My take is that schools will only change only as much as the surrounding communities will allow them. From my perspective, many parents fear 2.0 technology in the hands of their kids, probably because kids are far more technologically astute than they are. The fear isn’t necessarily rational, but something about a collective fear seems to make it stick harder.

I would love to blog with my students, but as of today, my district won’t give me permission; and I’m not willing to risk my job to break that barrier right now.

I have been working with my students on blogs and wikis and podcasts, and have been fortunate enough to encourage other teachers in my building and district to do so as well. This has been been very satisfying and rewarding for me as an educator and more importantly incredibly productive for my students.

I have had the belief that this type of work would help create a new story, but have often worried that I am just grafting a new limb onto an existing tree. I wonder what it would take to plant and/or create an entirely new tree.

This era more than any other feels like one of stories and narratives, of a multiplicity of voices.

Evidence of this can be seen in the enormously high number of blogs and personal web spaces.

How we support bringing stories in education to light is of concern for me, not seeking the one true story.

That’s the problem… it feels like we’re trying to find that one archetypal story. Tough to do.

You might be surprised to learn that I think Senge’s work is pretty good. My friend Tim Lucas was one of the authors of his “schools” book and was one of the best school administrators I’ve ever seen.

Here’s an example of how we are in-between stories. I believe that the dominant story regarding education for the past major period is the scarcity myth. We need to rank, sort, test and label students because we “think” that education is a scarce resource. This MAY have been true when education was restricted to 25 little desks and one big desk in a cinderblock box, but we know that even before online learning existed, the story of scarcity was wrong and destructive.

The spousal equivalent and I are traveling through Eastern Europe (I should be sleeping). Today we decided to leave Ljubljana and take the train to Zagreb, Croatia for dinner. (The pizza was wonderful in Zagreb. I recommend it.)

On the train ride back we sat with two Slovenian college students majoring in medicine. Here like in much of the world you take a 12th grade exam and the government tells you what you may study. The winners get medicine and law. The low-achievers get other professional options, like teaching (Don’t shoot the messenger. This is TRUE.)

The young man spoke English fluently and wanted to know about the American educational system. He kept asking what we taught in America (really) and had some idea that our students spend more time on projects than on “real” learning. OK, he’s an instructionist.

What really struck me was how incapable he was of imagining an educational system in which a test taken as an adolescent didn’t determine who got to enjoy an education and eventually afford to pay rent. He could not understand that education could be anything but vocational or that the government was in the best position to determine what people should study. The notion of choice, a strong liberal arts education or the idea that anyone should be able to attend college and study whatever they please was completely alien to him. The cognitive dissonance was on high.

He was also incapable of telling me how the kids who didn’t score as high as him viewed the system. I’ve worked in schools where 12 year-olds already know that their future is bleak, based on the examination system of their country. Good luck engaging them for the next 5-6 years!

Way too many Americans yearn for the type of one-test life lottery that kids in the U.K., Slovenia, Australia and New Zealand endure.

That is definitely on the wrong side of history.

-=Gary

BTW: Senge “borrowed” the concept of “microworlds” from Seymour Papert. I think he even attributes it somewhere.

I’m not saying we should try, but I also wonder if we can ever squeeze the richness of our schools and our kids into a short narrative.

Have you seen this?
Imagine a School…

“…a play written and performed by inner-city high school students from Toronto, Halifax, and Vancouver…the video depicts students’ perspectives and critiques of contemporary classroom life. Through personal stories, it envisions a high-school of the future in which the student voice is more fully articulated and acknowledged.”

Thanks for another thought-provoking post. Here’s another way to describe what’s going on: we are trying to discover what a truly democratic education might look like. Unfortunately we are dragging around this 19th-century factory-model school whose purpose is to weed out the unfit and unwilling. What we ought to do, clearly, is dump the model entirely and start over, but society has invested in it so heavily that revolution seems impossible. Thus we are stuck trying to make this elitist, hierarchical, 19th-century institution do the work of education in the 21st century.

Enter angst, frustration, burn-out.

If it makes us feel any better, the eccentric polymath historian, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, maintained that it requires the continuous effort of three consecutive generations to produce any lasting historical change.

Or as Voltaire wrote in ‘Candide’, all that is very well, but we must cultivate our garden.

Eric