I know as I begin this post that there will be any number of readers who will run to their bookshelves to find references to nail me on some of the observations that I am about to put into print. Sorry, I should have used the term” text”. Additionally, those people are not running to bookshelves with hard copies of textbooks or encyclopedias. I forgot we are in the 21st Century and we use computers and search engines. It is sometimes easy to forget. I would hope that comments of this post could bring some clarity to that which I often find confusing. This is the twenty-first Century.
As long as I can remember, I have always pictured the birth of our public education to have started in a conference room of factory building somewhere in the northeast. In my little vision I see captains of industry getting together and determining that if the United States was to move ahead as a manufacturing giant in a someday-to-be world economy, U.S. workers needed to come to work with skills that would be needed to support that industrial effort. We needed them to have a work ethic and a culture that would lend itself to the needs of industry. Of course someone pointed out that not all of America was industrial, so some concessions would be made. To placate Agriculture, they allowed farmers to have their child laborers from June until after the Harvest in August. Of course we needed uniformity, so they extended those dates to be common to all schools.
The idea was to set up the schools just like industry. They started the school day in the A.M. and the shift would then go to the afternoon. An eight-hour day would be great, but these are young people, so they shortened the shift by an hour. They could always get that hour back by giving kids work to take home. They set up little groups to train the needed skills, Reading, Riting, and Rithmetic. That was a cute way to name the needed skills, the 3 R’s. This is the Job for kids. If the kids show that they get it, they would get a promotion in their job as long as their manager approved. Each of the factories would be managed by a small group of managers under one overall lead manager. That manager, called the principal, would develop the schedules and make sure everyone puts the hours in.
This is how I pictured it in my mind. The facts do not really matter, so do not run to Google to download a firsthand account of who was where, and who said what back on the day as they thought all this up. None of that is important, because the reality is that this industrial model of Public Education is what we deal with as part of our culture. It matters not where it came from. Over the centuries, research has not changed this model. We still have our 8-3 shift. We still send our kids home for the summer to work the crops. We still group kids together and give promotions. We still focus on the 3 R’s. This is all despite the fact that research has supported doing things in a much different way in most, if not all, of those areas.
To take this industrial model a step further our society has come to believe that educators are manufacturing a product. People are paying taxes to support education and they need to know what their Return on Investment is. Hence, the Standardized tests were introduced. They provide an easy explanation, and a way to measure the needed skills of Reading, Riting, and, Rithmetic. It would seem that this is the product people expect to be manufactured. This is what is needed by our labor force to get and maintain job. That must be the goal of education, a job.
Now, I wonder is there a need to change what everyone chooses to believe. Centuries of time couldn’t do it. Research couldn’t do it. An economic downturn couldn’t do it. Huge unemployment numbers do not seem to be doing it. Even the collective common sense some educational leaders seem to have at times has had no effect. It would seem that people are demanding change to get a better Return on their Investment, but they want this without allowing any change to take place. I think that may for me be the most confusing part.
If we are to keep this industrial model, can we agree on what the product is? Can we restructure our workforce? Can we fairly hold managers accountable? Can we update our manufacturing tools with technology? Can we improve our work schedules?
If we cannot do all of that, an alternative might be to examine if this industrial model of educations is still the way to go. Is it serving us the way it should. If the safety, security and continuation of our society and democracy is dependent on the product of Education, it is incumbent upon us to get it right. It is a growing concern that I have, while I watch the 6:30 P.M. News each evening. It is my twentieth Century habit that increases my Twenty-First Century concerns.
I think I read it from another post by someone on the Educator’s PLN, but there was a great story about this.
I think the guy from Ben & Jerry’s was discussing how successful he was as a CEO and how these techniques could be applied to education. Mind you, he was talking to a group of educators. Many of them were getting ticked off, and he said if he had an employee who wasn’t doing their job, he fired them, or something of that nature. Anyway, one *wise* teacher sitting up front raised her hand to ask a question.
She asked, “Where do you get your ingredients?” and he answered, “Oh, we purchase the finest ingredients, blah blah blah…” So the teacher asked, “Well, what happens if you get a bad batch of ingredients? What do you do with them?” and I guess he said he’d send them back to the supplier and fire him.
I know I’m butchering the story, but the gist was the teacher said, “Well, as educators, if we only had the best and the brightest, the BEST ingredients, we’d probably have a great product too.” But she went on to say that as educators, we don’t have the option to turn away ‘bad ingredients’ we have to make do with what we have. And sometimes it affects even the good ingredients.
So, teachers make the best of the ingredients, and tools, they have at their disposal. You can’t run a school like a business, at least not in this country.
I love your take on it, Tom. I think the Great creators of the 20th Century schools were more thinking how to occupy the time of children and thus employ more adults in the workforce. That eventually gave way to intellectual bean counters whose job it was to create something constructive for the children to do. It was all fairly simple, at first. The children had to memorize numbers and vocabulary and facts. However, somehow it all got twisted. Children didn’t do as they were told. Children who grew up questioned the efficacy of what they were taught and how it would benefit them.
And I think you are correct, you can’t run a school like a business, yet here in Alberta, the business model drives every decision we make. We say it is all for the kids, but really, the decision was based on how much money there was to pay for it.
Sorry, the second comment was in agreement of Bonnie. I jumped the gun.
Tom,
I agree with everything you say and I think you hit the nail on the head when you wrote, “I wonder is there a need to change what everyone chooses to believe.”
Belief systems are the hardest things to change. Many belief systems (such as “the goal of education is to get a job”) have been hardwired in people. It’s bad software. But for some people it is all that they know and, unfortunately, what they are “comfortable” with.
On a positive note, educators are changing and working around these belief systems the best that they can. There are many hurdles to be sure, but we have some wonderful educators and administrators ready to address these changes. There are changes (ever so subtle) being made. We have to hold onto these inroads and build upon them.
Technology and social media, I believe, are going to be a huge part of this change. Social media is growing and, I feel, is going to be instrumental in altering these outdated belief systems.
I await the day, as do you, when the little changes turn into bigger ones and reform the entire system. If we can effect the belief systems of our current students (and their parents), imagine the possibilities as they come into position of influence. It will happen.
I think the problem is more complex than outdated belief systems. At my large high school, where everyone is at least theoretically a progressive educator, the thing that stands in the way of significant scheduling change (away from the industrial model) is proprietary interests in building and maintaining huge programs such as theater and music, and sports!
We have short 40 minute periods –9 periods a day to maintain all the choices in extracurricular and elective areas for students Why can’t we have a straddled school day? Sports. Why can’t we do block scheduling? Sports. Why do teenagers have to start their day at 8 am despite all the research that runs counter to this notion? Sports. In addition, the competition out there from the college admissions demands that our students have fully scheduled days with no breaks.
Although our school is a shining model of academic excellence, technology and social media are not enough to reform the system.
When we struggle with the inertia of our traditional educational model it is important to recall that regardless of how disconnected we may have become from the original rationale for the public education design, it was and remains functional at some level. Perhaps some of this functionality is the result of individual and collective divergences from the model. Despite mandated student learning outcomes and assessments for and of learning, teachers and students find time to follow their own differentiated goals. The human propensity for divergent and convergent thinking drives this I think. We think the system is broken. I think not. I suspect it is working pretty much the way our social and economic elites want it to work. In our western paradigm there is always a scarcity of resources and competition. The system is a dream for people with social and economic capital. Why would they want to change it?
Tom:
Love it when I see such fundamental questions on why we’ve done it that way so long, when upon further thought it seems madness.
Al Shanker, former AFT president, years ago did a weekly column in the NYT and often used the cookie-cutter, box analogy as you have.
If we locked a group of right-thinking people (there have to be some somewhere, right?) in a room and asked them to design a way for K-12 kids to learn effectively in today’s world, it’s hard to believe they’d come up with a model that looks anything like the one we have.
Keep asking the questions like Socrates did. The answers are in our heads somewhere. All we have to do is elicit them out!
Cheers!
Tom King
The business model for education falls apart, because in what business is the customer mandated by law to buy? Who is the customer in education? students? parents? If the customer is students and they want to buy training to achieve a job, I am thinking they would be unlikely to select our schools for this training.
Sometimes I think schools have left the business model and joined the childcare/babysitting model. If schools do not watch children, who will? Certainly the schools where I have worked get a great deal of heat for not “holding” children during the hours their parents work. Maybe that is the real function of education…
The thinking model, the idea that ed is about growing thinking participants in a democratic society, I think that model is the least embraced by our present culture and society. i seldom hear anyone concerned about whether students learn to think critically (except teachers).
How about a “future consumers” model? Maybe that is really what we are building in our schools? People who learn to read, rite, and do rith for the purposes of buying products and keeping our market alive?
Plenty to think about…thanks.
Tom,
My name is Meghan and I am a Junior at the University of South Alabama in Mobile. I am currently studying to be a high school science teacher, and in my Educational Media class I was assigned to follow your blog.
I liked how you compared public education to the industry business. They are very similar and probably did start out similarly to what you painted a picture of. I think that we could keep this idea of an ‘industry’ related education system if adopted to the new century like the industrial world has.
That would mean we need to adapt more technology into our classrooms, like today’s businesses have done.
Doing this would not only prepare our students for the outside world better, but it would also help them with the preparing for a job bit. Even though i would love for my students to just enjoy learning for learning sake, but the truth is most do not, and I plan to at least prepare the others as best I can.
You can see my full blog and my classmates at:
wallacemeghan.edm310.blogspot.com
edm310.blogspot.com