trumped curiosity; regimentation took precedence over personal initiative.
Today’s world needs a workforce of creative, curious, and self-directed lifelong learners who are capable of conceiving and implementing novel ideas. Unfortunately, this is the type of student that the Prussian model actively suppresses.
Sheldon Richman in his book Separating School and State: How to Liberate American Families, “the state’s apparently benevolent goal of universal education has actually been an insidious effort to capture all children in its net.”
As a practical matter, our conventional classroom model does not generally allow for these customized reviews and retests, still less for moving beyond memorization to experience the concepts through open-ended, creative projects. This is one of the central ways in which the model proves archaic and no longer serves our needs.
For now, however, suffice it to say that our overreliance on testing is based largely on habit, wishful thinking, and leaps of faith.
What are we actually accomplishing when we hand out those A’s and B’s and C’s and D’s? As we’ve seen, what we’re not accomplishing is meaningfully measuring student potential. On the other hand, what we’re doing very effectively is labeling kids, squeezing them into categories, defining and often limiting their futures.
The Prussian version of “tracking” students assured a plentiful labor supply. Moreover, since the testing process, for all its flaws and limitations, could claim to be “scientific” and objective, there was at least the illusion of fairness in the system. If you didn’t look too closely—if you factored out things like family wealth and political connections and the wherewithal to hire private tutors—the system could pass for a meritocracy.
To be clear, I am not antitesting. Tests can be valuable diagnostic tools to identify gaps in learning that need to be fixed. Well-designed tests can also be used as evidence that someone actually knows a subject domain well at a specific point in time. What is important to remember, however, is to have a solid dose of skepticism when interpreting results from even the most well-designed tests; they are, after all, just imperfect human constructs.
So then, is doing homework really the best use of time that families might otherwise spend just being together? Studies suggest otherwise. One large survey conducted by the University of Michigan concluded that the single strongest predictor of better achievement scores and fewer behavioral problems was not time spent on homework, but rather the frequency and duration of family meals.11 If we think about it, this really shouldn’t be surprising. When families actually sit down and talk—when parents and children exchange ideas and truly show an interest in each other—kids absorb values,
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Given all these drawbacks, why has it been accepted as gospel for so long that homework is necessary? The answer, I think, lies not in the perceived virtues of homework but rather in the clear deficiencies of what happens in the classroom. Homework becomes necessary because not enough learning happens during the school day.
The dominant method in our traditional classrooms is still the broadcast lecture; one of the most cited metrics in our public debates is class size. But there’s a disconnect between those things. If a teacher’s main job is lecturing, what does it really matter how many students are in the room?
Nearly all the students needed some degree of remediation, and the time spent on finding and fixing the gaps turned out both to save time and deepen learning in the longer term.
But let me be clear about why I was nervous. It wasn’t that I had strong doubts that our kids were learning math. I was confident they were learning, and that, moreover, they were learning at a deeper and more durable level than most conventional classrooms afforded. My concern, rather, was with the congruence, or lack thereof, between what our kids were learning and what the tests were testing.
This is one of the paradoxes and potential dangers of standardized tests: They measure mastery of a particular curriculum, but not necessarily of the underlying topics and concepts on which the curriculum should be based. The curriculum, in turn, becomes shaped by the expectations of what will be tested. So there’s a kind of circular logic, an endless loop going on. Teach what will be tested; test what most likely had been taught. Topics and ideas and levels of understanding that go beyond the probable parameters of the test tend to be ignored; they aren’t worth the classroom time.
It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age. —MARGARET MEAD
This realization, in turn, led to an even more basic question about the artificial boundaries of formal education. Why does “education” stop at some point? Why isn’t it lifelong? Doesn’t it seem arbitrary and in fact a little tragic that we invest so much in learning through formal education for twelve or sixteen or twenty years, and then just turn off the spigot when we reach full adulthood?
As I muddled along in my tinkering and pragmatic way, without assumptions or theory, I really didn’t consider lifelong learning at all. Yet it turns out that what I was trying to accomplish with the kids was to foster an atmosphere and an attitude that came closer to that of adult learners. I inadvertently bumped into an idea that Knowles had already explored: Maybe androgogy—self-directed learning with the teacher as guide rather than director—may be more appropriate for everyone.
Here is a remarkable thought: Among the world’s children starting grade school this year, 65 percent will end up doing jobs that haven’t even been invented yet. This projection, while impossible to prove, comes from a highly respected and responsible source, Cathy N. Davidson, a Duke University professor who is also the codirector of the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competitions.1
The certainty of change, coupled with the complete uncertainty as to the precise nature of the change, has profound and complex implications for our approach to education. For me, though, the most basic takeaway is crystal clear: Since we can’t predict exactly what today’s young people will need to know in ten or twenty years, what we teach them is less important than how they learn to teach themselves.
Sure, kids need to have a grounding in basic math and science; they need to understand how language works so they can communicate effectively and with nuance; they should have some awareness of history and politics so as to feel at home in the world, and some conversance with art in order to appreciate the human thirst for the sublime. Beyond these fundamentals, however, the crucial task of education is to teach kids how to learn. To lead them to want to learn. To nurture curiosity, to encourage wonder, and to instill confidence so that later on they’ll have the tools for finding answers to
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As we settled into the MIT routine, Shantanu and I began independently to arrive at the same subversive but increasingly obvious conclusion: The giant lecture classes were a monumental waste of time. Three hundred students crammed into a stifling lecture hall; one professor droning through a talk he knew by heart and had delivered a hundred times before. The sixty-minute talks were bad enough; the ninety-minute talks were torture. What was the point? Was this education or an endurance contest?
This last sentence reminds me of Bryan Caplan's book regarding the theory of signaling. It states that part of the value of undergrad is to demonstrate a level of endurance.
As we saw in the discussion of the Prussian roots of our school system, the original aim of educators was not necessarily to produce the smartest students possible, but to turn out tractable and standardized citizens, workers who knew enough. To this end, attention was given not to what students could learn, but to the bare minimum of what they had to learn.
Conventional curricula don’t only tell students where to start; they tell students where to stop. A series of lessons ends; that subject is over. Why aren’t students encouraged to go farther and deeper—to learn twice as much? Probably for the same reason we consider 70 percent a passing grade. Our standards are too low. We’re so squeamish and embarrassed about the very notion of “failure” that we end up diluting and devaluing the idea of success. We limit what students believe they can do by selling short what we expect them to do.
First, I would eliminate letter grades altogether. In a system based on mastery learning, there is no need and no place for them. Students advance only when they demonstrate clear proficiency with a concept, as measured either by the ten-in-a-row heuristic or some future refinement of it.
Instead, I would propose, as the centerpieces of student appraisal, two things: a running, multiyear narrative not only of what a student has learned but how she learned it; and a portfolio of a student’s creative work.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. —MARK TWAIN
What is Waterloo doing right? For one thing, Waterloo recognized the value of internships long ago (they call them co-ops) and has made them an integral part of its students’ experience. By graduation, a typical Waterloo grad will have spent six internships lasting a combined twenty-four months at major companies—often American. The typical American grad will have spent about thirty-six months in lecture halls and a mere three to six months in internships. This past winter—not summer—all of the interns at the Khan Academy, and probably most of the interns in Silicon Valley, were from Waterloo
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