Readiness is the Language of Servitude

The learning in school should be continuous with that out of school. There should be a free interplay between the two (John Dewey. Democracy & Education, p. 288).

I.

I was reading the post, Social Media and the Law: The Future of Online Defamation, by Aron Solomon and Jason Moyse and it got me thinking about the current aim of public education in the US to make all students college and career ready. Aron writes:

As 1Ls (first-year law students), both Jason and I learned about defamation law. We might as well have learned nothing, as the explosion of technology is about to result in an even larger boom in this area of the law.

Aron and Jason are writing about the changing (and emerging) understanding of defamation as it is being applied to social media based situations.  What interests me here is their claim that their former education lacks significantly in preparation for the new twists in understanding defamation. Applying the law to potential defamation cases that occur as a result of social media renders their former education as incomplete.

This makes me wonder about the efficacy of trying to ensure that all high school graduates are college and career ready. Might such an aim be off track?  Perhaps even, foolish?

II.

The CCSS makes a pretty large claim--a claim that is bold and hopeful as it is sophomoric and delusional.

The standards were created to ensure that all students graduate from high school with the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in college, career, and life, regardless of where they live. 

I do not imagine many can actually believe this claim when they study it, especially given the impossibly narrow focus of the CCSS on school-based math and English language arts. How can the skills and knowledge most needed for children who will be graduating high school in 2028 be known? Consider Aron and Jason's assertion that the highly specialized post-graduate work of legal studies each took did not readily prepare them for the litigious world that has been disrupted by social media. Our world never stands still. The world we partially name from our skewed points of view today cannot be the world we will name in 2028. Getting millions of children ready for a future we cannot know is a fool's errand.

• Is there a set of skills and knowledge that are most important?  And for whom?  In what context? 
• Is there causality between the skills/knowledge selected by a handful of college educated people in 2009 and college, career, and life success in 2028?  
• What are the meanings of success? Which of these matter most?  For whom?
• Was it even possible for this small coterie to know what is most essential for your child to know? For mine? For the Athabaskan child living in an Interior Alaska Athabaskan community? For the child who hears music as a language and uses this as self-definition? For the dancer? For the child in living in El Paso, Texas? For the artist? For the child being held in a detention center? For the child living in Lost Springs, Wyoming? For the tinkerer? For the lost one?  For the prodigy?
• Is there a set of educational standards that can be the key to equity in an increasingly inequitable country? 
• Is learning a matter of what we know? Unknow? Relearn? Not know?

What are we being sold here?  And perhaps most important: What is escaping our notice while we pander to this bill of goods?

III.

The last few weeks have found me teaching at a public high school in the South Bronx, a K-8 public school in the central ward of Newark, NJ, and at a public school in a wealthy suburb of New York City. The economic and safety issues and assets that frame each of these places is not without influence on what is learned, unlearned, and not learned by the students who attend school at each of these sites.

What is essential are often matters of geography and time.

The CCSS claim reminds me of the earlier school outcome via No Child Left Behind Act that 100% of the tested children in the United States would demonstrate school based math and reading proficiency by 2014. Even though such a claim was idiotic, an entire country swayed to its power for the better part of a decade.

What did we stop paying attention to in order to pay attention to this end goal that could never have been realized?

IV.

John Dewey in Democracy and Education told us that "the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth" (p. 85).  Continued capacity for growth. Further he warned that it is critical that the aims of education arise freely from one's experiences or else the aims will be "ulterior aims of others" (p. 85).

And this is the centrality of what I am writing about here and what I have written in too many posts to count. Agency is at the center of learning and the desire to learn.  Doing unto others via impositions of uniformed standards and annual standardized testing distracts us from learning by encouraging our active and/or passive resistance. This happens at the pupil and teacher levels.

We are always staring at something that is at best a distraction, chasing with dollars that which cannot be realized.  Standardized visions of learning pay homage to sameness--to readiness. Dewey warned us:

Exorbitant desire for uniformity of procedure and for prompt external results are the chief foes which the open-minded attitude meets in school. The teacher who does not permit and encourage diversity of operation in dealing with questions is imposing intellectual blinders upon pupils--restricting their vision to the one path the teacher's mind happens to approve. Probably the chief cause of devotion to rigidity of method is, however, that it seems to promise speedy, accurately measurable correct results. The zeal for 'answers' is the explanation of much of the zeal for rigid and mechanical methods. Forcing and overpressure have the same origin, and the same result upon alert and varied intellectual interest (p.145).

Kneel down before standards and find yourself unable to see the larger picture. Your vision is boot high. Readiness has always been the language of servitude.

The Wide Space Between Personalized Learning and Personal Learning is Choice of Action

Finding Eden (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

When something is personal, agency is required.  When something is personalized, the receiver is acted upon, not acting.  Personal learning requires the learner to be the doer--the actor. Personalized learning situates the learner as the recipient of something that another has determined. 

Personal learning is inhabited by a body. Personalization requires no such agency on the part of the learner and matters of agency are ones we need to consider.

Justin Reich in a recent EdTech Research blog raises questions about the term, personalization.  He writes:

"Personalization" has won the hearts of every camp in education. Whether you are a market-based reformer, an open education advocate, or a 21st century Dewey partisan, everyone agrees that learning should be personalized: learning experiences should be tailored to each individual student. We also agree that personalization is made feasible by new technologies.

Since we agree on these broad principles, we should expect fierce battles over the specifics, over "what we mean by personalization."

Let me be frank: I'm not a fan of personalized learning and I can say squarely that it hasn't won my heart.  Nonetheless, I did wonder at the definitions that Reich might offer. He provides the following understandings of what personalization via 'technology' means:

using technology to individually diagnose student competencies on standardized tests and then apply algorithms to adaptively deliver appropriately challenging content to each student to help them perform better on those tests. It means taking the factory model of education and giving every kid an assembly line.

For some, personalization means that technology opens a world of information and expertise to every student, empowers students as explorers and creators, and lets them follow their interests and passions in diverse directions. It means blowing up the factory, and building something else (maybe creative agencies).

Although these definitions are offered as different, I wonder if they really are.  If we ask who is the agent in each scenario, we do not come up with the learner.   In the first, the learner is situated as sick and the remedy is personalization that is provided through technology.  In the second, technology again (How ubiquitous is that?) has donned the pants so to speak and is the actor that grants learner permission to follow interests and passions, as streamlined through the technology.  Reich says in the first example, the learner is given a new assembly line and in the second example the factory model of schooling is exploded. But is it, really?

At the center of a factory model is control: The owner's control over the worker; the school's control over the learner.  Something other is determining the limits of another's actions. The wrappings of the second model may not look like a factory, but without will and agency it retains a similar level of control--just one that is dressed differently.

Personal learning is quite different as it is, well, personal.  It requires the learner to act, to make decisions--even (and perhaps especially) ones that may be considered 'poor'.  It does not safeguard, coddle, enforce, limit, encourage, or coerce the learner towards a specific direction--as such matters rest in the learner's hands. Whereas personalization requires following; personal learning requires thinking, being.

Interestingly, Reich alludes to the division between Edward Thorndike and John Dewey towards the end of the post and suggests that the differences between the two definitions of personalization he offers are akin to the philosophical differences between the two men.  Hmm.  I don't think Dewey would have liked either definition. 

As I read the post, I was reminded that some years ago I published an article titled, 'Choice of Action: Using Data to Make Instructional Decisions in Kindergarten' with an obvious nod to Dewey (1916) who noted: "The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action" (p. 351). 

Dewey's right--the difference between ready-made and continuous formation is the difference between personalized and personal.

We make ourselves by our actions. Agency is required.

It is this ready-made vs. continuous formation that offers us the sharpest insight into the gross differences between personalization and personal.  Personalization eschews a body, while personal learning is fully embodied; it happens alongside the continuous formation of self. 



Work Cited:
Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education. New York: Macmillan.

A Room of One's Own: Building a School with Kids

No Lemming Left Behind (2009)

I grow tired of the education arguments. They seem so circular, pointless really.  It seems to be either all "Rah Rah Rah, public education is the best!" or "Look at all the students public schools are failing." Neither is particularly helpful, but perhaps that isn't the intention. I know we get a lot wrong in public education. I have seen it first hand as a teacher, administrator, and mom.  Saying so does not mean that I want pubic education dismantled. I just want it to be better (in)formed, more relevant and inspiring for all who participate, but especially for the kids.

I was driving a car full of kids today who asked me would I consider opening a "home schooling classroom" (their phrase, not mine). When I asked them why, they offered these reasons:

1. I won't get detention for reading ahead in a book.
2. We can game.
3. We can go on lots of field trips (to NYC, to the shore, to the lake) and hike, look at tide pools, just go outside.
4. I wouldn't have to sit at a desk.
5. I wouldn't have to sit still.
6. I  might learn to read. It's hard for me now and I don't like it.
7. I could stay on one thing for awhile and really learn it.
8. I could study history and travel around and write about it.
9. We could skype with other kids, like the ones we game with now. (They named gamers from three continents).
10. I wouldn't get in trouble for talking.
11. Instead of just reading about something I could make stuff.
12. No stupid homework.
13. I could make animated films.
14. I could do real chemistry.
15. I could bring my iPad to school and use it.
16. You won't take my phone away if you see it & give me a detention. 
17. No test packs. 
18. Sometimes I want to do the teaching.
19. I could make mistakes and not get an F or be threatened with getting an F.
20. We could have fog days*.

When I asked what they would miss about school they had two responses: friends (although they seemed to think all their friends would be enrolled in the home schooling classroom) and certain foods sold in the cafeteria.

I thought a lot about their responses and realized that it wouldn't take much to build the type of school (or home schooling classroom:) that would honor their rather meager requests.  Embedded in the different ideas expressed was the idea of choice. It seemed to be most paramount and I know that it is a necessity for learning deeply.  Choice matters and we should honor it in schools. I also thought about their desire to experience the world more directly. Is it really such a foreign concept to want to experience the world and remake it through various forms; to connect with others within and beyond our national borders; to be able to use the technologies they use everyday freely while learning?

I know some classrooms (in public schools) that approach these ideas, but no schools that fully embrace experiential learning and choice.  Nonetheless, it seems only a matter of will to make such a school with kids.

Any takers?

*Fog days is a family euphemism that means playing hookey from school in order to make photographs because it is such a great fog day to shoot.