Generic commentary on education reform without specific actors or allegations

CHAPTER 14 i MZ What Can We Do About It? Simple solutions seldom are. It takes a very unusual mind to undertake analysis of the obvious. —Alfred North Whitehead What is obvious here? Schooling is broken. It needs to be rethought. What can we build as an alternative? It is a simple question really. If we had all the resources in the world and we really wanted to edu- cate our children, where education means teach them to think clearly, live well-thought-out lives, and be able to pursue their dreams, what would we build? It is, of course, very difficult to think about replacing sacred in- stitutions. The only way I know to think about it, is as a thought experiment. Just imagine that we lived in a different world, maybe a Greek colony in the Ist century, and ask yourself how we might edu- cate our children in this environment, pretending that schools are the one thing we cannot build for some reason. As we think about this, we must not assume that what we teach in schools now needs to be taught in some other way. We simply need to ask: What should one teach children? while making no assumptions that what we have been teaching is necessarily relevant. To put this another way, the right question to ask is: What do chil- dren need to be able to do, in order to function in the world they inhabit? The next question is, of course, How would we teach children to do those things? Now admittedly I am prejudicing the answer here by simply leav- ing out the word know. The usual question is, What should children know? It is this question that leads people to make lists of things every 3rd-grader should know and allows school boards to create lists of facts students need to be tested on. So, let’s leave that word out of the discussion and see where it gets us. 205 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023951