There has been a little education-related memeStorm in my neck of netspace in the last few days: current-events kvetching about state- and district-level budget deficits, increasing classroom sizes, teacher layoffs, school closures; quieter chatter about what it means to be in the sunset years of No Child Left Behind particularly in light of the data suggesting that most of the changes implemented since NCLB have had no, or modest, effect; and, infused through it all, brow-knitted worry about the seeming intractability of most problems in education. If collective interaction in netspace can have a "mood", then the adjectives I'd choose are "grim", "weary", "(not) optimistic", and even "rudderless". Fanboys of tech-in-ed are quieter as it becomes clear(er) that tech, at least as it has been implemented so far, is not a panacea, but tech-trolls are equally de-energized as the debate has firmly shifted from "if" info- and netspace tech has a role in education to "what" and "how". The low-fruit answers to the problems in education seem picked clean including (perhaps even "especially") firing money cannons loaded with circuits, software, and networks at ed and expecting (hoping) for something new to happen.
Frankly, I look at this winter-of-discontent as a good thing because now maybe we can finally get down to business… the business of recognizing that a Kuhn-style paradigm shift may be in the works.
First, I want to clean up a couple of anticipated nuclear misinterpretations of what I just wrote. I am not in the “education has failed” crowd. Why? With a little anthropology fairy dust, I see a remarkable accomplishment in what the U.S. and the world-at-large has accomplished in education when compared to human cultures across time and space. I also see education-as-enculturation and, thus, interpret our struggles to “reform” education as a collective recognition (belief) that the product(s) of our current structural, formal, institutional enculturation process are insufficient to our (collective) perceived needs – compounded by a lack of consensus about what these needs might actually be. It’s a protest with a chant that goes, “What do we want? We dunno! When do we want it? Now!” Yes, yes. I know that there are literally a million people working that problem, each with ideas about what education needs to be and do (and I tip my hat to everyone working the problem). But when you stand back from this Million Reformer March, what you hear is a very noisy… babble. No idea(s) exist at this moment which organizes the competing voices into major structures of consensus. The only thing close in scale is the ongoing process of creating national standards which, in the end, is merely a recapitulation of the old way of doing the education thing; the “old wine, new bottle” trick (standards-folks, my sensors indicate that you are powering up your weapons and preparing to fire).
The other clean-up detail is around the use of “paradigm shift”. I love Kuhn and think he was onto something with the whole paradigm thing. However, I don’t love the way that “paradigm shift” is tossed about by a very many others. Most folk’s ideas about what constitutes a new paradigm are… ridiculously unimaginative, woefully small, and completely within the old paradigm they think they are breaking. Quantum physics was a new paradigm that stranded even greats like old Einstein himself. Standards (fact)-based education is not. (Anticipating an ad hominem attack, I employ honest evasive maneuvers by stating for the record that while I may sound a bit “superior” in my delivery, I am not making any sort of claim to having “The Answer” but I do think I have a tiny little question or observation or two up my sleeve.)
So… while you’re sharpening your knives, can you point me to where in this big old education system of ours we’re seeing trend-lines from actual data that makes anyone resoundingly happy and hopeful? Yeah, me neither. But we’ve tried a lot of things over the years, haven’t we? While U.S. education has been the object of near-constant reform efforts for a couple of hundred years, Sputnik induced a collective pants-wetting over education that we’re still cleaning up from today. Actually, I view this high-energy do->fail (sometimes succeed)->learn cycle as a good thing, especially in light of the enormous delta we face in every area of our world and our cultures. I think we individually and collectively fail to appreciate and reflect upon this change-delta we’ve created for ourselves; it’s not trivial and it has real and present impact upon the problem of education. In fact, that sense of discontent about the products of education today are symptomatic of our incomplete recognition that culture-delta-v is higher than education-delta-v, coupled with the reality that institutional education can only be a “lagging indicator” of culture-delta. Institutions take time to change.
One premise that I’ve offered here is that the low fruit has been picked. Any disagreements? Is this a claim that can be evaluated to true-ish? Another premise I’ve offered is that these low-fruit-solutions have come up short, either producing negative (says a victim of New Math), no, or only modestly positive results. Restated, we have had no out-of-the-park home runs, have we? (sorry about the sports metaphor :P) Again, any disagreements? If premise one and premise two are true-ish, then we must turn our attention to premise three: we need to do something different… really, really different. How different? I can’t say… but that’s the nature of the paradigm shift isn’t it?
Kuhn suggested that there is a macro-process involved in human research, invention, and innovation. We collectively work within a range of what we think we know (a paradigm) until, eventually, our efforts start to fail and/or undermine the known. Being stubborn creatures (apparently *lol*), we cling to the old known until we are dragged kicking and screaming to the realization that the old known is bankrupt. If we’re lucky, some (deviant) person or group has been working on what the new-known might look like. Us lowing herds then waddle over to the new known and make it the (new)old known and, voila, a paradigm shift has occurred. Pretty spiffy and magical, eh?
There are some tricky bits to this process. One, paradigm shifts hurt. We love our known-knowns, and we build careers around them. What kind of career does one have when the new-known is a career assassin? And what about those deviant folks that just won’t let a known-known live in peace? Paradigm killers are dangerous folks to the established order of things. Two, how does one go about evaluating a new paradigm from the perspective of the old one? The issue here is that some folks going about trying to invent new paradigms are… using kind and generous words… working zero or low-probability vectors of discovery and invention while others are merely inventing/discovering things that look utterly ridiculous from within the old paradigm (can anyone say “God doesn’t play dice with the universe”?). See the difference? *lol* Evaluating and separating new paradigm wheat from chaff is more difficult than separating uranium isotopes… and with greater consequences, too. I do not have any idea how to solve that particular problem, but neither did Kuhn in the end. Three, I never had the impression from reading Kuhn that he thought that much in the way of control could be exercised over the paradigm shift process. [Paradigm shifts] happen like “creativity”, “eureka moments”, “epiphanies”, and “Great American Novels”.
We have a problem. I detect out there in the world a feeling that we don’t have unlimited amounts of time to solve the education problem. I feel it, too. Oh, I could lay out the social justice argument and say that we are harming each generation that has to suffer through an edSystem that doesn’t arm it with adaptive traits. I could point out that, at the world-collective level, we face dire problems like global climate change that really demand an all-hands effort from a well-educated populace. I could also suggest that our current range of socio-political-economic systems across the globe are creaking under the strain of disparities in education and opportunity, or observe that replacing the high school diploma with a college diploma as the new minimum ticket for full participation in the economy is having… interesting… consequences. Whatever justification suits, I believe that many of us hear the clock ticking. So if we have picked the low fruit, and the low fruit hasn’t gotten the job done, then we’re left with inventing more difficult (to conceive, to develop, to implement) solutions, up to and including undergoing a full-scale paradigm shift in education. If it is a paradigm shift we need but (real) paradigm shifts are difficult-or-impossible to cause, control, or evaluate (and threaten to make a lot of career-invested folks and institutions very unhappy), then we are in a bit of a pickle, aren’t we? And time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into an uncertain, high delta-v (and potentially dangerous) future.
I wish I had an answer. But I do have a question. Do we really have a good handle on what we know about education right now?
I ask because I see an awful lot of folks in different disciplines not talking to one another. I also see that our knowledge has grown so large that we’re forced by scale to specialize in increasingly narrow ways. I see that our tools for organizing, evaluating, and even finding knowledge are not keeping pace with our needs. I sense a… resistance… to big picture/big theory thinking; notions like “transdisciplinarity” seem a bit… contaminated… with marginality. I feel… amused… when adjectives like “national” are tacked to the problem of education and… sad… when I do not hear the voice of anthropology anywhere in the mainstream of discussion about education. I see many word-concepts being invented but too often find myself sipping that damnable old wine again from a shiny new bottle. I see assumption-based canon running amok to redutio ad absurdum ends. I see a lot of structural investment in the way things are and I see this investment functioning as an individual and collective “confirmation bias” working against what might or should be. In the end, I’m not convinced that even the best and brightest working on the problem of education really grok the full extent of both what we already know and the real scale, scope, and complexity of the problem.
I think we need to spawn an effort to collect and evaluate everything related to education and learning, and put it into one big pile: biological, neurological, psychological, social, cultural, political, economic, etc. The head, the tail, the whole damn thing. I don’t know how to cause a paradigm shift but I suspect that it’s possible to increase the probability of one occurring. Insight is often the result of a change in perspective, and perspective is often a matter of knowledge… and some damn good questions. I wonder what we would find while trying to sort out a big, messy pile like that?
Why did I write this diatribe (in addition to the reasons given at the start)? The catalyst was an article I read this morning called “We Can’t Teach ‘Critical Thinking’ Until We Learn How to Assess It” (http://etcjournal.com/2011/03/07/we-cant-teach-critical-thinking-until-we-learn-how-to-assess-it/). We love answers, don’t we? The core of our evaluation models in education are all about answers, usually in the form of regurgitation of learned facts but also well-reasoned opinion sometimes; our evaluation paradigm is “fact-answer”. But what about questions… damn good questions… the kind of questions that cause insight or precede it… the kind of questions that make an old paradigm quiver and a new paradigm flicker in your peripheral vision? What about this saccharin platitude that there are no such things as stupid questions? I’m sorry but I do think that there are stupid questions (ready photon torpedoes)… or, being of a more charitable spirit, questions that suggest that the asker hasn’t really spent much time or effort on those sorts of things which precede good questions, like paying attention or staying awake or thinking. But if we allow that not all questions are “good” then we also allow for the possibility that questions can be evaluated. Hmmm… assessing questions. Grading questions. Making question-asking an educational priority. What a strange and ridiculous thought, but a thought somehow related to critical thinking… and to the problem of reforming education itself… and to the process of paradigm shifting, more generally. Almost... deviant.
Could taking a fresh look at the value of questions (vs. answers) be important? Or is that just a stupid question? For those of you who do, in fact, believe that there are no such thing as stupid questions, I expect my questions to be treated with the politically-correct gentleness they deserve. *lol* For the rest of you… game on!
++vn
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