My professional goals have changed. For most of the last twenty years, I’ve been trying to make schools better. Over the last two years, that goal faded as I saw the problems of schools as firmly entrenched as the institution itself. I came to Tapestry because I wanted to help make better schools. Now I find this approach inadequate as well. It’s time to make something better than schools.
I see the institution of schooling (including academia) becoming vulnerable to collapse. I came to Tapestry hoping, more or less, to be part of the overthrow of traditional schooling, and, curiously, I find myself using a more traditional approach than I have since I was newbie in the field. What Tyack & Cuban call “the grammar of schooling” is very powerful indeed.
I came to Tapestry having given up on school reform. I came to Tapestry to engage in school replacement. I saw (and still see) the rate of change within schools as, thanks to global warming, slower than glacial. School reform can improve education, but I think the rate of change is doomed to be subglacial.
Allow me to expand on that a bit. When I was a beginning teacher back in the 1980s, school reform was often described as being like rebuilding a jumbo jet while in flight. I was attracted to the metaphor. I thought, “Yes! It really is that hard!” I still like the metaphor, but for different reasons. Now I think, “Yes, it really is that stupid!”
They aren’t building the next generation of aircrafts by remodeling or rebuilding the current ones! They are making replacements, applying new engineering approaches, perhaps most importantly using much lighter weight materials for the aircraft bodies. Fortunately, they aren’t making these changes to airplanes that are in flight. You really can’t substantially re-engineer either a school or a plane while it’s in use.
If you try, the thing will almost certainly crash.
That means make the change incredibly slowly. Or die. Or take the thing apart and rebuild it from scratch.
I think places like Tapestry might productively contribute to the partial collapse of traditional schooling, but I think homeschooling will play a stronger role in the end of schools’ hegemony in the edusphere.
Tapestry is an above average urban school, but it’s still essentially a school. We put 25 or so kids in a room hour after hour after hour; day after day after day; year after year after year and expect kids to emerge substantially smarter at the end of that then they started.
That very commonplace idea certainly doesn’t seem like a very good idea, but what should we do instead? That’s a topic for another day. Or for your comments.
I’ll close with a note to reiterate the point made in earlier posts and responses to comments on earlier posts — I know that it is possible for teachers to overcome the constraints of the system and change kids lives. I personally know many such teachers. A key point that I’m trying to make here is that I believe it is possible to create a new operating system for education that would make such an outcome much more likely.
Cheers,
Don
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