 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|||
 |
 |
|
||
 |
|
You
are here:
You Can't Teach An Old Dogma New Tricks
Imagine that your television has turned to black and white again. Channel surfing, you pause at the images of listless and bewildered faces and huddled, emaciated, bloated human beings hanging feebly onto a chain-link fence. Another black and white documentary on the Nazi Holocaust, you assume, until a CNN truck reports from Somalia or Kosovo or the Sudan. The grim truth is this: the 1990s are proving to be as genocidal a decade as the 1940s. In fact, it's always 1943 somewhere.
These are, indeed, interesting times. Some millennium evangelists wax on about how the future is bright: data flows freely, borders and boundaries disappear, and the world works seamlessly - at warp speed - with instant consensus and information access. Some views are darker: an apocalypse of fire or ice, as Robert Frost would claim, in which global consumerism is accused of having been made palatable for unsuspecting masses and satellites annihilate culture. Whether we're squinting at a brilliant future or peering over an abyss, it is time for all of us to ask some fundamental questions about who we are. Let's leave the paramystical rhetoric, the promises of freedom or the doom and gloom aside. It's not all black and white. Dorothy Parker's statement is clear: "You can't teach an old dogma new tricks."
We face big questions and educators -- above all-- need to ask them. It is, after all, an "information age," a "postindustrial world." That is what educators do. We live with tensions between the traditional and the modern; the haves and have-nots; between education for the short or the long term; education for utility and education for its own sake; the center of focus on the child or the subject matter; the debate over depth or breadth; the inculcation of civility and citizenship or training for a career; the inspiration of intrinsic and the lure of extrinsic motivation; the quantitative or the qualitative; the place of informal or formal education; the attention to process or product; cooperation or competition; the person and the package, the individual voice and the national goal.
We can blame youth violence on misanthropic websites or a 100-channel paralysis or the loss of family and community. At extremes, we blame it on a capitalist or communist plot. However much skepticism is crucial, rarely do deconstructivists replace their critique with something tangible. It is an age in which we must make decisions about how to live in an ecosystem of diminishing resources; how to harness science for human good, how to make sense of the age in which we live. How to be, how to do, how to know, and how to live together. What does school hold for teenagers? After all, some young people do not go to school at all. Some long to learn, in safety, though they must dive into shelters amidst regional conflict. Some go to school each day in fear. Some thirteen year olds wear Japanese Walkmans and Russian rifles and listen to Madonna as they patrol their village. Some teens attend class up to a certain age or time in the day, then go directly to work, whether it be in a factory run by a worldwide mega-merger, or out in the fields. Many reflect alienation and violence of modern life, yet they also exhibit extraordinary, selfless acts of human courage, alacrity, creativity, and kindness. We need to ask: "What do they need to meet the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead?" "How can these children, in turn, raise the village?" "What forms shall this take?"
Many reform efforts typically answer the hard questions with a new form of the word: what. If young people are becoming violent, then we develop new programs, new curriculum, new teacher training. We create voucher systems, charter schools, site-based management. There are problems and so there are fixes. Though there are fabulous success stories, many develop new mousetraps. Again - black and white. More successful school efforts are more nuanced and designed around the words why and how. In the past five years, we have learned a great deal about how and why we learn. Our postindustrial age has challenged us to develop new metaphors. Business in the information age is moving past the factory and transaction environment ("physics envy") to a more holistic set of concepts ("permeable boundaries," "learning communities"). Researchers and practitioners claim that outmoded notions of education as a quantity of knowledge to ingest and retain have given way to new paradigms, new qualities of thinking: the capacity for independence of thought, creativity, applicability, and the ability to work with others. These new approaches to curriculum and pedagogy do not belong to one country or culture alone, but are sweeping the worldwide landscape.
A transformational reform effort must validate the what and the how, yet extend the questions to where and when. Where does learning take place? When? This is where the rainbow comes in. An explosion of learning, in different settings, is taking place worldwide, facilitated by the Internet. Why do we continue to build schools where all information is brought in, like raw material to processing plants? Why not bring students to the information? Why build school theaters with state-of-the-art sound or athletic fields when the local theater is dark or the local park is free during the day? Why build a community center for evening activities when the school is dark at night? Why not turn schools into shopping centers? After all, the architecture fits this need. Perhaps we should convert strip shopping malls or unused buildings into schools? After all, research in education strongly suggests that schools need to be small and intimate places. Let us ask questions as hard as these. Where and when.
Let us use schools for their best purpose, as places of congregation, as clearinghouses for information, communities for reflection, cafés and marketplaces designed for the exchange of thoughts, feelings, and new ideas. Our teachers can translate their passion into resources and guides, rather than fonts of knowledge. Why not translate UNESCO's four pillars of education: learning to do, learning to be, learning to know, learning to live together into tangible places of learning, in which the community works as cultural centers, spiritual centers, skills centers, work centers? Such concepts are just coming into being worldwide. The East Indians talk of "learning cities." Ecuadorians train students to use communities to address literacy. Thai police carry satchels of books, along with their gear, to teach and read with students in the streets. In short, schools will look and feel different, wherever we go. The continental cocoon is over. The cookie cutter is no longer applicable. The metaphor of school may be out of date. Perhaps Mark Twain was right, one-hundred years earlier, when he exhorted us not to let schooling get in the way of our education. This is education in living color. It involves stakeholders, faculty, the community.
In my own work in reviewing the literature on worldwide educational reform, analyzing global reports, holding two conferences on the qualities and conditions for educating teens for the 21st century, and surveying educators in 31 countries, three conclusions have emerged:
- Despite significant differences in orientation or circumstance, educators have identified a need for whole-systems change in education that reflects new developments in access to information, along with the benefits of worldwide teacher collegiality.
The questions we must ask now are neither new nor novel. Great teachers ask great questions. God framed Adam and Eve in order to ask them to examine themselves. He placed the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden. He knew these students would succumb and pay the price of their curiosity. That price is not the loss of innocence, but rather the moment when they became human beings. A forbidden tree is a wonderful motivation -- what student could not resist the teacher's prohibitions?
The teacher was prepared for the consequences, for without consequences there is no human growth. Still, even after the fruit was taken, God was not didactic. He didn't even give Adam and Eve a summary of the lesson. Indeed, he simply asked: "Where are you?" He asked them to find their place: how and why, where and when they learned something. He asked them to discover a new cartography of learning. In some ways, without the rhetoric and the stridency, it mirrors our modern lexicon of whole-systems change. He asked for accountability, humanity, humility, reflection. His teaching was intimate and engaging, hard-nosed and risky and moral. It was certainly transformational.
The haunting images in black and white impel us to mobilize a vision, take those risks, and implement change. When Elie Weisel came home from school, his mother did not ask him: "What did you get?" Rather, she asked lovingly: "Did you ask any good questions today?" It is time to ask essential questions -- about the qualities of an educated person, how and why people learn, where and when people learn. It is also time to act.
These honest questions -- and the honest attempts to grapple with them in deeds -- are a hedge against tyranny and an act of love, for love -- in the words of Aeschylus -- tips the balance. We must all ask: "Where are we now?" In an era that sits precariously on the brink, with images that continue to haunt us, generation after generation, we have no greater task.
References
Learning to be; learning to do; learning to know; learning to live together are the four pillars of education eloquently articulated in U.N.E.S.C.O's Delors Report: http://www.unesco.org.
Barber, B. Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World. New York: Ballantine Books. (1996)
Fred Mednick, Ed.D. is currently the Executive Director of Teachers Without Borders. Before that, he was the Director of the Upper School at the Bush School in Seattle, Washington. He is the author of Rebel without a Car: Surviving and Appreciating Your Child's Teen Years, an unusual and innovative treatment of adolescence from the perspective of an educator. Rebel earned him the opportunity to work with the late Dr. Spock. Dr. Mednick has won the California's Outstanding Educator award through Johns Hopkins University. He has published numerous articles on school reform, and has consulted with companies in Thailand and Russia. This article was synthesized from findings of surveys of educators, in 31 countries and translated into 14 languages, along with an analysis of global reports and conferences discussing the qualities of an educated teen for the 21st century.
Much of the support for this project came from newhorizons.org, which originally published Dr. Mednick's call for participation in the study. He received an outpouring of responses from over forty countries, many of whom cited newhorizons.org as their source.
Copyright © October 1999 New Horizons for Learning, all rights reserved.
http://www.newhorizons.org
E-mail: info@newhorizons.orgFor permission to redistribute, please go to:
New Horizons for Learning Copyright and Permission Information