Pencils Down
Reconstructing American Education

The public education system is a $700 billion juggernaut. It outspends defense and healthcare. Any bureaucracy that swallows that many tax dollars is going to find elaborate ways to defend and perpetuate itself.

The system, however, is in crisis--and it needs to be retooled for the 21st century. If you believe what you hear, you'd think we could fix public education by throwing more money it at, raising standards, making classes smaller or producing better teachers. The truth is, all this has been tried and it hasn't worked. We now spend more per student on public education than any other western industrialized nation except Switzerland, and get the least in return.

Why? After all, most countries originally copied our system because it was initially successful at educating the masses and producing smarter citizens.

Our founding fathers believed that education for all was the fundamental revolutionary act. Like the principles behind the Enlightenment in 17th and 18th-century Europe, the notion was that if we had a broadly educated population, we could participate in our own governance and contribute to a better world. Aren't these the ideals that we all went to college and then out into the world with?

But these ideals were co-opted by bankers and industrialists in the mid 19th century to get us ready for the industrial revolution. They narrowed the goals of education saying that we needed to get people accustomed to following instructions so that they could punch time clocks and work on assembly lines. Without consulting the American people, these economic Brahmans decided that Americans needed to be more obedient so that they would buy into the values of an industrial economy-work hard, be good consumers and fit into the pre-established hierarchy.

Those "industrial model'' goals led us to copy the Prussian education system primarily because it was known for producing passive learners who would become citizens who thought alike and become subordinated to economic and ideological imperatives. The fundamental design of the system, which includes scheduling and tightly controlling what is learned, has not changed in more than 150 years.

Those ideals sowed our failure to adequately educate today. What's fundamentally wrong with education is that it is passive, something done to us. Remember those textbooks? You read a chapter, then the summary and took the little quiz at the end. You were told what to read, what it meant and what was important about it. You were told to memorize it for tests that would determine how good a learner you were. Finally, you were compared to other students using uniform criteria. This asks very little of your brain. It may have traumatized you and it probably insulted you.

Then you were thrust into a world that has changed immeasurably from the industrial economy with an education that has not fully prepared you for the 21st century. But it's not all bad, right? You are an American. You live in a free society, and that alone has made you smarter than most people on the planet. Your brain has probably survived formal schooling if you are reading this article.

Wait a minute. The "free" world has been transformed by a dramatic increase in global economic freedom brought about by the intersection of education and information technology. You've heard about the new "flat" world where five chemists can be hired in China, 11 in India, for the price of one here. Right here in Traverse City, x-rays are sent from Munson Hospital to India where they are evaluated by a radiologist for $8 an hour, a fraction of what it would cost here. With this kind of competition and equivalent technology around the globe, our options have narrowed to one: We have to be smarter to compete.

George Bush is not alone in thinking raising educational standards will produce smarter Americans. Bill Clinton, before him, launched Goals 2000, based on the same assumptions. Why do they persist in selling us this strategy when all the evidence indicates that high-stakes standardized tests not only do not measure what is learned, they also make us dumber because schools must focus on passing exams and narrowing learning outcomes. They become test-prep centers. As educator John Holt put it way back in the '60s, the drive for higher standards is keeping kids "too busy to think."

Tens of thousands of teachers have turned cynical as we've gotten further away from real learning in the classroom. It isn't their fault. Cheating is up. Schools cheat by teaching to tests and not reporting dropouts. When struggling students leave school, test scores go up. Don't count the dropouts and it looks like you are improving overall. Dropouts and student cheating are up because of the pressure to do well on tests. Is this the kind of learning culture we want?

No question about it, we need accountability in education. But before that, we need an education system that works, one that is engaging learners, giving them higher cognitive skills (teaching how to learn) rather than boring students with endless calls to memorize.

The real problem with the system is that it is woefully obsolete. A real education president would be calling for the creation of a national task force to completely redesign public education with a major focus on:

• Shifting the focus from group to individual learning, letting students move at their own pace and in their own learning style.
• Designing lessons around how the brain actually works and always coupling abstract learning with real world application.
• Using technology wisely, and making schoolwork engaging. (Studying math? Use, say, an electronic simulator to navigate a sailboat from Traverse City to Chicago during a storm, plotting a course with trigonometry.)
• Redirecting federal government's role toward research and implementing new learning designs, and getting businesses competing to create solutions.
• Designing tests that provide feedback on how to learn a particular lesson better and strategize learning goals. Making tests more sophisticated (more essays and real-world problem solving) and less dependent on memory. Getting rid of high-stakes tests that determine if a student can graduate. Using a broader means to evaluate student progress including portfolios of classroom work.
• Creating an integrated model that allows home-schoolers, charter schools and traditional schools to share resources and innovative solutions.
• Introducing a merit curriculum - like merit badges in Boy Scouts - and encouraging students to explore subjects that interest them so that they can try on occupations and domains of knowledge.
• Designing new means of community involvement: mentor programs, professional guilds that introduce students to the unknown realities of professions, school-to-work projects, apprenticeships, service learning and citizenship programs that lead to credit.

As a nation, we need to gather and redefine what is important for us to learn in the 21st century. Literacy should be redefined to include image manipulation and media skills. Competency should include understanding not only the nuts and bolts of civics and science, but also the implications and consequences of technology and international policy in this fast-changing interconnected world. Children learn by applying knowledge and synthesizing skills - and learning how to learn must occur in the K-12 system so we are adequately prepared for higher learning and the real world.

Here's the new mantra for your conversations about the education system: It can't be fixed. It isn't broken. It's obsolete. It needs to be redesigned. Maybe you've taken a break from caring because you are recently out of the system. If so, consider this: We're facing a precipitous decline in education that will increasingly affect the stability of our democracy and the strength of our economy in the next couple of decades. We've got to get smarter.

Edward L. "Ned" Davis is the author of "Lessons for Tomorrow: Bringing America's Schools Back From The Brink" (Orgone Press, 2006, www.lessonsfortomorrow.com). He lives in Northport.

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