School is a societal cultural incubator.
The children of most countries spend 5 days there from approximately ages 5-18. They are presented with information and perspectives from a curriculum that has been selected by the government's education department. Values that are deemed worthy from the country are focused on and fostered in kids and at the end of it all, we essentially say you have developed the way we wanted in the incubator and you are ready to be part of the adult portion of our society to contribute with your skills. (but you will likely want some refinement first in your particular area of interest in higher education first)
There are incredible upsides and horendous downsides to using school as our cultural incubator.
Before addressing those, let's look at the story of schooling. To give it a narrative I will look through three lenses:
- conformity
- achievement
- differentiation
Each of these represents a historical era of schooling, complete with its own set of practices, values and ideals to create citizens for the kind of society it wanted.
Era 1 - Conformity (early 1800s - to present day)
Modern public schooling emerged from Prussia in the early 1800s. Prussia wanted a better military.
They felt that waiting until soldiers were 12 to begin training was a waste of valuable time. What if they could start modeling the kinds of soldiers they wanted at an earlier age?
They started taking 5 year olds and teaching them basic Language, Math and Science skills that would make them more effective soldiers when doing service in the military.
After just a few years of this experiment, it was evident that Prussia was developing an incredibly effective army. So other governments around the world started to invest in Public Schooling. Government funded, state run educational institutions for (almost) all citizens.
I am aware that I am making huge generalizations here to capture the school experience across dozens of countries, but here is what this basic Era of Conformity Education focused on:
Core Value for the Society:
- respect and obedience towards authority (images of Kings, Queens, local military leaders on the walls)
Role of the Teacher:
- source of authority and punishment (otherwise punishment was in order, including physical violence against a disobedient student)
Activities most commonly focused on:
- memorization and recitation (all of the good thinking has already been done by people wiser than you, it is your job to make their ideas your own, by reciting poems, stories, text from great speeches, religious texts etc)
Student's role:
- your only real job is to not get out of line and learn to do what you are told
School Environment to aid this:
- students were rarely organized by year, but rather a teacher would instruct students from ages 5 through 13 in the same room. Typically individual desks in rows facing the front of the room.
What kind of soeciety was present at the time? One centered around military service and the growing industrial revolution.
What kind of people do you need to have a successful military and early industrial workforce (based on long days, repetitive tasks with machine like work)? Obedient people, who won't go off doing their own thing and messing with what the larger system requires of them.
Fun Fact: I have done some research on what report cards looked like from this era. The only kind of formal report commonly given by teachers about students provided information only on attendance, cleanliness, number of behaviour incidents and sometimes the numbers of lines memorized of a religious text. Just showing up, participating and not causing a fuss and staying tidy was all that was demanded of students.
Era 2 - Achievement (late 1800s to present day)
Around the late 1800s, this model of schooling started to change due to the changing needs of the society. The industrial revolution brought with it a more free market economy and the pursuit of individual success was going to be what drove its success. We no longer just need obedient members of society.
We still need folks who will play by the rules, but they must be motivated to achieve success if our society will work.
By the 1890s schools started to take their curriculums and assign marks, based on the percentage of mastery that students could demonstrate.
All of a suddent you weren't just in the same cohort with others, you were attempting to achieve success for yourself against the government's selected topics.
All of a sudden students weren't ranked by cleanliness and lack of disruptions, rather based on how well they could do in relation to their peers.
Characteristics of this type of schooling involve:
Core Value for the Society:
- individual achievement, figuring how to strategically get ahead within the system, setting goals and accomplishing them.
Role of the Teacher:
- to share information so that students can be tested against what was presented.
Activities most commonly focused on:
- celebrating specific cognitive skills over other competencies
- experimentation to reveal previously known conclusions to verify their validity
- your ideas and opinions about topics discussed are taken into consideration (class discussions, debates, presenting perspectives in an essay etc.)
Student's role:
- getting good marks, passing class, not failing.
School Environment to aid this:
- majority of tasks are done independently to ensure proper assessment of the individual (group work is usually used more for tasks that won't be marked)
- seating arrangement may vary, the classroom in primary typically has centers or specific areas where certain jobs or activities are worked on, like a work place.
By and large we don't think of this as an era of education, we think of it as school itself.
While conformity and obedience are still very much required, they are more indirect than in the previous era.
Era 3 - Differentiation (approx the 1980s, but evidence since 1930s- present day)
This era really started to show up in Canada and Europe in the early 1990s and has been bumping up against Achievement education and is still taking root. The overall ideas though have been spreading into schools all across the world.
Eventually it was hard to ignore that the achievement era marginalized a large percent of those in the system. It created a bell curve with some who found school too difficult and either dropped out or barely got through it, while others grew bored of the easy tasks. Just like a one size fits all T-Shirt, it will work for a few, but the shirt itself fails being a great shirt.
A one size fits all curriculum to measure students against simply doesn't work for all involved. So some educational systems started differentiating tasks, curriculum and expectations so that it met the needs of the student. Authority figures in both the Conformity and Achievement eras presented the curriculum that students had to live up to. Now, the needs and abilities of students have finally come online.
What has started to change in society that required us to start moving away from the achievement era?
This is a cartoonishly simplistic summary, but basically, it used to be the case that if you did well in school, you either got into a higher end of jobs than those who didn't, or you had access to higher level post secondary schools which opened even more opportunities for you. This world still exists to a small degree, but is not the reality for most. Students leaving schools in the Western World in 2015 are entering an extremely different economy and work force than someone entering the work force in 1965.
So what kinds of things are going on in our social cultural incubator now?
Some characteristics of this differentiated era include:
Core Value for the Society:
Consensus, shared understanding, sensitivity, post modern thinking, deconstructionism.
Role of the Teacher:
- attention by teachers and staff on not marginalizing a student based on ability
- all perspectives are welcome. No ideas or positions should be marginalized.
Activities most commonly focused on:
- less focus on content and more on critical skills
- group consensus intended to develop ideas through exploration, shared discussion and drawing one's own conclusions (think modern Math problem solving/presenting techniques Bansho etc)
- differentiated tasks with a lot more group and partner work
Role of the student:
To share understanding of topics with others, present their thinking and yet see other's perspectives. Be prepared to be tested at their level of development.
School Environment to aid this:
- Individualized Education Plans so that student abilities are taken into account and the curriculum is edited so that the challenge meets their needs
- Multiple Intelligences start to be take into consideration as it is obvious their are more than just cognitive ways to be successful
- students interests in relation to the curriculum are take into account through more inquiry based approaches to ideas that must be studied
This differentiated era represents the fact that the world no longer instantly supports those who managed to achieve well in school and takes into consideration that in our post modern, globally connected world there is no one position or perspective that is universally applicable anymore.
I simply wanted to present these 3 eras to you as a framework for almost all of my future blog posts.
Soon I will attempt to:
- highlight conflicts about the future of education in terms of Achievement and Differentiated Eras coming into conflict
- highlight the developmentally advantageous and oppressive drawbacks of each approach
- explain what I think the 4th era of education will look like that is just starting to pop up now, which I am dubbing Integral.
