Powerful Voices Rallying for the end of “The Old World of School”

Helen Parkhurst (1922): Education on the Dalton Plan

Author Statements / Implications
Real social living is more than contact; it is cooperation and interaction. A school cannot reflect the social experience which is the fruit of community life unless all its parts, or groups, develop those intimate relations one with the other and that interdependence which, outside school, binds men and nations together.
A child never voluntarily undertakes anything that he does not understand.
The choice of [a student’s] games or pursuits is determined by a clear estimate of his capabilities to excel in them. Having the responsibility of his choice, his mind acts like a powerful microscope, taking in and weighing every aspect of the problem he must master in order to ensure success. Responsibility for the result will develop not only his latent intellectual powers, but also his judgment and character.
To win the race [the student] must first get a clear view of the goal…Instinctively he seeks the best way of achieving it. Then having decided, he proceeds to act upon that decision.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to chose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and fore-ordained and he alone holds the key to his own secret. By your tampering and thwarting and too much governing he may be hindered from his end and kept out of his own. Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of nature.”
The top-heavy organization has been built up for the instructor, and with it teachers are expected to solve their problems. But I contend that the real problem of education is not a teacher’s problem but a pupil’s problem.

Tony Wagner (2010) — Global Achievement Gap

Author Statements / Implications
“The Old World of School is still run more by command and control than are many companies, as we’ll see, and students are accustomed to having teachers tell them what to do. And students almost never work in teams. Hearing these executives talk, I began to understand how ill-prepared today’s students are both for working more collaboratively and for exercising a different kind of leadership as team contributors”
Mike Summers: “We are routinely surprised at the difficulty some young people have in communicating: Verbal skills, written skills, presentation skills. They have difficulty being clear and concise; it’s hard for them to create focus, energy, and passion around the points they want to make. They are unable to communicate their thoughts effectively. You’re talking to an exec, and the first thing you’ll get asked if you haven’t made it perfectly clear in the first sixty seconds of your presentation is, ‘What do you want me to take away from this meeting?’ They don’t know how to answer that question”
Ellen Kumata: “You have to be able to take in all sorts of new information, new situations, and be able to operate in ambiguous and unpredictable ways… You have to be thrive in this environment and deliver results. Our system of schooling promotes the idea that there are right answers, and that you get rewarded if you get the right answer. But to be comfortable with this new economy and environment, you have to understand that you live in a world where there isn’t one right answer, of if there is, it’s right only for a nanosecond. If you’re afraid, you can’ think clearly”
Karen Bruett: Work is no longer defined by your specialty; it’s defined by the task or problem you and your team are trying to solve or the end goal you want to accomplish. Teams have to figure out the best way to get there—the solution is not prescribed. And so the biggest challenge for our front-line employees is having the critical-thinking and problem-solving skills they need to be effective in their teams—because nobody is there telling them exactly what to do. They have to figure it out’”

From Sir Ken Robinson — TED TALK: “How do schools kill creativity?” and “Bring on the Learning Revolution”

Author Statements / Implications
Kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they’ll have a go. Am I right? They’re not frightened of being wrong. Now, I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original — if you’re not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong… We stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.
I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won’t serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we’re educating our children.
Many of our ideas have been formed, not to meet the circumstances of this century, but to cope with the circumstances of previous centuries. But our minds are still hypnotized by them, and we have to disenthrall ourselves of some of them… The great problem for reform or transformation is the tyranny of common sense; things that people think, "Well, it can't be done any other way because that's the way it's done."
So I think we have to change metaphors. We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it's an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.
It's about customizing to your circumstances and personalizing education to the people you're actually teaching. And doing that, I think, is the answer to the future because it's not about scaling a new solution; it's about creating a movement in education in which people develop their own solutions, but with external support based on a personalized curriculum.

From Will Richardson — Why School?

Author Statements / Implications
In this new story, real learning happens anytime, anywhere with anyone we like — not just with a teacher and some same-age peers, in a classroom, from September to June. More important, it happens around the things learners choose to learn not what someone else tells us to learn.
What our kids need to know and to be able to do at this moment of rapid and radical change, the longer we wait to start a conversation around doing school differently, instead of simply better, the more we’re putting our kids at risk.
What doesn’t work any longer is our education system’s stubborn focus on delivering a curriculum that’s growing increasingly irrelevant to today’s kids.
Based on existing trends, some now predict the year 2020 will see 65 to 70 million freelancers, consultants, and independent workers representing more than half of all U.S. employees…. More and more, our children will have the chance — and increasingly, be expected — to forge their own paths to an education and into the workplace. That’s a challenge and an opportunity.
Access doesn't automatically come with an ability to use the Web well. We aren’t suddenly self-directed, organized, and literate enough to make sense of all the people and information online — or savvy enough to connect and build relationships with others in safe, ethical, and effective ways. Access doesn’t grant the ability to stay on task when we need to get something done. No matter how often we dub our kids “digital natives,” the fact is they can still use our help to do those things and more if they are to thrive in the abundance of their times.
This narrative focuses on preparing students to be learners, above all, who can successfully wield the abundance at their fingertips. It’s a kind of schooling that prepares students for the world they will live in, not the one in which most of us grew up. In this new narrative, learning ceases to focus on consuming information or knowledge that is no longer scarce. Instead, it’s about asking questions, working with others to find the answers, doing real work for real audiences, and adding to, not simply taking from, the storehouse of knowledge that the Web is becoming. It’s developing the kinds of habits and dispositions that deep, lifelong learners need to succeed in a world rife with information and connections.

From Seth Godin, Stop Stealing Dreams

Author Statements / Implications
We don’t need more of what schools produce when they’re working as designed. The challenge, then, is to change the very output ofthe school before we start spending even more time and money improving theperformance of the school.
Learning is not done to you. Learning is something you choose to do. The dreams we need are self-reliant dreams. We need dreams based not on what is but on what might be. We need students who can learn how to learn, who can discover how to push themselves and are generous enough and honest enough to engage with the outside world to make those dreams happen.
The best tactic available to every taxpayer and parent and concerned teacher is to relentlessly ask questions, not settling for the status quo. “Is this class/lecture/program/task/test/policy designed to help our students do the old thing a little more efficiently, or are we opening a new door to enable our students to do something that’s new and different?”
Our new civic and scientific and professional life, though, is all about doubt. About questioning the status quo, questioning marketing or political claims, and most of all, questioning what’s next. The obligation of the new school is to teach reasonable doubt. Not the unreasonable doubt of the wild-eyed heckler, but the evidence-based doubt of the questioning scientist and the reason-based doubt of the skilled debater.
The good jobs of the future aren’t going to involve working for giant companies on an assembly line. They all require individuals willing to chart their own path, whether or not they work for someone else.
We can amplify each kid’s natural inclination to dream, we can inculcate passion in a new generation, and we can give kids the tools to learn more, and faster, in a way that’s never been seen before. What we do need is someone to persuade us that we want to learn those things, and someone to push us or encourage us or create a space where we want to learn to do them better.