We’ve all been through school, and I mean that in a literal sense - We got through it. That’s what everyone does in school. They tolerate it. That doesn’t mean that we got much out of it, or that it was a peak experience, or even that it was particularly effective. And I would assert that it’s not. Think about it. Would you like to do school over again, just for the fun of it? Even a week of it? I seriously doubt it.
A lot of ink, research and reform has been invested in trying to improve school, or at least make it basically effective. But it’s still not. The achievement gap has not changed for over 50 years. An average of over 60% of US students do not score proficient for college or career. And why not? We had No Child Left Behind. We had STEM. We had the small schools movement, Career Technical Education, the computer revolution, charter schools, personalized learning, a myriad of strategies and learning theories, and the Every Student Succeeds Act. Yet, we’re still in the same place...if not worse, due to the pandemic. And I’m sorry, but I don’t think AI is going to fix this either. That’s another essay!
I believe that what’s wrong with school is much deeper, structural and systemic. It starts with our misunderstanding of what school is. Or rather, what education is. We mistake school for education, for that matter. Education is something much higher in concept. I think most people could agree that it means a societal organization that fosters learning, the deep understanding of a rounded curriculum, and the full development of all of the youth for life, college and career. Given the statistics, school isn’t there yet.
I would go even further. I believe education should be how we design the cultivation our society’s intelligence and our continual upward progress. It is how we engineer our society to adapt and evolve effectively, so that everything improves over time. We get better through education. It is a solution to problems we face - climate change, social justice, well-being, war, crime, media literacy, etc. We should learn to identify and solve our societal shortcomings, and improve our understanding and effectiveness over time. Our current educational system clearly can’t aspire to that.
Our current educational system merely delivers content and measures whether it is temporarily in the brain. It appears to be trying to maintain the status quo of our complex society and to perpetuate it. And failing at it, at least for most students, and for our complex, evolving future.
The complaints about our current educational system are well known. It was designed in the industrial era, and has all the characteristics of a factory, including: a regimented, conveyor belt methodology, one-size-fits-all pedagogy, passive and top-down learning process, siloed subjects, content and testing-centered, memorization-based, emphasis on failure, monotonous, etc.
The antidote to all of this should be clear. Education should be focused on learning and improving the learning process itself. That process needs to be student-centered, engaging, meaningful, purposeful, interactive, collaborative, and rewarding.
It may be surprising that our educational system isn’t focused on learning. In actuality, it’s focused on teaching. Its primary teaching method, direct instruction, is a method of instruction, not of learning. We then assume that students learn through good teaching. That’s the foundation of our problem. We assume education is a one-way process. The teacher teaches the information, and the student absorbs it.
In fact, learning must be primarily self-initiated and conducted, from the student side. It is commonly acknowledged, and supported by ample research, that students need to make their own sense of the content. It’s not some automatic process. They need to actually grapple with new ideas, and integrate them into their viewpoint. Think about this idea of education I’m presenting as an example. It takes work to interpret, understand and to adopt a new perspective, and thus remember and apply it later in new situations.
The second mistake we make in education is that this passive form of learning is somewhat permanent. That once students ‘know’ something, because they read it in a textbook and answered a quiz about it, it will be there for a while, and that we can build on it. Yet research shows, and everyone has experienced, that this superficial form of learning fades quite rapidly. In effect, we are building on a weak foundation, like sand. This is the nature of our neuroplasticity; our brains constantly adapt to ongoing conditions. They don’t naturally retain information they don’t immediately need.
Therefore, this antiquated mechanical education system, which is built on a weak model of learning, cannot possibly deliver this higher concept of learning and education. The ultimate goal of education should be learning to learn, and improve learning, and to aspire to a higher level of intelligence.
In short, I am proposing an evolutionary model of education. We need to develop a system that cultivates intelligence and accelerated learning. In other words, the educational system needs to be a cognitive system that engenders metacognitive abilities for all students. It needs to develop a love of learning itself. This is far beyond our current model of education.
How do we do this? Please read my explanations and descriptions of media arts education (MAE). In essence, MAE infuses cognitive and metacognitive capacities into the system through engaging projects of creative inquiry. When one engages in these processes repeatedly and regularly across various subject areas, and in various media arts forms, this creative inquiry grows the student’s capacity for learning and their interest in and mastery of a variety of interconnected subjects. Eventually, they can begin to form their own lines of inquiry and become self-directed, lifelong learners. This becomes the basis of a cognitive system of learning, that is primarily about learning, and that improves its understanding and cultivation of learning over time.
