Just Another Factory

[omorka]

Those of you who are educators, or who have ever toiled in the profession, you can skip this.

Otherwise:

I am sick and tired of people who think education is a godsdamned assembly-line job.

It's the model we have, I understand. Ever since we abandoned the one-room schoolhouse, these brick buildings have been, metaphorically, factories. There are 5 or six stops on the assembly line, and here the elementary teachers stand, with their rulers and their chalk, to rivet the right places on the malleable minds. Then the line forks, wish some units getting music bolted on, others art, or shop, or ROTC. Six or seven more stops, each with six to eight steps. Then the units roll off the end of the line to go join factories of their own.

There didn't used to be any quality control, and then the plutocrats who bought the units off the line complained that some of them were defective, or the bolts fell out. Just before the last couple of stops, now, in all the government-owned factories, an inspector comes in and tests each unit. The ones that fail are sent back through that stop on the assembly line again. Occasionally, an inspector will even admit that it wasn't that stop that had bits missing - it was some earlier stop - but we can't send a unit back down the wrong way on the assembly line, can we? And of course, privately-owned factories we all know are superior, so there's no mandatory QC check on them.

*spit*

There are dozens of reasons to repudiate this model, but I assert first and foremost that the biggest one is that it totally devalues the student.

A child, adolescent, or young adult is not a passive recipient of bits of learning bolted on by a teacher like pieces of sheet metal. If you, as the teacher, approach it that way then the vast majority of the bits will fall off into the great bit bucket. Any learning is a cooperative effort, and there is nothing a teacher can do that will make a student learn something if that student is actively resisting, or even passively resisting.

I am not a pitcher, pouring knowledge into the empty cups of the students; it's more like taking a model apart, demonstrating what each one looks like, hoping that the kids have the raw materials already (and knowing where to point them if they don't), and showing them how to construct the same model for themselves. But even if the pitcher metaphor worked, even if it didn't require active effort on the part of the kids, you can't force a kid to drink.

In short, any educational model that considers the student a passive recipient, or assumes that every child is inherently an enthusiastic participant in his or her own education, is going to (epic) fail. It will fail the kids, and it will fail the greater culture in which it is embedded.

And it is this, more than anything else, that I think is the great problem in public education. Fifty years ago, a kid who didn't want to be there was allowed to mark time until it was legal for him or her to drop out, and then he could join the Army or go take a drudge job in a factory or drive a combine on the farm, or she could get married, get pregnant, and take care of kids for the rest of her life, preferably in that order. And while this was a tragedy, it was not a huge one; people who didn't earn a high-school diploma could still work, live, eat. They may have lived lives of quiet desperation, but then so did middle-aged housewives with a year of college under their belts before they earned their MRS degree. The kids who stayed in school had a motivation to stay there - they wanted to go to college, or they wanted to become foremen at the factory and so needed that diploma, or their parents wanted them to stay because they valued education, or they wanted to graduate with their friends.

Now, we know better than that. Education is mandatory in almost all states until the kids' senior years; schools are penalized for having high dropout rates. One in three kids in their junior year in high school now is someone who wouldn't have been there fifty years ago. And the schools can't brush them off into a vocational track at the start of junior high, either - which is a good thing, but it means that kids who want vocational education, things like carpentry and textile arts and welding and auto shop, are often not able to find them now, and certainly not in junior high middle school.

What we desperately need is not necessarily 'better teachers,' although encouraging women to enter elementary education as a major because "it's easy" or steering highly capable undergraduates away from education as a career choice doesn't strike me as a good idea. What we need is a way - more accurately, a panoply of methods - to motivate students, starting from the early grades and continuing through the end of twelfth grade at the very least, to not just show up but to choose to participate in their own learning. We don't need better textbooks, or fancier technology in the classroom; we need non-coercive ways to draw kids' interests. Technology may well be part of that, for many kids, but it is no cure-all.

And still, I suspect that a 0% drop out rate and a 100% passing rate - which, make no mistake, with a few exceptions for special ed kids, that's what No Child Left Behind will ask of us, and sooner than you think; that's what that title means - is not in our power. I mean that literally; that is not in our power to do, because the achievement measured is not ours. It's the kids'. Anything else denies their personhood, and makes them nothing more than units on the assembly line.

Comments

[kansas-dave.livejournal.com]

Are there programs out there -- they would have to be private -- which eliminate age-based education entirely? I can imagine a school which offers sequences of classes in different subjects, and lets students test up or down the sequence rather than expecting them to be at some 'age-appropriate' level.

[altamira16.livejournal.com]

I think that would be useful in general due to the shift in the speed of the work cycle.

[iamjw.livejournal.com]

I have taught at two schools (Canadian and private elementary) that do that in some form, but not entirely. Note that neither of these schools have external testing of the sort omorka is talking about.

The first was a parent-run co-operative alternative school which had ten students. I was the only teacher. The students worked at their own pace through Math and Language Arts work. We did all the other subjects together, which meant that they were learning material that was sometimes grade-appropriate and sometimes higher or lower.

The second is a private school for gifted children. The Math program is set up so that students can move up (though not down) to the level that suits them. The high school students are able to take credit courses in their own year and the year above them. Again, not down.

The argument in elementary school against children moving down revolves around social needs rather than academic ones, although we always have children transferring in from the public schools who find our very advanced curriculum challenging (for example, my Grade 5 math class actually learns grade 7/8 math).

The current government of Ontario promised in its campaign that it would bring back apprenticeship programs for those children not academically inclined/interested. I voted for them based on that, as my nephew effectively dropped out of school at age 13 (though they kept him around until he was 16 as that's the law) and would have benefitted greatly, and been much happier, had that program existed then.

[omorka.livejournal.com]

That's pretty much how the one-room schoolhouse worked. There are homeschooling curricula that follow this model, but as far as I know, no private programs. While some charter schools promise to "meet the kid where they are" or some such platitude, they all do so with the aim of getting the kid up to "grade level" eventually. And schools or curricula that permit radical acceleration are relatively rare, although letting a kid move one or even two grade levels ahead in certain subjects is common enough.