Lifelong Learning Radio Series — Crossing the Finish Line

Another week, another inspiring learning story from WAMU 88.5 FM as part of its ongoing weekly Lifelong Learning series of radio stories about people’s most powerful learning experiences.

This week’s story comes from H.Y. Griffin, a Washington resident who works as a community organizer through AmeriCorps, achieved a big dream with a little celebrity inspiration a lot of community support.

Take a listen — and please spread the word!

Don’t Believe the Hype (About College)

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

It’s not what you think.

I’m a proud graduate of the University of Wisconsin (and two graduate schools). I loved college. And it’s undeniable that the United States boasts some of the best universities in the world.

I’m also someone who flunked out my freshman year with a 0.6 GPA. In fact, I’d say it wasn’t until I flunked out that I had a chance of being successful. I simply wasn’t ready for what college was designed to give me (aside from the unsupervised social time).

Although my freshman-year GPA was surprisingly low, my freshman-year experience is unsurprisingly common. Too many young people simply aren’t ready for college, for a variety of reasons – meaning they either coast through four or five years and waste a ton of money along the way, or, if they’re lucky, they crash and burn so badly that they discover, for the first time, what it is they actually want to do with their lives – as opposed to what the adults in their lives have told them they should do.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently since reading Matthew Crawford’s bestselling book, Shop Class as Soulcraft. Crawford, as you may know, got his doctorate in political philosophy from the University of Chicago – and then left a cushy job at a DC think tank to open a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond, Virginia.

In this regard, Crawford is uniquely suited to comment on three inextricably linked aspects of modern society – our public education system, our modern economy, and our shared values. And, as Crawford puts it, the news ain’t good.

In some respects, the story starts in the 1990s, when shop class started to become a thing of the past, and educators started exclusively preparing students to be “knowledge workers” – and stopped valuing the ancient notion that our hands are what make us the most intelligent of animals. Yet the clearest starting point stretches back much farther, to the early 20th century, the rise of Industrialism, and the concerted effort to separate thinking from doing – and, in the process, to begin the degradation of “work” as we have come to know it.

Any historian is already familiar, for example, with Frederick Winslow Taylor and his 1911 book, Principles of Scientific Management. It was Taylor who wrote: “All possible brain work should be removed from the shop and centered in the planning department.” It was Taylor who suggested that the modern workplace “will not have been realized until almost all of the machines in the shop are run by men who are of smaller caliber and attainments, and who are therefore cheaper than those required under the old system.” And it was Taylor whose ideas led people like Ellwood Cubberly, a former head of Stanford University’s Department of Education, to recommend in 1920 “giv[ing] up the exceedingly democratic idea that all are created equal. . . . Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life.”

What has this legacy begotten? According to Crawford, it has given us a society where the production of credentials (e.g., knowing how to graduate) matters more than the cultivation of anything real (e.g., knowing how to think). It has led us to devalue the specific skills of the craftsman, and overvalue the general knowledge of the office worker. And it has engendered the gradual WALL-E-fication of our culture, in which the larger goal becomes the creation of passive consumers whose assembly-line work environments – be they the actual assembly line or the assembly-esque world of modern office work – can only be cured by the illusory freedom we exercise when we choose different products to purchase.

The bigger concern, and the one that relates to my own skepticism about whether everyone should go to college, has to do with the changing nature of the workforce. As Princeton economist Alan Blinder has written: “The critical divide in the future may instead be between those types of work that are easily deliverable through a wire with little or no diminution in quality and those that are not. And this unconventional divide does not correspond well to traditional distinctions between jobs that require high levels of education and jobs that do not.”

In other words, it’s easier to imagine outsourcing your need for legal advice than your need for an electrician. But the point is not that no one should go to law school and everyone should become an electrician – just that the goal of our schools, our economy, and our society should be to help people find work that engages their human capacities as fully as possible. And that’s not happening. And that’s a really big problem – and one that will never be solved if our knee-jerk reaction is to urge every young person to go to college.

“The best sort of democratic education,” says Crawford, “is neither snobbish nor egalitarian. Rather, it accords a place of honor in our common life to whatever is best [for each individual].” Amen, I say. So let’s stop pretending that college by itself is a cure-all for every person. Let’s start recalibrating our schools in ways that will help children discover their worth – and acquire the skills they’ll need to unleash their full potential on the world. And let’s keep searching for ways to help people understand, in the deepest, fullest sense, what it means to be free.

Lifelong Radio Series — Our Children’s Heroes

Last night, WAMU 88.5FM, the public radio affiliate for the DC region, aired the latest in its ongoing weekly Lifelong Learning series of radio stories about people’s most powerful learning experiences.

This week’s story comes from James Woody, a native Washingtonian and the executive director of D.C.’s Bishop John T. Walker School for Boys. Woody had the opportunity to learn about influencing the next generation from one of his personal heroes.

Take a listen — and please spread the word!

Calling Bill Maher

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

After reading Michelle Rhee’s surprisingly casual dismissal of cheating allegations in DC’s public school system, I’ve decided we need to do something drastic if we want to shake ourselves out of this surreal set of conversations about school reform.

We need Bill Maher to make a documentary about education. Perhaps we can even take a cue from his first film, Religulous, and call this one “Edu-buh-cation.” Or “Stoopid.” Or “The Bee-Eater.”

Oh, wait, that one’s taken.

We need Bill because we are living in a country where smart people genuinely believe they’re talking about school reform – when all they’re really doing is talking about labor law.

We need Bill because we need to stop pretending that improving test scores is the same thing as proving that children are learning.

And we need Bill because the problems we face will not be solved by deciding if we’re for or against unions, or if we love or hate Michelle Rhee, or if we think charter schools are a great or horrible idea.

Ours is a society in seeming-constant need of some satire. And we need satire because we need some social criticism that can lay bare the idiocy of the moment, and queue up a different set of questions about how to improve public education in America.

Here are a few I could see Bill using in his interviews and profiles of people and communities:

  • What do we know about how people learn?
  • When and where were you when you learned best?
  • What are the core elements of the ideal learning environment – based on our own memories, and the best learning experiences of our lives?
  • What do we know about what motivates people?
  • What do parents want their children, when they graduate, to know, be, and be able to do?
  • What habits of mind and work will be most valuable to children when they graduate?
  • What if we stop pretending that everyone should go to college?

If this were to happen, I can guarantee we’d discover a deeper truth about what learning looks like – and requires.  We’d see that there are tons of schools and communities doing great things across the country – and we’d get the chance to learn about what it is exactly they’re doing. And we’d stop allowing the most powerful voices in the field to keep pretending that what we seek is as simple as replacing bad teachers with good ones, seeding more charter schools, and pretending that the solutions we seek can all be attained within the walls of our schools.

We need Bill Maher because he’s already doing this – as he did recently when he mocked the simple narrative that has developed in this country around “fat cat” teachers.

We need Bill because this issue is too important to keep being mischaracterized – as it was in that remarkable graphic in Waiting for Superman, in which a teacher attempts to pour “knowledge” into the empty heads of the passive, seated students, all in order to criticize the elements of the system that were affecting the teacher’s “aim.”

And we need Bill because the only way we can snap out of this stupor is if someone helps us see the ridiculousness of it all, makes us laugh at our own stupidity – and shames us into rethinking our approach.

We can do better. And Bill Maher can help us.

Bill – call me.

What’s Your Declaration of Education?

Those pesky EduCon folks are at it again.

Earlier this year, I wrote about a small, networked, eclectic tribe of educators who attended a conference at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, and who, with great energy and determination, pledged their shared commitment to bring about a different type of public school system by agreeing to the following core values:

  1. Our schools must be inquiry-driven, thoughtful and empowering for all members.
  2. Our schools must be about co-creating — together with our students — the 21st Century Citizen.
  3. Technology must serve pedagogy, not the other way around.
  4. Technology must enable students to research, create, communicate and collaborate.
  5. Learning can — and must — be networked.

For me, EduCon was a Come to Jesus moment – a time when I found adults who shared my fidelity to a language of possibility that was solution-oriented, relationship-driven, and future-focused. And now I see that they/we are at it again, this time via a drive “to remind ourselves and our students that citizenship means asking questions, finding answers and standing up for what you believe in . . . and that education must mean that too.”

The vehicle for this lofty goal is something known as The Great American Teach-In and, if it works, the result will be, on May 10, thousands of classrooms, students, and schools drafting their own Declarations of Education.

The Teach-In website has useful resources for anyone who wants to structure a conversation that results in an actionable set of aspirational goals toward the creation of healthier, higher-functioning learning environments. And the conversations will all be framed by a core set of essential questions:

1.     When and where do I learn best?

2.     What does an ideal learning environment look like?

3.     How closely do our current places of learning resemble our ideal learning environment?

4.     What barriers to learning/growth exist within our current learning environments?

5.     What will we do to make our current learning environments more perfect places to work and learn?

What I love about this idea is it assumes the best people to change the landscape of public education are those closest to the day-to-day workings of our nation’s schools – educators and students. After all, although there is much to dispirit us with the state of our school system, it does educators no good to assume these ills have merely been “imposed upon them”, and that they have no choice but to keep hoping, as passive victims, that better days lie ahead.

As the great quantum physicist David Bohm once said, “Thought creates the world and then says, ‘I didn’t do it.’” So, too, is it with the current state of public education in America – and all of us have a choice: remain complicit, and passive, in the acceptance of a system that denies us the ability to create truly transformational learning environments; or become active agents in solving our own most intractable problems – and creating spaces for people to reflect on their ideal learning environments, and then think together about how to create those environments as soon as possible.

Sound like a good use of your time? Check out http://declarationofeducation.com/ to learn more and get involved. We can do better – and it is up to us to make sure that we do so.

What If Learning — Not Fighting — Were the Focus?

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

As accusations fly back and forth over the reported DC cheating scandal – the latest in a series of battles between America’s two dominant Edu-Tribes – I can’t help but wonder what would happen if we stopped spending so much time focusing on what is broken or who is to blame, and started focusing instead on how people learn, and how we can create better learning environments for everyone.

This week, as part of an effort to spur such a conversation, a coalition of individuals and organizations is doing just that — envisioning a movement of adults and young people in search of better places to work and learn, and highlighting powerful learning experiences to make a larger statement about how and when transformational learning occurs.

I am proud to be a part of the campaign, which is called Faces of Learning, and which aspires to help people understand we are all effective learners, with differing strengths and challenges. Kim Carter, executive director of the Q.E.D. Foundation, a non-profit organization that is a member of the coalition, explains: “We want to elevate four essential questions that are, alarmingly, almost completely absent from the current national conversation about school improvement: How do people learn? How do I learn? What does the ideal learning environment look like? And how can we create more of them?”

To help provide the answers people need, Faces of Learning is asking people to share personal stories of their most powerful learning experiences; attend and/or organize public events at which people think together about how to improve the local conditions in which people learn; and use a new interactive tool called the Learner Sketch, which invites users to explore their own strengths and challenges among the various mental processes that influence learning. Rather than just categorize the user as a certain “type” of learner, the Learner Sketch feedback actually suggests strategies users can try to help them become even more effective learners. Users can also explore what research is teaching us about how we learn, and find resources that help improve the overall learning conditions for children (and adults).

Ideally, of course, a campaign like this would be unnecessary. And yet, when one looks back at the last 15 months – a period in which school reform has been at the forefront of American life, from “Race to the Top” to Waiting for Superman to the endless coverage of Michelle Rhee or the union fight in Wisconsin – what becomes clear is that we haven’t been having a national debate about learning; we’ve been having a national debate about labor law. And while that issue is important, it is a dangerous stand-in for the true business of public education – helping young people learn how to use their minds well.

What if our efforts were squarely focused on the true goal of a high-quality education, instead of the hidden goal of a well-funded few?

What if each of us could identify our own strengths and weaknesses as a learner?

What if each of us had the chance to discover – and contribute – our full worth and potential to the world?

What if all of us came to both expect and demand high-quality learning environments throughout our lives?

It’s a great and worthy vision. And before any of those things can happen, we all need to work together to see more clearly what powerful learning actually looks like — and requires.

Join our efforts – and share your voice – at www.facesoflearning.net.