I had a couple more articles about some of the problems in the education industry pop up in my view this week. The first is from the Speed of Change blog (one of the best edu-blogs out there, and one which I read every day…via RSS). The post covered an experience I have had the sad fortune to have run into many times over the years (and not necessarily in the education industry).
The fact is that large organizations are de facto bureaucracies, and as such are quite resistant to any sort of change (especially fundamental change). The post’s author (Ira David Socol) was at an education conference (Educon 2.3), and was bemoaning the fact that the actual structure of the conference belied any possibility for even a discussion of substantive change.
A post relating to the Speed of Change (edu-blog) post:
http://speedchange.blogspot.com/2011/01/messages.html
So if a high school consists of classrooms and time periods and grades, can it really be a "game changer"?
And if a conference begins a day with an hour plus long lecture by PowerPoint, and is held in discrete sessions in classrooms on a time grid, can it show people how to "change that game"?
Because I talked to a student yesterday who said, "If the teacher didn’t give me a grade I wouldn’t know if I was learning." And today the conference organizer seemed troubled that I was ‘not in class.’
This post comes from what I can the edge of where the changes in the future of education may come from…
The second article comes from Stanley Fish on the Opinionator blog at the New York Times. Professor Fish has a lot of articles at this blog, and this is one of this large number which I actually agree with (a sometimes rare occurrence for me…).
Race to the Top of What? Obama on Education
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/race-to-the-top-of-what-obama-on-education
Quite another account of what is wrong is offered in a new book by sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. The book’s title is “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” and its thesis is that what is limited — in short supply — is learning that is academic rather than consumerist or market-driven. After two years of college, they report, students are “just slightly more proficient in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing than when they entered.”
The authors give several explanations for this unhappy result. First, a majority of students surveyed said “that they had not taken a single course . . . that required more than twenty pages of writing, and one third had not taken one that required even forty pages of reading per week.” Moreover, “only 42 percent had experienced both a reading and writing requirement of this character during the prior semester.” The conclusion? “If students are not being asked . . . to read and write on a regular basis . . . it is hard to imagine how they will improve their capacity to master performance tasks.”
The thesis of this article relates to many experiences I have had and seen when in college (as a student at various times from 1973 through 2008). As a matter of fact, I have a post from last Friday which deals with another aspect of this problem in college curricula and expectations… (see ‘education industry problems…).
