Education funnels and webs of learning

There has been a lot of discussion recently about the personalisation of education. The sticking point is that most education is publicly funded, the state has a major stake in how it's conducted, and therefore dictates what should be taught in schools. Because of lack of space, time and resources (you will always have this problem when the state intervenes) there is little latitude for personalised approaches and creativity is stifled. Every child gets the same content, and every child is tested in the same, standardised way. The result: children become disenfranchised and demotivated, teachers are exhausted and demoralised, schools are positioned unfairly in league tables, and governments measure success not through human achievement or creativity, but through cold, hard statistics. This is universal education, and if one size does not fit all ... tough. Shame no-one has told the powers that be that universal education is unachievable.

Ivan Illich railed against this mindset way back in 1970 in his anarchical, visionary critique of the school system. In Deschooling Society, Illich called for personal learning through informal learning networks, and rejected the funnelling approach of mass, unidirectional, instructivist education systems. More recently, powerful modern day visionaries such as Stephen Heppell and Sir Ken Robinson are saying the same thing. They ask how we can sustain a factory model of education 'production', where children are 'batch processed' according to their age groups. It's obvious to any teacher or parent that children develop at different rates, and all have different talents and interests. I suppose we have Jean Piaget and his fellow 'stage theory' psychologists to thank for that kind of constrained thinking.

In their current configuration, says Robinson, most schools kill creativity. The picture above was taken in 1909. If those students could jump into a time machine and be transported a century or so forward to 2011, what would they be amazed by? Jumbo jets, motorways? Satellites and HD television? The internet, medical science? Mobile phones and credit cards? They wouldn't recognise any of those. One thing they would almost certainly recognise though, would be the school classroom. It has been largely bypassed by the last century of progress, because institutions are very hard to change.

Heppell points out that creativity could be encouraged and personal learning achieved through the use of handheld technologies such as mobile phones. When they use these tools, he says, children are in their element. When they walk into the classroom, they are told to switch off all devices, and in doing so, the school switches off the child too. Gaming consoles could also be used to personalise learning, engaging children in playful learning, something which Heppell strongly advocates. But ultimately, teachers have a vast array of personal learning resources at their disposal thanks to the social web. Students must choose their own personal tools - if they have tools imposed upon them there is little scope for personalisation. Schools are now beginning to incorporate some social media into their lessons and even allowing children to use mobile and handheld technologies during lessons. It's starting, but it's slow progress. If students are shown a range of tools and then allowed to choose which ones they would like to use, if they are allowed to create their own personal webs and choose their own connections, we might begin to see some very personal learning taking place in our schools.


This post was first published on August 8, 2011.


No more funnels by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The industrialisation of learning

The industrial model of education that has such a strong grip on schools has been critiqued by a number of high profile commentators, from Ivan Illich (1970) and Paulo Freire (1970) through to contemporary commentators such as Stephen Heppell and Sir Ken Robinson. Indeed, Robinson's 2006 TED talk video goes as far as to say that current schooling is stifling innovation and creativity, and squandering talent. The video has been viewed over 11 million times, which shows that the message clearly resonates. Robinson argues that children are educated out of creativity. He warns that if we are not prepared to take risks and get it wrong occasionally, we will never come up with anything original. The education system, he complains, is predicated on academic ability to the detriment of art and creativity. Watch this entertaining and challenging video to grasp the full value and impact of Sir Ken's message.

Alvin Toffler (1980) describes a number of features that maintain the status quo in society, including synchronisation of behaviour, standardisation of content and maximisation of resources. Robinson talks of 'batch processing by age', another erroneous strategy schools still employ for convenience rather than for the wellbeing of individual children. It is a mass production of education, or as Noah Kennedy once put it 'The industrialisation of intelligence.' A closer look at school systems reveals that these features remain central to the management of education. These were ideal features to prepare children for a future of work in industrial settings. But time has moved on and schools have not. We now work in fluid situations were more often than not, there is no 'job for life' and portfolio careers are dominant.  

The future of work is more uncertain now than it has ever been. We are preparing children for a world that we cannot yet clearly describe. It makes sense for schools to reappraise their mode of operation and decide what to change to engage children with learning in new ways, to develop them into independent learners, agile thinkers, creative and innovative in all they do. Only then can we be assured that we have done our very best for them.

NB: In my next few posts, I'm going to critically explore several of the school strategies Toffler and Robinson have identified, and offer some alternative approaches to promote independent learning and creativity.

Image by Steve Wheeler

References

Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin.

Illich, I. (1970) Deschooling Society. London: Marion Boyars Publishers.

Kennedy, N. (1989) The Industrialisation of Intelligence. London: Unwin.

Robinson, K. (2006) Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity. TED Talk Video available online at http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html (Accessed 29 June 2012).

Toffler, A. (1980) The Third Wave. London: Pan Books.

The industrialisation of learning by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Dead philosopher society

Remember the Dead Poets Society? It was a movie starring Robin Williams as a maverick teacher who causes ructions at an ultra-conservative American prep school when he uses his unauthodox methods to engage and inspire his students. It was a heart warming movie, and if you could get past Williams' emetic impersonations, it had a strong message for educators everywhere: dare to take a few risks. The fact that one of William's young charges commits suicide in the film is a bit of a dampener, but there is some interesting underlying philosophy in the screen play. Hmmm... philosophy...

Are you interested in philosophy and have a Twitter account? If the answer to those questions is 'yes', it so happens that Twitter has its own Dead Philosophers Society. Yes, there are famous philosophers on Twitter - alive and tweeting. The accounts are all fake, obviously, but if you want a daily dose of philosophy to make you think, ponder life or something to quote to irritate your friends, colleagues or family, your favourite sage is probably out there somewhere, just waiting for you to follow them. Many of the accounts simply tweet unadulterated quotes from published works or well trodden aphorisms from their late authors, but one or two may engage in dialogue with their followers. Here are a few of Twitter's philosopher accounts I have stumbled across (and occasionally retweeted) in the past few days. Explore for yourself ... and follow whom you will:

Mikhail Bakhtin
Roland Barthes
Pierre Bourdieu (in French)
Gilles Deleuze
Jacques Derrida
Paulo Freire
Ivan Illich
Jacques Lacan
Friedrich Nietzsche
Claude Levi-Strauss
Susan Sontag
Ludwig Wittgenstein

If you know of any other dead philosophers who are still alive and tweeting, and want to recommend them, please add their links in the comments box below.

Image source


Dead philosopher society by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

No more funnels

There has been a lot of discussion recently about the personalisation of education. The sticking point is that most education is publicly funded, the state has a major stake in how it's conducted, and therefore dictates what should be taught in schools. Because of lack of space, time and resources (you will always have this problem when the state intervenes) there is little latitude for personalised approaches and creativity is stifled. Every child gets the same content, and every child is tested in the same, standardised way. The result: children become disenfranchised and demotivated, teachers are exhausted and demoralised, schools are positioned unfairly in league tables, and governments measure success not through human achievement or creativity, but through cold, hard statistics. This is universal education, and if one size does not fit all ... tough. Shame no-one has told the powers that be that universal education is unachievable.

Ivan Illich railed against this mindset way back in 1970 in his anarchical, visionary critique of the school system. In Deschooling Society, Illich called for personal learning through informal learning networks, and rejected the funnelling approach of mass, unidirectional, instructivist education systems. More recently, powerful modern day visionaries such as Stephen Heppell and Sir Ken Robinson are saying the same thing. They ask how we can sustain a factory model of education 'production', where children are 'batch processed' according to their age groups. It's obvious to any teacher or parent that children develop at different rates, and all have different talents and interests. I suppose we have Jean Piaget and his fellow 'stage theory' psychologists to thank for that kind of constrained thinking.

In their current configuration, says Robinson, most schools kill creativity. The picture above was taken in 1909. If those students could jump into a time machine and be transported a century or so forward to 2011, what would they be amazed by? Jumbo jets, motorways? Satellites and HD television? The internet, medical science? Mobile phones and credit cards? They wouldn't recognise any of those. One thing they would almost certainly recognise though, would be the school classroom. It has been largely bypassed by the last century of progress, because institutions are very hard to change.

Heppell points out that creativity could be encouraged and personal learning achieved through the use of handheld technologies such as mobile phones. When they use these tools, he says, children are in their element. When they walk into the classroom, they are told to switch off all devices, and in doing so, the school switches off the child too. Gaming consoles could also be used to personalise learning, engaging children in playful learning, something which Heppell strongly advocates. But ultimately, teachers have a vast array of personal learning resources at their disposal thanks to the social web. Students must choose their own personal tools - if they have tools imposed upon them there is little scope for personalisation. Schools are now beginning to incorporate some social media into their lessons and even allowing children to use mobile and handheld technologies during lessons. It's starting, but it's slow progress. If students are shown a range of tools and then allowed to choose which ones they would like to use, if they are allowed to create their own personal webs and choose their own connections, we might begin to see some very personal learning taking place in our schools.


No more funnels by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.