Seth Godin makes some great points about the false ideas that we tell our students today in school. His main question in "What is School for?" He argues that many times in school, it is used to teach respect and obedience. For example, “Good morning, boys and girls… Good morning, Teacher.” This pattern is engrained in students from an early age. It propagates the industrial idea of creating more obedient factory workers who never question the status quo and the idea of consumerism (an idea that will still suffer in America today).
We buy and have to have more than we need of everything. We also have to drive the best cars with no regard for the environment, the infrastructure needed to sustain that form of transportation, and what the “concrete jungle” is doing to society and our well-being. I bring up well-being because the automobile culture in America has perpetuated getting in the car and driving a block instead of walking. This causes a few problems. One is obesity in our country, and two, the car is now the only viable form of transportation (while many European cities have developed a manner that promotes walking, riding a bike, or taking public transportation). I believe these are systemic problems caused by ideas that are ingrained from an early age, but I digress.
Mr. Godin makes the argument that Frederick J. Kelly created the "bubble test" or as many like to call it, the "multiple choice" test. The multiple choice test is still the dominant form of testing used in schools today, and students are even being taught that if they have no idea of the answer to guess, they have a 25% chance of getting it right. Students in my class don’t even bother answering questions if they are fill-in-the-blank questions because those questions require you to at least have an idea of what the answer is. With so much emphasis put on standardized testing, why are we surprised when students ask, “Will this be on the test?”. Students naturally begin to value what education has repeatedly reinforced to be the only metric we use to determine if a student is successful.
Mr. Godin also uses the example of using a textbook and memorizing stats to make people love to play baseball as an analogy for the education system today. He then mentions that we value creativity, but in education, we spend all our time and energy teaching students to do the opposite. He then lists eight things that technology has taught us. One is that we don’t need someone to sit beside us and teach us how to take the square root of something. Students can watch lecture videos of leading experts teaching students how “because the internet connects us all” and then homework can be done with a teacher to get practice and explore. Second is that classes and tests should be open notes and open book all the time because there is no value in memorizing anything anymore, and “Anything worth memorizing is worth looking up.”
Another point Mr. Godin makes is that we should do away with multiple-choice tests and measure experience instead of test scores. This would end compliance as an outcome. The ePortfolio and the resume are proof of compliance and the idea of collaboration, which technology has made a zero-barrier activity instead of isolation (the traditional education model). Cooperation and collaboration are essential skills in the workplace, so why is it not first on our minds in education? He then goes on to state that teachers roles should now be coaches or mentors to guide and direct students in their educational journey. Why would we not teach our kids to figure it out and do something incredible? Instead, we are telling our students “not to figure it out, do not ask questions that the teacher does not know the answer to, do not look it up, do not vary from the curriculum, and comply but always strive to fit in, be like your peers, and do what your told because I must process you because my evaluation is based on whether or not I process you properly”.
In closing, Mr. Godin argues two points. That it is a myth that great performance in school leads to happiness and success and great parents have kids who preform exceptionally well in school. The idea that are we asking kids to collect the dots or connect the dots is a great way to sum up that traditional education with standardized testing, multiple choice, teaching to the test, and the constant reinforcement of compliance is like collecting the dots when we live in a world that we are required to build on our experiences in connecting the dots.
References
Davidson, C. (2011, September 23). Standardized tests for everyone? In the Internet
age, that’s the wrong answer. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/standardized-tests-for-everyone-in-the-internet-age-thats-the-wrong-answer/2011/09/21/gIQA7SZwqK_story.html
Messerli, J. (1972). Only a Teacher Horace Mann, A Biography Retrieved from
https://www.pbs.org/onlyateacher/horace.html
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