by Kerry McDonald, Activist Post:
The K-12 district schools I went to while growing up in a Boston suburb look nearly the same today as they did when I attended them in the 1980s and ’90s, when they also looked quite similar to how they did when my father attended those same schools in the 1950s and ’60s. Sure, there are some new technologies and updated curriculum—and more testing—but for the most part, traditional schools haven’t changed much over the past few generations.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
The world around those schools has, of course, changed beyond measure. The disconnect between the outdated structure of standard schooling and the economic and cultural realities of the innovation era is growing harder to ignore.
At a time when top jobs didn’t even exist a decade ago, and many jobs of the next decade haven’t yet been invented, most young people today continue to learn in conventional classrooms that train them to be passive bystanders, rather than active, agile pathmakers in a complex, constantly changing culture.
This conditioning starts early. The exuberance and inquisitiveness that young children naturally display is quickly constrained within a system of coercive schooling that favors obedience and compliance over originality and curiosity. With the growth of universal preschool programs, more children today are beginning this standard schooling path when they are just barely out of diapers. They learn to color in the lines, to wait to speak, and to ask permission to use the bathroom. They learn that their interests and ideas are irrelevant, that their energy and enthusiasm are liabilities. They learn to need to be taught.
Indeed, as Ivan Illich wrote in his classic book, Deschooling Society: “School makes alienation preparatory to life, thus depriving education of reality and work of creativity. School prepares for the institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught.”
This may have been more tolerable at the dawn of the industrial era, when compulsory schooling statutes were first passed and when conventional schooling created a pipeline to factory jobs that required obedience and compliance. Even then, parents like Nancy Edison recognized that standard schooling could crush a child’s creativity. She pulled her son Thomas out of school after only a few short weeks when his teacher called him “addled.” From then on, Thomas Edison mostly directed his own education as a homeschooler, following his own interests and passions.
Later in life, while working in his massive laboratory in New Jersey, one of Edison’s chemists concluded: “Had Edison been formally schooled, he might not have had the audacity to create such impossible things.” [i]
Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom
Today, we need more young people to grow up with the audacity to create the impossible things that will brighten our lives, enhance human flourishing, and improve our planet. We need more young people to nurture the qualities and characteristics that separate human intelligence from artificial intelligence. These human qualities—including curiosity, critical thinking, ingenuity, and an entrepreneurial spirit—are the same qualities that are so often eroded in our dominant system of traditional schooling.
To successfully coexist, compete, and cooperate with ever-smarter machines, humans need the chance to cultivate the cherished qualities that make us distinctly human. The type of rote, by-the-book, standardized behaviors that conventional schools inculcate are exactly what AI and other technologies are increasingly automating. To thrive in the economy of tomorrow, children need to learn how to both harness and rise above the robotic.
There are some who believe that conventional schools, both public and private, can successfully change to meet the economic and social realities of the 21st century, but I am doubtful. The continued stagnation, and in some instances increased standardization, of conventional schooling demonstrates why any meaningful educational change will come from outside the prevailing model, not in it.
I already see signs of these changes in my work spotlighting the stories of the entrepreneurial parents and teachers who are creating innovative learning models beyond the conventional classroom, including many that emphasize self-directed learning. These everyday entrepreneurs recognize the growing gap between how most schools teach and what humans need to excel in the innovation era, and are doing something about it.
Take the story of James Lomax, for example. He and his wife enrolled their daughter in a top private preschool at the age of two, thinking they would set her up for a successful path to college and career. “What we found was that the preschool was very, very, very focused on academics, on being kindergarten ready,” Lomax told me in a recent podcast episode. “So we got progress reports home saying she can only count to 100, but she should be counting to 150 at this point. And her Spanish comprehension is not where we want it to be. And around this time, it’s starting to click with me that maybe these aren’t the important things.”
Lomax had other questions for the preschool staff, such as what was happening on the playground? Was his daughter making friends? Was she learning to solve conflicts? “And I just kept getting this blank stare,” Lomax said in response to his inquiries. He felt there had to be a better way.
