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What is the true value (if any) of organized schooling?
There are so many people suggesting that schools kill creativity, learning is innate & children can learn by themselves, no real life skills are acquired in the current school system, etc. -- the list is really long! If this is all true and we all agree that organized schooling needs big reform, I think we have to step back and ask the ultimate question about the value of organized schooling!
I make a distinction between learning, education and schooling -- with schooling being an attempt to govern/institutionalize education and education representing formalized learning. I think this is important as often people refer to school as the only place where education happens, ignoring programs like the Khan Academy or not to mention the millions of homeschoolers in US alone. They also confuse education with learning, but Sugata Mitra's child-driven education shows that the learning that happens when kids are given tools and left on their own devices is neither formal, nor it can be governed. (He uses the term education tad wrongly, though I suppose with purpose as his is an example of bringing learning and education together.)
I would like to challenge the TED community to think about the value of their own schooling or the value their kids currently in the school system are getting and share their thoughts here!
Randy W Horton
Colby McGrevey
Katrina Musick
Tyler Vega
Manuel T. Ortega
A system that teaches critical thinking, problem solving, self-reliance and inter-dependence would increase the likelihood for success and possibly happiness, for more children.
Nadine Shozuya
Peace
Uday Madaan
Jamelle Sanders
Ross Kleiman
To me, there is a lot of value in organized education in that it is the most efficient way we know of to educate the majority of people (although there are certainly great alternatives out there). I feel that students should be encouraged to search for outside resources and given opportunities to explore their passions. Ultimately, it is up to the individual to embark on any sort of auto-didactic work, but they should be encouraged as much as possible along the way.
jag . 50+
Good side: If your on a course you like, then there will be parts that are very interesting, and these are enjoyable to experience.
L Alex
Invested parents/individuals want an education that teaches students to ask more questions. So do teachers. I/we want to have in depth discussions on art, music, politics, literature and science. I/we want to empower our students with the confidence to ask questions and then the ambition to find answers to those same questions.
Public education does need reform; however, it is public. Not all parents are as involved and it shows in the classroom. As many of you have posted, education starts at home. Some parents are not physically available for their children because of financial burdens or others are not interested. All of these students are in class with your wonderful child.
If we truly want to change education, then we need to come together. Communities and education. Children need someone to look up to and help them make sense of their world. Those children who do not have support at home might find support from a parent/adult that is interested in them.
A lot of decisions are being made about education without educator/parent input. If you want to be informed or you want to make a difference, get on the school board. Talk to the teachers. Visit their classrooms. Ask questions.
David Williams
The relation of organized schooling to educational achievement thus leading to social development thru technical advancement cannot be underestimated....hopefully for better & not worse.
The ability of organized schooling to deal with the longer term negative effects(i.e. social exclusion due to perceived inferiority) of organized schooling, well that's another matter.....I believe that is why more and more people are now trying to find alternative education methods which teach for 'better' individual and societal needs.....
Certain legacies of Organized schooling have bred social instability.....i.e. increased industrialization & mechanization leading to accelerated environmental depletion , warfare induced technical evolution surges, diminished self reliance, diminished local, national and international resilience, raising of false hopes (many are losing faith in the higher educated, is there another book burning on the way ?)....
In Organized schoolings’ favor, many of these negative legacies of our recent evolution can be attributed to the increased dependency on money as a social organizer rather than the implementation of organized schooling.
We now live in an age where there is a growing battle between resource and ability to access it, those that have battled to the 'top of the money tree' don't understand the incentive to climb down and share the view...hence the growing perception that society is becoming more exclusive than inclusive.....
There surely is a valid argument to whether the 'Enlightenment period' of organized schooling should be renamed....
Proposals;
1) The un-enlightened period
2) The era of accelerated social instability
3) The era of the Ivy League Legacy of Social ILLS ( The era of ILLS)
David Williams
Evolution clearly shows a 'wish' to enforce order on chaos. Organized schooling is I believe part of that wish.
The question now is whether government led society (i.e. the United Nations) can utilize much of what was & can be gained from organized schooling and implement it to bring about a stable environment on a globe of peaceful equal opportunity, with a long term view of propagation of our species, across the known universe.
You would think this would mean investing in the positives of technology & organized schooling i.e. educating for our needs including the reduction of competitive job procurement, alternative energy, massive land reclamation and reinstating, openly structured government encouraging the participation of all, geo-engineering to influence natural cycles…….
Yet we have and have had….natural environment degradation by over industrialization, investment in the war machine rather than the mediation machine… suppression of alternative energies and other technologies, because of it’s perceived infringement on the profit making abilities of the private industrial ladder of hierarchy….the ignorant stupidity of elitism out of step with the needs of a growing world population on a planet of ‘finite’ resources.
Irrespective of waffle….organized schooling seems to have reduced (at least in this country) occurrences such as this…
http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~calderdalecompanion/kk_85.html
http://www.flickr.com/photos/8976830@N03/4843795147/
http://www.opendemocracy.net/paul-rogers/toll-of-world
Walter Wilkins
That said, the complexity of the question rests with its verb.
toni powell
I homeschooled / almost unschooled my 5 kids for various periods of their lives. Some got most of the time at home and some got only a few years. They are now all grown up and have left home.
I am in a good place to have seen how this works...
We mostly homeschooled because we wanted to raise confident, resilient, caring and curious kids who would make a contribution to their world.
We did not do it to improve them academically, we believed that if they felt good about themselves and others that they could learn anything later on. It was an experiment that we entered into nervously.
We read all we could as almost no one in Australia was homeschooling then. Could it be true that left alone kids would learn on their own. Sounded mad but surprise surprise.... it worked.
Keeping them home for much of their school life made for kids who can teach themselves. On his first year of school our then 14 year old aced the national science exam coming in the top 6%... having done almost no formal science and reading no textbooks. I am still baffled by that! He had a reading age of 32 when he was 12 and we had no focus on academics!
There are so many stories to tell about this... best of all we had virtually no teenage angst, relationship stress and our kids are amazing adults with great marriages and two are making significant contributions to their world.
They are all extraordinarily creative, lateral thinkers and socially confident. They are all very caring and turned into wonderful friends.
4 of them have children and all of them are unschooling or homeschooling their own kids.
I have one question:
"Why do people keep thinking that socializing is best done with a small group of immature people in one age group?" It does not make sense. Our kids were socialized by being with people of all ages and nationalities. They have friends across all age groups.
Vincine Fallica
Your 'controlled group study' was very interesting, thank you. I suspect the genes your children received (and the people who contributed them) had a lot to do with your children's success. Congratulations, and thank you for improving the gene pool.
Julian Blanco 30+
Thanks for your post!
I have a two year old daughter, and considering options, would love to home school, but think I can’t if I have to work…
Can you pls send me a list of the bibliography you read/recommend?
Thanks!
JB
jag . 50+
toni powell
Hailey and I have made a few award winning shorts together and are now tackling a feature doc on gratitude.
Hailey is the one who was homeschooled the longest as I got sick for a few years and the other kids were in school on and off but Hailey was already left home by the time that happened.
Dick Deason
Concur 100%. I grew up in Brick and Mortar Schools (60's-70's), but had more opportunities than most to "socialize" with a large stratification of world society. Participation in multiple sports, a variety of recreation, travel across the US, and working with my parents, at home as well as professionally, catalyzed interactions that would never have happened in the best of Brick and Mortar schools. My sons are receiving the same socialization format, and are consistently viewed as highly mature, introspective, and well educated.
margrethe Ulvik
Jon Wolfe
Sarina Hannon
Goran Kimovski 500+
I'd like to share few excerpts here as they're highly relevant to this discussion:
"Direct instruction really can limit young children's learning. Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific. But it also makes children less likely to discover unexpected information and to draw unexpected conclusions."
"That means, it's more important than ever to give children's remarkable, spontaneous learning abilities free rein. That means a rich, stable, and safe world, with affectionate and supportive grown-ups, and lots of opportunities for exploration and play. Not school for babies."
Robert Hooper
Goran Kimovski 500+
Overcoming the false environment problem and extending the learning outside the classroom is a major issue that requires involvement from the students, the parents, the community really. For example, to keep presence of French in our home (and we're already bi-lingual with English and Macedonian) we're turning the language into one we use to play. With a bit of an effort on my side, I am trying to remember few words and learn few sentences myself and then challenge my daughter to teach me more by playing guessing or matching games. This past weekend we did a pretend game calling some girl from Paris on the "phone" and my daughter spent 3-4 minutes talking in French with her in an unscripted conversation -- it turned out the girl was poor and we needed to make some cloths for her, but the materials were on a different planet ;-)
I'd love to hear more ideas how to keep the experience in the schools spill out of its walls. Rather than turning to homeschooling, I would like to help schools reinvent themselves so they can offer rich learning experiences and become environments where the authentic self is appreciated and the learning is the goal!
END ... (3 of 3)
Goran Kimovski 500+
One thing that is offered by learning environments that work and seem to be lacking from the school setting is the opportunity for the learner to immerse in the experience. As long as the kids are split by age and the curriculum controlled by the teacher or some far removed bureaucracy, the schools will only provide false sense of immersiveness -- as one French teacher described to me the environment inside the French Immersion schools here in Canada. (sadly, my own daughter is in one such environment, which is a point of pain for me, but that is a different story!)
What the teacher meant by the false environment is that in her classroom, she is the only one that is constantly using French and is motivated (or at least incentivized) to keep on doing that as a way to offer the experience to the kids. The kids find it very easy to slip back to English, since once they're outside the classroom, they have no reason to keep speaking French.
CONTINUES ... (2 or 3)
Goran Kimovski 500+
- What makes us the authentic selves we all seem to show when not inhibited by social pressures or need to comply?
- Do we become those authentic selves as we grow up or we've always had them with us and what we really learn is when to be someone else?
- If the current schooling system teaches us how to comply and keep the authentic selves in a hidden place, can schooling and education ever be positive forces that nurture our propensity to be curious about the world, wishing to discover it for ourselves, create new value through our passions, and maybe even change it!?
I agree with many of the comments why the current system doesn't provide enough value or on the contrary does more damage instead. However, my interest is not in finding the flaws, but finding if the concept of "learning in an institution whose goal is teaching" has any value in it at all.
One underlying theme I can see bubbling up from many comments is that schools provide an environment where the kids can learn and experience stuff they ordinarily have no chance to in other places. Some of the learnings called out seem to include how to follow directions, meet deadlines, work in groups. On top, some of you suggested that we need schools for the socialization aspect, in particular the opportunity to interact with adults outside the family circle.
CONTINUES ... (1 of 3)
Peter Myers
For the factory owner or the incarcerated?
Take the bait?
Lovingly, :-)
Peter
Matthew Stingel
I realized–at about the time of exiting secondary education–that organized schooling was truly only a way of reinforcing conventional knowledge and setting some form of standards to live by. Unfortunately, I'm not able to speak from the viewpoint of someone who has experience growing up in an urban setting. The cultural variety, and hopefully the availability of more than 5 AP classes would more than likely foster a much more creative student body.
Even having said all of this, I believe that truly great teachers, those who can magnify these "standards" imposed by boards and governments can really be the true savior to this endemic.
Sarina Hannon
Kevin Ringeisen
http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/2010/10/14/rsa-animate-changing-education-paradigms/
In the video, the speaker mentions something - the fact that today's schooling is still based on the outdated industrial revolution. Whereas I wouldn't go so far as to say the parallel englightenment period thinking should be done away with, there are some considerations that should be made. The speaker made the following points:
1.) Public schools were designed for the industrial revolution and in the image of them.
2.) You've got factory type schedules (Think how bells mimic shift-changes for factory workers)
3.) You've got compartmentalized departments (For example, is statistics math or social science? Knowledge doesn't have an intrinsic line of demarcation and we should be emphasizing interdisciplinary thinking in todays age.
4.) Students are created in batches (classroom) where their - apparently - most important commonality is the year of manafacture (See how students are grouped together as class of 2011, or 2012. This inadequately explains real learning differences between students of the same age).
5.) Finally, no student is the same and a society that aims at creating a standardized human population will not survive, especially today. Ford's assembly works great with building cars but when it comes to people, you quickly begin to realize that some come pre-built, some with parts missing, some even without instructions. Some of the same parts go in different places for different students. It's like saying a one-size fits all t-shirt is going to fit an octopus.
To answer the question, I do have concerns about publicly mandated schooling, and about the way such programs fit into democracies in general. There is way too much of a distinction between school and life. The two aren't naturally separated and to doing so just increases the tension of the student.
Vincine Fallica
Once upon a time we had one room school houses with one teacher for all grades. Granted there was a lot less knowledge then, but it did have the advantage of the older students helping to teach their younger school mates, effectively lowering the student teacher ratio and also benefitting the older students as well, among other things.
I think something was lost when school systems were restructured to make processing students through an education system as economic as possible. The priority became moving students though a system as efficiently as possible for the benefit of the system at the expense of the student. I’m not advocating a return to the one room system necessarily. I’m advocating for many different systems, academic, apprentice, etc., maybe the one room among them.
It will be more difficult to judge the success of several systems. You would have to question each student to see what they learned and how they learned best. It would be time consuming, just like a tailor made suit. But it would serve the students better, which would in turn serve the society better.
Re: Coxsackie-Athens Valedictorian Speech 2010. That was great!
Qazi Fazli Azeem
Ray Jefferd
John Arleth
Without it, how would we use the computer on which we are pondering this question?