© 2017 Michael
Swickard, Ph.D. At a
recent meeting someone said in frustration, “I wish schools would just educate
kids.” The person was vague as to specifics. I asked, “So you think educating is
simple?”
“Yes, you get
a teacher and some children and let the teacher teach. It’s no big deal.”
Perhaps that notion is both right
and wrong. Simply put: education is when there is something you want to learn
and you listen to someone or read something. But there’s an entire public
education industrial complex in our society.
That
system of education is incredibly complex and fraught with dysfunction. Paul
Simon wrote in a 1973 song, “When I think back on all the crap I learned in
high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.”
There is a
Chaos Theory in Weather Prediction stating when a butterfly flaps its wings in
Beijing the weather changes ever so slightly in New York City. We know it will
rain but not when. No matter how much money goes into weather prediction, it is
limited to perhaps a week.
In education,
we know some children will learn, but not how much each will learn at any given
time. Despite the industrial mania for testing we don’t have the ability to say
if a teacher does something, students are guaranteed to learn.
It is a
very complex. There are so many factors that it is impossible to name them all.
Some major factors are: interaction with parents, student age in months, brain
development in the child, the child’s nutrition, eyesight, allergies and other
physical issues.
Some minor
factors are: the latitude of the school. The northern schools have more
coughing making it harder to hear. If we research the many thousands we might see
school lunches are a 1.3% factor and the school having a winning football
season a .0001% factor.
What the
Chaos Theory of Education illuminates is that despite the assurances that our
educational leaders “know” what they are doing, they are as good as the weather
service is at making one year weather predictions.
In weather
and public education, the plan has been that if the endeavor could be broken
into a large enough number of measurable steps we would be able to rely upon
the prediction. In education, every year there are more and more measures, more
and more new strategies and pretty much the same percentage of children doing
well or not doing well.
The
all-knowing expression many educational leaders wear should no longer cause us
to be silent. That these leaders have impressive credentials or impressive
titles or ornate offices does not matter.
Perhaps the
factory model of education which we use in America where all children are
similar enough to educate in the same way will finally be proven to be false.
Perhaps in the coming years children will spend less time in institutions and
more time learning individually.
Each
student learns differently in so many ways. Public education can never function
satisfactorily using a factory model.
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