Averting Educational Catastrophe

The Situation

Educating—attempting to clarify or alter the images of reality in other’s minds—is the most complex of all human endeavors.

America’s schools don’t educate well. They cost a great deal to operate, require inordinate amounts of time, are at odds with youthful nature, and, based on typical adult retention rates and use of what’s “taught,” are extremely inefficient.

The situation is unacceptable. “Human history,” said H.G. Wells, “is a race between education and catastrophe.” The news of the day suggests catastrophe has a comfortable lead.

Mis-Diagnosing the Main Problem

Formal education is in an advanced state of institutionalization. Fads periodically sweep the profession. Old ideas are given new names and recycled. Policymakers legislate the conventional wisdom. Experienced administrators are replaced by mayors, military officers, and business executives. Reformers’ “silver bullets” are beyond count. The media revel in education’s supposed ills. Ideologues cherry pick the data to promote their prejudices. True believers in market forces “raise the bar” and preach the “Rigor!” sermon.

But in the only place where it really matters—in the minds of learners—little happens. Generation after generation, after physiological, emotional, and cultural factors are taken into account, student intellectual performance varies little.

A principle long accepted in management circles, that poor performance indicates a system problem, isn’t thought to apply to education. The finger of blame is instead pointed at the people in the system—students, teachers, administrators, parents, other scapegoats.

The System Problem

There is indeed a system problem. The familiar math-science-language arts-social studies “core” curriculum, standardized in 1892 and in near-universal use in America’s schools and universities, is that problem. It has no overarching aim, ignores the seamless, systemic nature of knowledge, doesn’t respect the brain's need for order and organization, neglects important fields of study, fails to move students smoothly through ever-increasing levels of complexity, doesn’t distinguish between degrees of importance of content, insufficiently relates to real-world experience, neglects higher-order thought processes, unduly emphasizes symbol manipulation skills, has no built-in self-renewing capability, is overly dependent on extrinsic motivation, makes unreasonable demands on memory, lacks a comprehensive vocabulary shared by all educators, assigns students unnatural, passive roles, fails to put specialized studies in holistic perspective, doesn’t encourage novel, creative thought, penalizes rather than capitalizes on student variability, encourages simplistic methods of evaluation, neglects the basic knowledge-creating process of relationship exploration, and fails to address ethical and moral issues.

Tying “standards” and high-stakes tests to such a curriculum is indefensible. Any one of its problems is serious enough to warrant calling a national conference, and it suffers from all of them.

A Proposal

Helping students make more sense of experience is the overarching aim of public education. The basic sense-making process is simple: The mind pulls from the stream of consciousness something to think about. It then puts that “something” in “story” form—locates it in space, assigns it time dimensions, identifies the participating actors or objects, describes the action, attributes cause for the action, and weaves the five elements together systemically. As sense-maker—as the basic intellectual tool for selecting, organizing, creating and integrating knowledge—this single system, which children master long before kindergarten, is far superior to the many conceptual organizers of school subjects and academic disciplines. Its formal use eliminates or radically reduces all major problems with the curriculum. It allows students to perform at intellectual levels not now even being considered, but that fact will only be apparent to its diligent users.

There will be no significant progress toward closing the “achievement gap,” no major improvement in student performance, no decrease in the waste of intellectual potential, no relief from the tyranny of simple-minded tests, no enhanced ability of America to meet the challenges of an unknowable future, until the power and sophistication inherent in our ancient, civilization-enabling, pre-disciplinary system of sense-making is understood, raised into consciousness, appreciated, and adopted as the primary organizer of general education.