Everything Tagged with 'Waiting for Superman'
‘The Classroom is Obsolete’
A great piece by Prakash Nair, responding in Education Week to the never-ending call for “education reform”:
Lost in all this hand-wringing is the most visible symbol of a failed system: the classroom. Almost without exception, the reform efforts under way will preserve the classroom as our children’s primary place of learning deep into the 21st century. This is profoundly disturbing because staying with classroom-based schools could permanently sink our chances of rebuilding our economy and restoring our shrinking middle class to its glory days.
The classroom is a relic, left over from the Industrial Revolution.
Indeed, this is perhaps the most fundamental flaw of all education reform efforts in the past several decades, while at the same measure the most stubbornly – even vehemently – ignored. Go back and watch Waiting for Superman, for instance – the documentary widely heralded “to save public education.” You won’t find even a passing consideration in it of the most fundamental elemental of education: individual students and learners. Nor will you find any challenge to the past industrial-era mindset of education as a passive “conveyor belt”-like consumption of knowledge – in fact the documentary almost criminally perpetuates this destructive model, while ignoring a vast decades-old body of scientific research that proves that learning doesn’t happen this way.
Instead of considering this most basic element of education, Waiting for Superman – like so many education reform debates and efforts before it, and I’m sure many more to come – settles for skirting the issue and blowing around more hot air. It seems almost dogmatically fixated on the relatively superficial things in public education, like teachers’ unions and rubber rooms, student tracking and charter schools – incorrectly labeling these things as the root problems of (or, in some cases, solutions to) our system, without even stopping to consider whether it could be something more fundamental.
That’s the problem in the “education reform” world: We’re not lacking for magic answers, for solutions that we’re sure will “fix the system”. The thing is they’re useless, though, and will continue to be, so long as we avoid asking the right questions.