Classroom Learning

Schools make learning hard. No matter the subject, it would be easier to learn it in its natural environment: basketball in the gym, government in the legislature, cooking in kitchen and agriculture in the fields. We like to think of the classroom as being the best place to learn. Actually, the average classroom is the last place I’d go to learn anything. Unless I was there to learn how to be a student in a classroom. Or a mediocre classroom teacher. 

THE THREE REASONS WHY

1. Learning is a product of practice not of book-based knowledge. You want an electrician who is practiced in his craft. Same with your lawyer and your restaurant chef and your mechanic. Imagine a tennis player who learned to play sitting in a classroom. A politician with only knowledge of, not practice in, the political system will be called Stalin or McCarthy or McNamara. Theory has its place. In fact, the masters in any field of endeavor from tennis to physics to plumbing to food service more often than not possess a deep understanding of the principles that underlie their application in specific cases. But theory learned separate from practice trains one to be a theoretician, a professor, not a competent, much less a masterful, practioner. As long as the primary challenge posed by our teachers to their students is the absorption of the textbook's contents, learning will not be occurring in our classrooms.

2. Teachers are woefully undertrained in the complex, subtle and demanding art form that is teaching. It takes as long to train a great teacher as it does to train a great M.D. or legislator or farmer or chef. The actual training requirements of teachers in the United States bespeaks a definition of teaching as requiring no more than a cursory exposure to the principles and challenges of the profession and a brief part-time apprenticeship. Furthermore, once the typical teacher is installed in a school, the scandalous reality that predominates is that while teachers are at work in immediate proximity to colleagues who are practicing the teaching profession day in and day out, teachers do not observe each others’ classes, do not request that others critique their classes, do not, in other words, see the need to continue their professional development. It is the exception that a teacher takes the initiative to forward his/her development beyond the silly requirement of attendance at the occasional conference. Additionally, teacher training, to the extent that it exists, focusses to a goofy degree on the policy dimension, and on management issues whereas the focus needs to be on dynamic, project centered, playful yet demanding classroom pedagogy. The school must be a place where the student loves to return each day.

3. The best and the brightest (i.e. those you want to attract to teaching your children and training your workforce) will have no interest in a poorly paid career working in under-financed schools functioning under a most uncreative system of regulations authored by bureaucrats and administrators with little understanding of the artistic freedom required by the exceptional teacher.

WHAT CAN BE DONE?
There is a very simple set of reforms and systemic changes that can be initiated to solve these three problems, and I shall describe below those that I would recommend were I asked. 

Unfortunately (1) teachers, especially teachers who see, and are willing to say, how increasingly empty this educational glass is, are rarely asked. And when asked, we aren't listened to. (Surveys today being designed by the established to illicit responses not outside of the range of proposals undisruptive to the establishment.) And when listened to, we are marginalized as a statistical minority, the majority, by definition, being those whose self-interest is served by the maintenance of the status quo.  (2) Truth telling -- in the "Hey, the king's naked!" sense -- is never the norm despite everyone agreeing tacitly with the truth teller. People's opinions are so easily swayed by simple membership and identification with a group. And, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the punishment awaiting anyone who is foolish enough to tell the truth is worse than that meted out to a murderer. (3) We have arrived at the period culturally where our mediocre educational system is fully ramped up and mass producing in vast numbers  Generic-Unconscious-Materialist-Worker-Opinionated-Consumers or GUMWOCS where once local citizen craftsmen individuals stood.  (4) The culture of schools at all levels now includes a farcical amount of self-celebration. It could not be clearer to the outside observer that the less confident the educational institution becomes in its excellence, the more of its energy is expended in celebration (of its excellence). Methinks you celebrateth way too much.

A program of reform will focus on three areas:
1. Educator training and support
2. Revocationalization of schooling (including apprenticeships)
3. Reinstitution of educationally oriented standards for broadcasting