Steve Kinney

Al Gore is fond of saying that you can change your lightbulbs, but you’re not going to see improvement until you change policy. I believe the same is true in education. There has been considerable research–most notably by Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University–that shows that our environment can have a profound impact on our psychology.

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Teaching is a profession of practitioners. Teachers are people who give themselves passionately to their craft. They scrutinize their practices. This is to be admired, but we must not overlook the need for the same scrutiny to be applied to educational policy, which has largely ignored findings in the field of psychology, sociology, and neuroscience.

We know that exercise improves thinking and brain functioning. Early humans walked as much as twelve miles a day. Neuroscientist, John Medina, argues in his book, Brain Rules, our brains developed while we were on the move. Despite this, we ask students to sit for hours on end and cut physical education and recess in the name of test scores.

Carol Dweck, has elaborated eloquently that the theories we have about the nature of intelligence can dramatically impact our ability to tackle new challenges that will expand our knowledge. Believing that intelligence is a malleable trait that can be improved over time significantly increases our likelyhood of taking on demanding projects that do, in fact, lead to increased skill and knowledge. Despite this, our school orthodoxy organizes our students into classes based on a few, often statistically-invalid assessments and promote a fixed, unalterable theory of intelligence that our students believe cannot be changed.

The rigor in educational research is missing. Best practices come and go as quickly as the political winds shift. The best example of our indiscipline when it comes to the way we approach education is in the infamous high-stakes testing that comes as a packaged deal with No Child Left Behind legislation. One data point is not enough to base any claims about a student’s performance. The lack of validity or reliability in the test as a research tool is beyond the scope of this post–as is the fact that it is statistically impossible for all students to be above the mean (average) in any time span.

I’m not saying we need to scrap schools completely. However, I am arguing that we need to dramatically rethink the ways we approach education. Teachers can–and should–continue to focus on improving their practice in the classroom setting, but the classroom setting is broken. The one-size-fits-all model doesn’t work. You know this as an adult; you ger to choose how you learn best.

If you function best in the late afternoon, then–as an adult–you are welcome to set up shop in a café at two in the afternoon. If you’re a night owl, so be it. If you work best in groups, you have that option. If you need background noise in order to focus, that’s fine too.

I am not arguing for a midnight to morning school day. I am trying illustrate that as adults, we shake the habits enforced on is in school and develop alternative means that are more effecrive for us. Some of us like to participate in lively discussion, others of us would like nothing more than to hole up with a book by ourselves. Some of us are mathematicians, others are writers, and still others are entreprenuers–all intelligent, none of us in the same way.

I think you get the idea. My point is that despite what we know about the brain and learning from scientific research and despite what we know from reflecting on our adult lives, we still insist that our current educational paradigm is even remotely acceptable.

P.S. Good Magazine recently devoted an issue to educational policy in America. Highly recommended.

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