Education is but a reflection of societal needs, as it is education’s duty to produce the next generation of society members.
summary of the situation
Two years ago Robert B. Reich, who was U.S. Secretary of Labor, and is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote an article in Forbes Magazine aptly titled: Manufacturing Jobs Are Never Coming Back. Riech also subtitled the article: Increasingly, machines make things, not people--and that should be great news for the U.S. In the article, Reich describes the shift in the American economy to what he calls “symbolic-analytic” jobs (Reich). Reich says, “Americans now work in jobs that weren't listed in the Census Bureau's occupation codes in 1967” (Reich). These new jobs are better jobs. These new jobs reflect the 21st century needs.These are the new normals of today. For us to continually cling to a manufacturing marketplace would be like the people of 20th century continuing to cling to agriculture. We need to look forward, not backward, for growth. Reich cautions that if you are looking for those manufacturing jobs to return, that: “You're on the wrong side of history. You see only the loss of old jobs. You're overlooking all the new ones” (Reich). The future of the American marketplace lies in the symbolic-analytic jobs: “…people who analyze, manipulate, innovate and create. These people are responsible for research and development, design and engineering… they're composers, writers and producers. They're lawyers, journalists, doctors and management consultants” (Reich). If the needs of the 21st century marketplace are analytical, innovative and creative, then why doesn’t the 21st century education system reflect this? PBS aired one of the most fore-thinking and innovative documentaries discussing this very issue – 20th century models of education which do not prepare our students for 21st century job markets.
It was aired in February of 2011 and entitled, Digital Media: New Learners of the 21st Century. I strongly encourage anyone interested in educational practice to view this special as it specifically addresses the need for 21st century education to be revolutionary – a complete institutional change for the entire educational system! The documentary opens with this line: “In the 20th century we taught our kids what to learn… we lined their desks up in rows and put the teacher at the front of classroom. But in today’s world many educators are questioning the status quo and meeting young people where they are,” (PBS Teachers). The special focuses on five different schools across the country which challenge conventional teaching methods and structures, and utilize truly integrated digital media within the classroom. One of these schools, the Science Leadership Academy, is a progressive high school in Philadelphia, PA. The principal of SLA, Chris Lehman, was named as one of the 30 Most Influential People in EdTech by Technology & Learning Magazine, 2009. In the documentary, Lehman is interviewed saying: “What do we want our schools to be? What do we dream for our schools and for our children? What are the most important things that schools can teach kids? And wouldn't it be wonderful to have a national conversation around that, and at least figure ... start to figure that out. And then from there start the process of maybe trying to reinvent education looks like in this country, and that's what I hope for; that's what I dream about” (PBS Teachers). Along these lines, the special is geared at change – purposeful, meaningful, institutional change. Throughout the film educators and scholars question current, orthodox standards and question why education has come to a standstill.
One of the most important ideas is that education is still built autogamously. Our classrooms and curriculums reflect 20th century ideals. During the 20th century, everything could be structured and compartmentalized – everything – no thing was left untouched, from the workplace to relationships to the human mind, itself. The prevailing thought, had been, when something was divided it became more efficient. And when it was more efficient it produced greater quantities. Education is still structured the same way today! Curriculums are divided into units which are divided into lessons and are finally broken down into tasks. This is very much the influence of the assembly line – we even use assembly line terminology: units, performance, product-based, outcomes, etc. Standardized testing is another result of a mechanized worldview. The idea that all students can be processed and measured in the same manner comes from expecting students to simply be cogs in the machine. Testing and curriculums are not the only aspects of education influenced by this assembly line worldview. We even organize our classroom and school day in this mantra!
Our days are broken up into schedules which in themselves have periods or classes compartmentalized. Subjects are distanced from one another and segregated. They are taught by specific compartmentalized instructors who specialize in a single area. This is the essence of autogamy – ideas are self-fertilized, taught down and grown within a rigid, artificially segregated environment. Is the teacher not the foreman and the students not the drones? Shame on us for keeping those 20th century mantras, especially, when our American culture rarely reflects those needs: this stratified practice of education no longer makes sense. According to Robert Reich, it is exactly the opposite of the skills needed in the 21st century marketplace. Lehman specifically critiques this: “We built schools today as an industrial model. Eight-period day, 45 minutes a class, go, go, go, go, go; assembly line, modeled after the factory, 1920 comprehensive high schools. That's how we got where we are today. Society has evolved past that. Schools haven't yet” (PBS Teachers). Society looks for integrated, cross-pollinating ideas. Schools rely on self-fertilization of ideas. But schools, like Lehamn’s, recognize that education can no longer dwell in the 20th century skills sets but needs to foster “analyzing, manipulating and communicating through numbers, shapes, words, ideas” (Reich). As I read these new skill sets, I am immediately reminded of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Every classroom in the country, from San Francisco to Cheyenne to Chicago to Hartford, has a poster of Bloom’s Taxonomy posted somewhere. Bloom’s Taxonomy is the fruit of Benjamin Bloom’s psychological work, along with many others working alongside him.
In The Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, The Classification of Educational Goals, Handbook I: Cognitive Domain, Bloom and his colleagues outlined a commonly cited “taxonomy” of the way people think. Each level represents a higher order of thinking and has been used by educators for years to develop activities and lessons targeting those higher levels. Unfortunately, most of the educational practices used today still fall into the lowest tiers of learning. These are autogamous and result from a compartmentalized, Industrialized education. On the other hand, new educational practices, seen by the schools showcased in the PBS special Digital Media: New Learners of the 21st Century, focus on the highest levels. These are integrated learning experiences which are allogamous. We can see autogamous models relying on the base of the pyramid (reaching the greatest number of students with lowest common denominator of information), while allogamous models rely on the tip of the pyramid (engineering learning experiences for individualized students).
We, teachers, consistently say we are striving towards higher order thinking skills: problem solving, critical thinking and creativity. Yet, in reality the vast majority of curriculums still focus on the first three tiers: remembering, understanding and applying. James Gee, Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University, sees education at a crossroads: some schools will remain stuck in the 20th century model and focus only on the bottom rungs of Bloom’s Taxonomy while other schools will become progressive and focus on the top three tiers of the taxonomy. In Digital Media: New Learners of the 21st Century, Gee is interviewed as saying: “We are either going to have two school systems – one for the rich and one for the poor, and the poor one will be a standardized, accountable system that does guarantee you and give you the basics, and will suit you for a service job.
The privileged kids will go to another school system where they will learn all the same facts, but they'll learn to use them to solve authentic problems, and eventually to innovate and produce new knowledge, and they will ... they will make out well in the global system. Or, we can imagine a system where school is not just about what job you're going to have, but about making everybody able to participate in the society, to have dignity, to be able to innovate, and that we're going to see that everybody gets that form of schooling…” (PBS Teachers).
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