LearningReImagined

I spent some time this weekend reading Clay Shirkey’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. While the book is not directly related to education or schools, it is a cogent analysis of organizations in times of dynamic change. I was struck by the similarity of the content to some reading I did in the last century. More about Pat Dolan’s Restructuring Our Schools: A Primer on Systemic Change (1994). I want to go back even further to 1990 when Seymour Sarason published The Predictable Failure of Educational Reform. The reason that all three of these books are important is that it appears to me that we are stuck on some giant hamster wheel, moving something with great energy while the wheel and hamster stay in the same place.

Sarason makes a number of key points summarized here.

1. Schools have been intractable to change and the attainment of goals set by reformers. A major failure has been the inability of reformers to confront this intractability.
2. Change will not occur unless there is an alteration of power relationships among those in the system and within the classrooms.
3. The assumption that schools exist primarily for the growth and development of children is flat out wrong. That assumption is invalid because teachers cannot create and sustain the conditions for the productive development of children if those conditions do not exists for teachers.
4. There is an unbridgeable gulf that students perceive between the world of the school and the world outside of it. Schools are uninteresting places in which the interests and questions of children have no relevance to what they are required to learn in the classroom.

I think he has it right and the failure of reforms before his writing and after helps explain the giant hamster wheel and why we haven’t moved a bit.

What’s missing from the school reform ideas is systems thinking and analysis. Unless and until we focus some of our thinking on the tough issues raised by Sarason (and many others) and look more deeply and thoughtfully at the education system we’ll continue to exhaust ourselves on the wheel with one “reform” after another. It’s hard and agonizing work—so far we’ve chosen not to engage. And I’m not sure that if we have the courage or desire to do that difficult work. If we dealt with Sarason’s ideas I’m not convinced we’d retain “school” as a way of learning, especially now.

Menken: for any problem there is a simple, direct answer that is wrong.