Education

The Big Debate on American Education

November 4th, 2011 // 4:39 pm @ Oliver DeMille

Home Schools, the New Private Schools, and Other Non-Traditional Learning

The current national commentary on American education is split by a major paradox.

On the one hand, nearly all the experts are convinced that our schools must find a way to effectively and consistently teach the values and skills of innovation and initiative.

If we fail in this, everyone seems to agree, the competitiveness of U.S. workers and the economy will continue to fall behind other nations.

As Gary Shapiro wrote:

“Our nation is looking into the abyss. With a blinding focus on the present, our government is neglecting a future that demands thoughtful action.

“The only valid government action is that which invests in our children. This requires hard choices…

“America is in crisis. What is required is a commitment to innovation and growth. We can and must succeed.

“With popular and political resolve, we can reverse America’s decline…. America must become the world’s innovative engine once again; we cannot fail.”

And education is the key.

On the other hand, many of the top education decision-makers seem committed to only making changes when there is a consensus among educators, parents, experts and administrators.

They adamantly criticize any who take bold, innovative initiate to improve the situation.

In the meantime, they wait timidly, albeit loudly, for a consensus which never comes.

Because of this view, the innovative success of many parents in home schools, teachers in small private schools and other non-traditional educational offerings go unnoticed or undervalued by the national press.

The reality is, as Orrin Woodward put it: “If everyone agrees with what you’re doing, it isn’t innovative.”

The growing Global Achievement Gap in our schools, as outlined by Tony Wagner’s book of this title, presents an ominous warning for Americans.

We can change things if we choose, Wagner says, by adopting the following values and skills in our school curriculum: critical thinking, agility, adaptability, initiative, curiosity, imagination and entrepreneurialism, among others.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan quoted Wagner in Foreign Affairs:

“…there is a happy ‘convergence between the skills most needed in the global knowledge economy and those most needed to keep our economy safe and vibrant.’”

He also foreshadowed the decades ahead by quoting President Obama:

“The nation that out-educates us today is going to out-compete us tomorrow.”

It is difficult to imagine our public schools meeting these lofty needs if our teachers are expected to be anything but entrepreneurial, innovative and agile, when they in fact work in an environment that discourages and at times punishes precisely such behaviors.

It is even more impossible to make the needed changes to our education system if we must wait for everyone to agree on a consensus of action.

Change always comes with a few courageous souls taking the lead, showing what can work, and helping others follow their innovative path.

The only way we’re going to see a burst of innovation and initiative in American education is to start paying attention to the myriad exciting educational innovations already occurring.

As Malcolm Gladwell suggests, the leadership right now in many arenas—including education—is occurring outside the mainstream, led by “Outliers” who just forget the experts and create new and better ways of doing things.

If you are one of these educational innovators—at home or in the classroom—keep taking the lead. You are the future of American success!

Category : Education &Family &Featured &Leadership &Liberty &Mission

Education Reform Won’t Work Anymore.

October 3rd, 2011 // 10:57 am @ Oliver DeMille

We Need a Transformation!

A Review of Ken Robinson’s Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative

This is an excellent book. Here are some of Robinson’s main points:

We are living in a time of global change, whether we admit it or not.

“As the world spins faster and faster, organizations everywhere say they need people who can think creatively, communicate and work in teams: people who are flexible and quick to adapt. Too often they say they can’t find them. Why not?”

Young children think they are creative; most adults think they aren’t creative. What causes the change over time?

The truth is that our educational system does a lot of harm to some of our most needed abilities and qualities. “Some of the most successful people in the world did not do well at school…. Many succeeded only after they had recovered from their education.”

With education so vital to advanced post-industrial society, why is it that the legacy of education now seems to include a reduction in creativity, initiative and innovation in so many people? And what can be done about it?

Robinson addresses these questions head on:

“Current approaches to education and training are hobbled by assumptions about intelligence and creativity that have squandered the talents and stifled the creative confidence of untold numbers of people.”

I was interested to note that people haven’t lost their creativity or creative ability, just their “confidence” in these abilities. Many adults are also out of the habit of using their creativeness. In my view, the conveyor-belt model of learning has caused this result in the lives of most people.

Robinson:

“This waste stems partly from an obsession with certain types of academic ability [e.g. rote memorization, early academic success rather than lasting academic interest, etc.] and from a preoccupation with standardized testing. The waste of talent is not deliberate. Most educators have a deep commitment to helping students do their best….

“The waste of talent may not be deliberate but it is systemic. It is systemic, because public education is a system, and it is based on deep-seated assumptions that are no longer true.”

The challenge is that given this systemic, structural reality in our educational models, the time for reform is past. “The challenge now is to transform them.”

Robinson writes:

“As Thomas Friedman, author of the World is Flat, puts it, ‘Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait…. Those who have the ability to imagine new services and new opportunities and new ways to recruit work…are the new Untouchables. Those with the imagination to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies will thrive….

“Our schools have a doubly hard task, not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.’”

Top global business and public sector leaders “overwhelmingly agree,” Robinson notes, “that the single most important leadership competency for organizations to deal with [the] growing complexity is creativity.”

“All over the world, governments are pouring vast resources into education reform. In the process, policy makers typically narrow the curriculum to emphasize a small group of subjects, tie schools up in a culture of standardized testing and limit the discretion of educators to make professional judgments about how and what to teach. These reforms are typically stifling the very skills and qualities that are essential to meet the challenges we face: creativity, cultural understanding, communication, collaboration and problem solving.”

“The challenge now is to transform education systems into something better suited to the real needs of the 21^st century. At the heart of this transformation there has to be a radically different view of human intelligence and creativity.”

Robinson’s solutions:

Increase access to education
Change the way we educate
Help students learn to ask more questions
Promote a diversity of subjects, talents and interests
Increase exposure to the arts and sciences
Rethink disability as deep ability in something
Personalize and individualize
Help students become their best selves rather than emphasize fitting in
Stop penalizing individuality
Stop penalizing mistakes; promote mistakes as essential to the creative process and positive to learning
Teach across the academic fields and remove barriers between topics of knowledge
Officially make feelings as important to learning as thinking
Make authenticity a key part of learning
Stop acting as if life and learning are linear
Restructure schools and businesses to encourage creativity
Fund creativity, and give people time to be creative
Allow each school to be unique
Use new technologies to help individualize the education of each student
Help the student be the primary creator of her own program
Be creative and flexible with the schedule; great learning is the thing, not some list of rules, schedules and plans

This is a truly excellent list of educational transformations. This book is as important to America as Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy, or my own book A Thomas Jefferson Education—or at least it should be. Every educator, political official and parent should deeply consider how to apply the reforms it suggests. This is more than a great book, it is a necessary book.

If Robinson’s book has a weakness, it is that he gives too little attention to the role of teachers. He mentions how important teachers are, but in my opinion he doesn’t go far enough. The reality is that teachers are the lynchpin in all education and educational reforms. If you have a great teacher in the room with your student, you’ll watch the young person experience improved and eventually great education. If not, you won’t. It really is this simple.

Great teaching results in great learning, because great teachers inspire students to engage the act of getting a great education for themselves. Such education always increases creativity, innovation, imagination and initiative. Great teachers bring great education. Period. Even with all the changes listed above, without great teachers, very little real change will occur. With great teachers, however, such reforms will naturally catalyze a genuine transformation.

Maybe Robinson’s next book will be on how to be a great teacher. If we implement the suggestions he made in Out of Our Minds, even in our homes or a school where we have influence, we will be ready when such teachers come along.

Category : Blog &Education

Definitions That Matter, II

September 26th, 2011 // 10:49 am @ Oliver DeMille

As I have said before, one mark of ruling classes in society is the understanding of nuanced definitions. In American society, the original design was for the regular people to be the rulers.

Here are some words that need to be closely considered, understood and discussed by the regular people who care about freedom:

Administration
Aggression
Allegiance
Alliances
Amendments
Aristocracy
Authority
Balances
Banks
Borrowing
Business
Centralization
Character
Checks
Citizenship
Civil Rights
Classes
Common Law
Communism
Community
Consent
Constituent
Constitution
Contracts
Courts
Culture
Currency
Defense
Democracy
Diplomacy
Duty
Economy
Election
Empire
Equality
Ethics
Executive
Faction
Fallacy
Fallibility
Family
Farming
Federal
Feudalism
Fiscal Policy
Force
Foreign Policy
Forms of Government
Freedom
Good
Goods
Guilds
Human Nature
Independence
Independents
Individuality
Investment
Judgment
Judiciary
Jury
Jury of the Vicinage
Justice
Law
Leadership
Legislature
Leisure
Liberal Arts
Liberal Education
Liberty
Limited Government
Local Government
Loyal Opposition
Mercantilism
Mixed Government
Modernity
Monarchy
Monetary Policy
Natural Law
Oligarchy
Optimism
Ownership
Political Economy
Political Parties
Politics
Popular Sovereignty
Positive Law
Powers
Pragmatism
Precedent
Principle
Private Property
Profit
Progress
Propaganda
Prosperity
Providence
Public Office
Public Opinion
Public Policy
Public Virtue
Realism
Reason
Representation
Representatives
Republic
Rights
Savings
Separation of Powers
Slavery
Social Contract
Socialism
Society
Taxation
Tyranny
Utilitarianism
Wealth
Wisdom

Category : Aristocracy &Blog &Citizenship &Constitution &Culture &Economics &Education &Featured &Leadership &Liberty &Mini-Factories

On Reason, II

September 26th, 2011 // 3:51 am @ Oliver DeMille

Aquinas held that angels are intellectual beings because they know all things, while men are merely rational beings because they know little and therefore must figure things out.

Descartes and Locke differentiate between intuition and reason by arguing that intuition can be believed without demonstration while reason requires that we demonstrate every step of our thinking.

Since each person must reason out each answer on his own to really use reason, the fact that others have outlined their thinking at every step makes reason easier to follow and to expand upon than intuition. Also, the argument goes, reason can be used to analyze and test intuition, while the opposite is seldom true.

The Bible discounted this view, comparing the rationalist “goats” with the more obedient and intuitive “sheep.” In much of Western culture, the term “sheep” became a negative name given to those who refuse to think things through.

Religious icon Aquinas, who certainly cannot be accused of not thinking things through,[i] argued that those who trust God’s full knowledge more than man’s limited knowledge are in fact more rational than those who believe in man’s abilities.

Ultimately, Aristotle taught, all demonstration rests on certain indemonstrable truths. Human rationalism can extend our understanding, as can science, but it cannot prove or disprove every detail.

However, rationalism is based on the assumption that there are truths in the universe, and that the use of our minds can help us learn these truths. In fact, modernism is based on this same concept.

For example, if there are no universal truths then math, logic and the scientific method are all flawed and useless. All of these depend on the ability to discover and detect truths that are out there.

Reason is the most democratic thinking method to date because it holds that each individual person can use it without depending on experts or elites.

In fact, it is how the regular people can analyze and test the words and assurances of the experts and elites. The other major methods of arriving at truth—from science, math and logic to theology, aestheticism and credentialism—depend on the assurances of experts.

Jefferson goes as far as saying that the people are bound by duty to use reason as they oversee government. The committee of founders which approved The Declaration of Independence agreed with this assessment.

A free people is a deep-thinking, well-read, independent-thinking people.

[i] His works are the longest and among the most logically and meticulously argued of the great books.

Category : Aristocracy &Blog &Citizenship &Culture &Education &Generations &Government &History &Leadership &Liberty &Science

On Reason

September 23rd, 2011 // 3:16 am @ Oliver DeMille

In the American founding era, most of the leading thinkers were rationalists. This means that they believed in reason as a top method of determining truth.

Note that the general concept of reason has changed since then. When most people think of reason today, they tend to mix it with the ideas of logic, science and determinism. In the American colonial and early republican era, this was not the case.

The term “science” was often used to mean general thinking and the idea of learning, and in this sense it coincided with the rational perspective. But today’s technical science, based on a general consensus of experts along with the empirical use of the scientific method, is quite the opposite of the rationalist viewpoint.

And logic, which is actually a branch of mathematics (rather than philosophy), is very different than reason.

Reason, in the original sense, is the use of one’s own mind to test and analyze the words of the experts, the ancients, and all authority.

In the founding generation, reason was a check and balance on the smug groupthink[i] of the upper classes and elites. Most of the leading founders usually used the term “right reason” rather than simple “reason,” since this first phrase carried the connotation that all right-thinking people would come to the same conclusions if they had the benefit of adequate information.

In this view, no king, priest, aristocrat or expert can rely simply on some claim to a “divine right” of expertise to be correct—each individual citizen can test everything said by the elites simply by taking the time to obtain all needed information and then think it through.

Forrest McDonald wrote in the introduction to Empire and Nation, a collection of writings by American founders John Dickinson and Richard Henry Lee:

“In the historical view, men have such rights as they have won over the years; in the rationalist view, men are born with certain rights, whether they are honored in a particular society or not.”

Using reason, leading American founder John Dickinson wrote:

“Ought not the people therefore to watch? to search into causes? to investigate designs? And have they not a right of JUDGING from the evidence before them, on no slighter points than their liberty and happiness?”[ii]

It is always up to the people to maintain their freedom, and one of the first steps is to think—independently as they see fit—regardless of the assurances, promises and statistics of experts and elites.

Throughout history, the experts have nearly always worked for the elites, and the regular people have held reason as their first line of defense. When the regular people put expertise, tradition, authority or official promises above their own reason, they have always lost their freedoms and prosperity.

Dickinson put it this way: