Will Richardson

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“Never”

January 18, 2023 By Will Richardson Leave a Comment

“Never,” was the answer.

The question?

“Do you ever have conversations in school that touch on the changes that are happening in the world that will affect your life outside of school?”

Honestly? Not shocked.

That student is a part of a diverse team we’re working with in a school that’s trying to figure out its path forward at a moment when every path feels pretty murky. And it came up because that same student said she felt a little unnerved by the picture we were painting of the world we’re all trying to navigate. Climate, AI, challenges to democracy, equity and justice issues…the list goes on.

A lot of things are unnerving right now.

But I wonder why we’re not talking with kids about these things in age-appropriate, real ways? (I’m assuming that student’s experience isn’t an outlier, I know.) If our job is to “prepare them for the world they will live in,” which is what everyone seems to say it is, then isn’t it also our job to talk with them as candidly as we can about what that looks like?

And isn’t it also our job to then focus on the dispositions that our children will need to develop in order to learn their way through all the messes we’re leaving them?

We’ve heard in other groups that many students seem more angry now, more willing to push back against the status quo of school. We’ve heard that enough for us to wonder what might be the cause. The pandemic, sure. And the stress of the world that kids absolutely feel.

But I wonder if it’s a response to “never.” I wonder if it’s this increasing divide they feel between school life and real life, and they’re sensing our inability (or unwillingness?) to bring real life into the conversation.

We’ve never been in a moment where our kids engage with the world in ways that are so different from the ways most adults do.

Maybe they’re wondering where we are.

Filed Under: Change

The Parent Opportunity

March 28, 2020 By Will Richardson 2 Comments

Right now, we have millions of parents shouldered up to their children trying to help them do school. I’m reading a fair share of both funny and sad accounts of parents who are trying to navigate this new role of surrogate teacher or coach in terms of setting schedules or giving feedback or making the technology work or just getting “coverage”. Frustration levels are high, and my sense is that most parents can’t wait for this to be over and will be happy to send their kids back to school. Not all, but most.

For progressive educators who are looking to this “crisis” as a way to make real change happen in schools, the opportunity right now is not to change practice but to change minds. Now is not the time to figure out what parts of the school experience are truly broken and what we need to create as an alternative. As an old friend reminded me recently, now is about “getting thru,” about making sure that we survive the disruption not just in a curriculum outcomes sense but in a health and wellness sense as well. People are grieving. Forced change like this is stressful to the max. We need to minimize the upset, not create more.

That said, I think all of us would be remiss if we didn’t use this moment to begin to build a different conversation around learning. Again, all these millions of parents in close proximity to their kids, observing “learning” right in front of them. It’s a moment that will be relatively (I hope) short-lived, yet it’s also a moment where we if we seize it, allows us to reflect deeply as school communities about the central commitment that we share for our kids, that they become powerful learners in the world. It’s a moment where we can begin to change the larger story of school.

Getting Meta

In other words, now is the time to get meta with parents, students, and teachers about learning. And we can do it in the service of learning about learning. Whether through survey or live Zoom discussions or email or whatever else, right now is when we need to be asking these questions and engaging in these conversations:

  • When is your child most engaged with their online school experience? Why? What drives that engagement?
  • When is your child bored or disengaged? Why?
  • When do your children feel joy in learning? What circumstances lead to that?
  • What are you learning about your children during this experience? How does that learning happen?
  • How are your children’s learning skills improving during this time? What’s changing about them as learners?

I’m sure there are others, and we can vary them for the audience, but you get the idea. We can collect and share these answers at the appropriate time as a way of sparking a larger conversation about what learning really is, what aspects of school really aren’t working, and how we can bring more joy and love of learning to “real” school moving forward. And it would be a spark built on our personal, collective experience as qualitative researchers asking relevant, important questions about our kids.

Let me say it again: we need to do this work now. I really believe this is the real opportunity of this crisis for those who have been itching to reimagine school. Real change has to start with a community-wide, shared understanding of what learning actually is, how it happens, and what constrains it. This moment, when so many families are huddled inside together trying to make sense of school, we can be creating a powerful conversation about learning that will serve us all when we’re done “getting thru.”

Filed Under: Change

School as Fiction

February 19, 2020 By Will Richardson 5 Comments

I’ve been expending a lot of bandwidth lately reading and thinking about the meta story of school, not just the history of the system and of pedagogy, but, more specifically, the motivations behind the story we’re currently living and how they effect the potential for deep and powerful learning that we all say we want for kids.  That means diving into some new (to me) edu-historians and thinkers and trying to connect what I’m learning to others who have been tweaking my thinking for a long time. Frankly, it’s a lot to make sense of, but I think it may be time to try. Feedback welcomed.

Let me start with Yuval Noah Harari, who has been stuck in my craw for the last few years after I read his 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. The other day, a lengthy, fascinating piece about Harari popped up in the New Yorker, and one idea in particular jumped out at me. The author of the article is talking here about Harari’s most famous book, Sapiens:

In the schema of “Sapiens,” money is a “fiction,” as are corporations and nations. Harari uses “fiction” where another might say “social construct.” Harari further proposes that fictions require believers, and exert power only as long as a “communal belief” in them persists.

If you recognize schools as “social constructs” which, of course, they are, that’s a provocative idea, no? Schools don’t exist in nature. We’ve constructed them to meet some type of societal need, primarily to collectively educate our young. We see them as a public good, aimed at perpetuating democracy (at least in the US) and creating a more just and livable world. (More on the purpose of schools later.)

The idea of schools as “fictions” is bracing at first. But if you flip the idea over a few times, less so. The narrative of schooling runs deep, but it is simply that: a narrative. A story. One that depends on our “communal belief” in it to wield the power it does. (And no one doubts the power of the school narrative, right?)

In-Between Stories

Importantly, Harari’s work highlights another idea that is relevant here, and that is that in this moment, almost everything is in-between stories. Think about media, business, politics and even the ways we meet and fall in love. Less and less seems to be abiding by old rules and norms. In 21 Lessons, he writes that we are particularly stressed because of this:

“We are still in the nihilist moment of disillusionment and anger, after people have lost faith in the old stories but before they have embraced a new one.”

I think it’s fair to say that many are losing faith in the traditional story of school, primarily because it doesn’t serve all kids equitably and it’s increasingly out of step with how the modern world operates. But while there are some indications as to what the new story might look like, (more child/learner centered, focused more on skills and dispositions than content, etc.,) we’re nowhere near any “communal belief” in it. It’s not clear enough, yet, that there is a new story to fully “embrace.”

Still, the new story that is emerging feels much more in tune with the natural, biological rhythms of learning, which, by the way, are not a “fiction.” This is the point that Carol Black has so eloquently made in her amazing essay A Thousand Rivers (which I’ve glossed many times.) If you want the punch in the gut quote from that, here it is:

“Collecting data on human learning based on children’s behavior in school is like collecting data on killer whales based on their behavior at Sea World.”

Our current fiction about schools attempts to take the very natural process of learning that is a part of all of us and make it happen in the very unnatural setting of the classroom where few of the conditions that all of us know are needed for learning to occur actually exist. It’s our greatest unpleasant truth that schools are not really built for learning. And if you read the rest of Black’s essay, you’ll get the gist of just how harmful that current fiction can be to the well-being of kids.

The Function of Schools

I think this whole idea of “fiction” resonates with me more deeply today due to my recent introduction to the work of David Labaree, a recently retired professor from the Stanford Graduate School of Education. I can’t remember how I found it, but a few months ago I came across his essay from the Journal of Curriculum Studies published in 2012 titled “School syndrome: Understanding the USA’s magical belief that schooling can somehow improve society, promote access, and preserve advantage.” Let’s just say that it’s been rocking my thinking about schools ever since.

In a nutshell, Labaree’s thesis is this: we may say that we want great schools because they are a public good, because (as I said above) they serve the purpose of preparing children to live in a democracy and to hopefully improve society. But what we truly value in schools in the private good they offer in terms of promoting privilege and the current meritocracy, and in the assumed role of providing access to “a better life.” Here are his words from the top of the essay:

The US is suffering from a school syndrome, which arises from Americans’ insistence on having things both ways through the magical medium of education. Society wants schools to express the highest ideals as a society and the greatest aspirations as individuals, but only as long as they remain ineffective in actually realizing them, since one does not really want to acknowledge the way these two aims are at odds with each other. Schools are asked to promote equality while preserving privilege, so perpetuating a system that is too busy balancing opposites to promote student learning. The focus is on making the system inclusive at one level and exclusive at the next, in order to make sure that it meets demands for both access and advantage. As a result the system continues to lure one to pursue the dream of fixing society by reforming schools, while continually frustrating one’s ability to meet these goals. Also, a simple cure cannot be found for this syndrome because no remedy will be accepted that would mean giving up one of the aims for education in favour of another. [Emhasis mine.]

Yes. That.

Seriously, the whole piece is important because it paints with an historical eye to explain school reform movements and why almost all of them have failed. It makes a compelling case that the true reform of the original system was the one that was driven by the consumers of education, not the creators and purveyors of it. While we say that schools and education are the most effective way to attain our highest aspirations and ideals as a society, schools are also the primary way that we accomplish our greatest individual ambitions and “stave off our worst fears.” And that last part, in fact, has become the primary motivation behind the story in schools that we’re currently living.

In short, we choose to build our narrative of schooling around the “private good” of schools and education in order to maintain access to social standing and individual opportunity, rather than as a “public good” which emphasizes citizenship and civic mindedness at its core. And that is a challenging, “unpleasant truth” as well.

The Consequences of our Fiction

That narrative has many deleterious effects, as I was reminded last week in Johannesburg when I reconnected with David Gleason, the author of At What Cost? Defending Adolescent Development in Fiercely Competitive Schools. A school psychologist, David is researching why it is that our students are now reporting record levels of stress, anxiety, and depression and what schools can do to alleviate it. Educators at “prestigious” schools that David has interviewed are very forthcoming about how their schools contribute to those issues. They freely cite things like putting too much emphasis on college, assigning too much homework, rewarding “achievement” over all else, and not honoring the normal mental and physical development of adolescents, among other things. (In other words, they’re acting in service of the “private good” over the “public good.”) But when he asks those same educators what would happen if they stopped doing those things that they know contribute to the problem, they respond by saying they would then be seen as lacking rigor and excellence, that they would lose their reputations as elite schools and their enrollments along with it, and more.

This “bind” that David discusses so powerfully in his book is the same “bind” that Labaree sees as well, this idea that we are trying to balance two things that are in opposition to one another, and that right now, we are deferring to the consumer’s need for credentialing over students’ well being or society’s noblest aspirations. It’s the same tension that Black feels between the natural needs of children and the unnatural needs of schooling.

Which all ties into a recent David Brooks column in the New York Times titled This Is How Scandinavia Got Great: The power of educating the whole person. Brooks argues that the reason Scandinavia got it right is because they dedicated themselves in the late 19th Century to educating the whole child, that it was more about lifelong learning. That it was more about connection to community and home. It wasn’t about status. Money quote:

“If you have a thin educational system that does not help students see the webs of significance between people, does not even help students see how they see, you’re going to wind up with a society in which people can’t see through each other’s lenses.”

When we choose (or allow ourselves) to be motivated by pragmatism and individualism over idealism and collectivism, we run the risk of ignoring what’s best for our kids and for our society and world.

What We’ve Lost

I’d argue we’ve lost a great deal because of the system as it’s currently constructed and the motives that drive it. And this idea that schools are meant to serve the individual over the collective is at the root of many of our ills. This is what we get when we focus on grades. On being right. On knowledge and not learning. On delivery instead of discovery. We get kids who see others as competitors, not collaborators or cooperators. We don’t want to work with them as much as work to overcome them.

The fiction of schools says we can teach kids things that they don’t internally care about. That we can measure long term learning with numbers and letters. That following the rules is the way to success, at least at the game we call school. The fiction also says that we know what you need to know. It says that you as a child should just acquiesce to our choices. That acceptance of this fiction is the path to an education and, ultimately, personal success.

And yet, we all know this just isn’t true. The vast majority of what we measure in schools, those things that count, literally, are most often quickly forgotten, never again used, and a barrier to the conditions that great learning requires. Our emphasis on “outcomes” and grades creates real emotional stress that is absent when we are learning the things that matter to us. I mean, what kind of emotional stress and anxiety do you feel when you are learning something that you find deeply and powerfully important and useful?

Our greatest challenge as educators is to write a new story of “school” that more effectively serves our students and our society given the moment in which we live and whatever future we can glean. Acknowledging that that too will be a “fiction” may actually make the work easier. But more than anything, understanding and acknowledging the motives of the current story will make that work more urgent, more relevant, and hopefully, more powerful.

Filed Under: Change, On My Mind, schools Tagged With: change, education, schools

Out of the Mouths…

December 28, 2018 By Will Richardson Leave a Comment

As 2018 winds down, I’m thinking back at what I heard kids saying about schools and education. A few quick stories…

Early in the year in Sydney, a woman with a troubled look on her face approached me after my keynote. “I have to tell you what my son told me this morning on his way out the door,” she said. “He said ‘Off I go to my six-hour interruption to my learning.'”

This summer when I asked a group of students at a respected international school what school would be like if they didn’t have grades, one girl looked at me and said, “Well, if we didn’t have marks, no one would learn anything.”

And late in the year, during a full day workshop with teachers and students, a young man came up to me at a break and said, “You’re right about school not being about learning. I wish it was more like the Internet.”

Certainly, not every conversation that I had with students went like these. But, honestly? The vast majority did. In fact that’s close to the top of my list of takeaways from my travels this year. We’re continuing to lose a slew of kids when it comes to the learning that matters to them and the passions and curiosities that drive that.

I wonder if my conversations with kids next year will be any different.

No doubt, that’s up to us.

Filed Under: Change

On Learning and Common Sense

October 11, 2017 By Will Richardson 4 Comments

As I continue my trek through some of the “classics” regarding learning and schools, I’m finding it interesting the belief systems that many authors take pains to articulate when it comes to answering my current favorite question “What do you mean by learning?” And while there are some similar overtones, to be sure, each comes at it a bit differently.

Carl Rogers, best known as a psychotherapist who championed “client-centered therapy,” was also a vocal advocate for one of today’s most prevalent edu phrases, “student-centered learning.” And this was 50+ years ago.

Freedom to Learn: A View of What Education Might Become is Rogers’ most focused work on education. It highlights the stories of three different teachers at the outset and their work to create conditions in their classrooms where students had a great deal of agency over the what and how of the learning they were doing. The stories are not unlike those you read from a number of schools who are currently reimagining what their practice in classrooms looks like. Later, Rogers goes into the practical aspects of facilitating classes like these, and dives into the types of relationships that teachers and students must have in order to develop kids as learners.

To that end, Rogers’ principles for learning interest me and resonate to a great degree:

  1. Human beings have a natural potentiality for learning. They are curious about their world, until and unless this curiosity is blunted by their experience in our educational system.
  2. Significant learning takes place when the subject matter is perceived by the student as having relevance for his own purposes.
  3. Learning which involves a change in self organization—in the perception of oneself—is threatening and tends to be resisted.
  4. Those learnings which are threatening to the self are more easily perceived and assimilated when external threats are at a minimum.
  5. When threat to the self is low, experience can be perceived in differentiated fashion and learning can proceed.
  6. Much significant learning is acquired through doing. Placing the student in direct experiential confrontation with practical problems, social problems, ethical and philosophical problems, personal issues, and research problems, is one of the most effective modes of promoting learning
  7. Learning is facilitated when the student participates responsibly in the learning process. When he chooses his own directions, helps to discover his own learning resources, formulates his own problems, decides his own course of action, lives with the consequences of these choices, then significant learning is maximized
  8. Self-initiated learning which involves the whole person of the learner—feelings as wells as intellect—is the most lasting and pervasive.
  9. Independence, creativity, and self-reliance are all facilitated when self-criticism and self-evaluation are basic and evaluation by others is of secondary importance. If a child is to grow up to be independent and self reliant he must be given opportunities at an early age not only to make his own judgments and his own mistakes but to evaluate the consequences of these judgments and choices
  10. The most socially useful learning in the modern world is the learning of the process of learning, a continuing openness to experience and incorporation into oneself of the process of change. If our present culture survives it will be because we have been able to develop individuals for whom change is the central fact of life and who have been able to live comfortably with this central fact

Much to unpack in that, but as I said earlier, almost all of it resonates with my own thinking and that of others I’ve read. A couple of specific comments.

First, in my work with leadership, I see the resistance alluded to in #3 all the time. Robert Evans calls it the difference between “first-order changes” which deal try to improve the “efficiency or effectiveness of what we are already doing,” and “second-order changes,” which are “systemic in nature and aim to modify the very way an organization is put together, altering its assumptions, goals, structures, roles, and norms.” Substitute “individual” for “organization” in that last sentence as well. Very few leaders in my experience are willing to level up to take on with seriousness those second-order changes.

The whole “external threat” aspect of learning Rogers talks about in #4 and #5 is a huge barrier to learning, and change. Federal and state governments have placed explicit threats on schools and teachers, which in turn tempers their ability to learn. (And yes, we need schools that learn.)  It also speaks to the way we currently assess our kids and the consequences of “failure” that we place on them. Deep learning can be uncomfortable, and absent a supportive, nurturing environment, it does not flourish.

In #7, I love how Rogers uses the word “responsibly” and the stark distinction between his use of the word and the way it’s most often applied in schools. There, being “responsible” means acceding to the demands and norms of the system, as in do your homework, be on time, don’t cause a ruckus, etc. To Rogers, however, it means using freedom and agency to pursue personal learning in depth. Shifting the way we think about the word in schools would be a “second-order change,” no?

Finally, the one that resonates the most is undoubtedly the last. But it’s not just the goal of we the adults developing “individuals for whom change is the central fact of life.” It’s that we adults, especially in education, have to become those individuals ourselves. As much as schools have changed over the past 100 years, and they have changed a lot, present day school cultures are still resistant to change. It only happens when it has to, as a reaction to external edicts or pressures. I see little evidence of school cultures that embrace change, and act proactively to learn through it.

As with most of these lists of principles or beliefs, there’s little here that belies common sense.

Photo Credit

Filed Under: Change, leadership, On My Mind Tagged With: learning

Zen and the Art of School Change

January 27, 2017 By Will Richardson 8 Comments

About a week ago I grabbed Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig off my bookshelf and cracked it open for the first time since I first read it probably 30 years ago. I didn’t remember much of the story, but I did remember thinking it was an important read the first time around. And I’m finding that again. For the uninitiated, it’s the true story of the author, his son and two friends on a motorcycle trip through the high plains and Rockies, and the search for a deeper understanding of life and existence. It is, for me at least, a pretty deep and challenging text that I’m enjoying struggling through.

Anyway, last night I read this one passage that when I read it made me go “yeah…that’s what I’ve been trying to say but haven’t been able to.” Pirisg is writing about Phaedrus, who, it turns out, is actually a younger, darker version of himself. He writes:

“He felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments, and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for control of individuals in the service of those functions.”

I love passages like this one that literally (and I mean literally) give me goosebumps of resonance, if you know what I mean.

So let me try to break that down a bit more in terms of my sense of the schools part of that quote.

Do schools “direct thought for ends other than the truth?” This is what I’ve been trying to suss out in my never ending homilies around beliefs and common sense in schools. I think, too, this is what Frank Smith argues so well in The Book of Learning and Forgetting. There are just truths about learning and schooling that we deny. Truths like we don’t remember what we don’t want to learn or what doesn’t have relevance in our life. That we don’t learn when we are oppressed. That standardizing an education pushes against the inherent uniqueness of children. That learning in schools doesn’t reflect learning in real life, and so on. This is the Russell Ackoff quote, again, where we do things right at the expense of doing the right thing. It’s why so many people go “aw, crap” when I show that side by side slide of conditions that we know kids (and we) need for deep and powerful learning and the conditions we actually create.

And the idea that schools (meaning the people in them) do this for “the perpetuation of their own functions” is absolutely true. If we truly were to move agency over learning to the learner and hew to the truths about learning, our functions would radically, fundamentally change. Teacher wouldn’t be teacher. The architectures of schooling would be seen as barriers to learning, not as paths to efficiency. The narrative would have to be completely rewritten. But the reality is we’d rather be “better” than “different” because the former doesn’t require huge change.

Finally, do we avoid the truth and instead focus on the “control of individuals in the service of those functions” that are already well established? No question. This is what Seymour Sarason writes so passionately about in terms of the power relationships that have existed and currently exist in schools. I’ve written before the literally hundreds (if not thousands) of times where I’ve talked to teachers who have told me they are “powerless” to change. They are, in other words, controlled by the system, by the standards, by the narrative. And no one doubts that kids are controlled; they have little voice in what happens to them, and classroom management is still high on the list of things that teaches are evaluated on.

So, yeah, we ignore what we know is true because if we didn’t, we would have to seriously change what we do. It’s just easier to work within the well established norms of learning and teaching, the efficiency model, and to impose power over those who may want to challenge those norms in a quest for truth and effectiveness in learning. In other words, as much as we as individuals may want to change, the institution we’re stuck with is built not to. It works to “perpetuate its own functions,” which is why real, high-bar change in schools is so hard to effect.

Thoughts?

(Image credit: Alan Levine)

Filed Under: Change, leadership, On My Mind

Change Sucks

September 27, 2016 By Will Richardson 13 Comments

“This hasn’t been easy, you know.”

That’s the principal of a middle school where the way kids learn in classrooms is fundamentally changing. More questions. More projects that actually tackle stuff that’s happening in the real world and that are driven by kids’ interests. More making stuff. More presentations. More kids who are taking on their own “home work” because they want to, not because someone assigns it.

In other words, some real shift.

It’s taken a good chunk of time. She’s been at the school for six years. The first three? “Spinning wheels. Baby steps.” The last couple? “I didn’t know if I’d see it happen, but there’s definitely less pain now.”

15831047566_e7d7322b3b_cI ask her about that last part, the pain part.

“I don’t think you can do this without feeling a lot of pain,” she says. “A lot.” Pain as in confusion and pushback and anger and failure. “I know if we’re not feeling it, we’re not changing. But it’s hard to see it through sometimes.”

No one likes it, she says. No one likes to be uncomfortable. But it’s a necessary part of the process.

“You just don’t get anywhere, really, unless you embrace the discomfort and commit to working through it.”

I wonder how many people in school leadership are embracing the pain. I wonder how many of them, are instead trying to mitigate the pain, to not confront it. To appease those causing it instead of leading them through it.

And I wonder how many of them really believe in what they’re doing enough to see it through.

Image credit: Cogdogblog

Filed Under: Change, On My Mind

The De-Construction Crew

August 27, 2016 By Will Richardson 1 Comment

If you’re a frequent visitor here, you know that I’m always going on about the importance of grounding our work in education in what we believe about how kids learn. (If you haven’t checked out my latest TEDx Talk, you’ll get the gist.) You’ll also know how surprised I am that so few of us have actually articulated what exactly we do believe, not to mention how few schools and districts have done that as a community.

Those that have done that usually face a dilemma. They quickly find that most of the structures that we currently employ in schools and classrooms really don’t support our fundamental beliefs about learning. I mean, and again I’ve asked this before here, if you were building a new school from scratch, would your beliefs about how kids learn lead you to separate them out by age? Would you teach a standardized curriculum assessed by standardized tests? Would you separate out disciplines into 50-minute blocks, or make students compete for grades and rankings or pretty much prevent students from asking their own questions and solving real life problems? Would those things hew to your beliefs?

I don’t think they would. Most would never argue for those things.

15612738556_2c325a8c00_bBut that’s what we’ve got. And that’s our dilemma: Do we do the “right things,” the things we know in our hearts and minds are best for kids and learning? Or do we sacrifice those things in our attempt to “do the wrong things right?” (That’s not a new question here either, but one I keep feeling the need to come back to.)

So it follows, I think, that the road to real transformation, that place where students have true freedom and agency over the learning, where it’s about their questions, their problems, their passions, and their pathways, getting to that place requires a serious de-construction effort to break apart those “wrong things” that don’t actually fit with our beliefs about how kids actually learn.

It’s hard work. We need some de-construction helmets for sure. But if you’re serious about change, you’re going to have to do that work.

And if it’s about learning, why wouldn’t you do that work?

Image credit: Kevin Jarrett

Filed Under: Change, On My Mind

Risky Business Redux

August 12, 2016 By Will Richardson 3 Comments

(Building on this post.)

From a New York Times article on Anne Holton, Vice Presidential nominee Tim Kaine’s wife:

Ms. Holton later enrolled in Open High School, which allowed students to create their own curriculum and did not give grades. When asked to pick an activity for physical education, she took up clogging. When assigned to research her family’s ancestry, she presented not the names of distant gentry, but the names of slaves owned by her great-grandparents.

This a woman who eventually ended up at Harvard Law where she met her future husband.

But how can that be, that someone can go to a school that says to students “you create your own education” and doesn’t give grades can end up at Harvard? She must be special, right? That kind of school experience just can’t be for everyone, can it?

I’m sure it’s not.

risk deleteBut I wonder how many of our kids would flourish in that type of an environment given the chance. I wonder what would happen if that model was the great reset for education.

Look, no one argues that there are currently millions of kids for which the traditional system simply doesn’t work, doesn’t engage. Yet most of us see ideas as an Open High School as a risk to becoming “educated.”

Seriously, what if it were the other way around?

The way we think about what an “education” should be is just a current best guess at meeting standards and outcomes using methods that policy makers and businesses are heavily invested in and loathe to change. Happily, that guess seems to, finally, be up for more serious debate at increasingly higher levels. But it still dominates.

There’s a lot less risk than we think when it comes to doing education “differently” instead of better. The greater risk may be to stay the course.

(Photo Credit: SpaceX)

Filed Under: Change, On My Mind

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