This post is intended to be read in juxtaposition with the previous post, and like that post (Stuck between too much and not enough choice), draws it’s inspiration from a TED Talk. This TED Talk comes from Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink, The Tipping Point and the forthcoming Outliers: The Story of Success.
Gladwell’s talk, What we can learn from spaghetti sauce, describes happiness brought on by choice and choice attributed to Howard Moskowitz. Here’s the video embed:
An assumption of schools is that this structure of sitting kids down in rows and having them listen to a series of adults (at the secondary and tertiary levels) talk at them hour after hour after hour, day after day after day, year after year works. (Yeah, I know I overuse that line). Whatever the hell works means.
For so many, it’s clear by whatever measure, schools don’t work.
Quoting Gladwell (who is quoting Moskowitz):
All Americans fall into one of three groups: There are people who like their spaghetti sauce plain. There are people who like their spaghetti sauce spicy. And there are people who like their spaghetti sauce extra chunky.
The third of these, Gladwell goes on to say, is the most significant because at the time Moskowitz made his case, there was no extra chunky spaghetti sauce (my personal favorite). Prego filled the unknown need of a third of the spaghetti sauce consuming population and made millions.
The need for extra chunky educational choices is greater than the need for extra chunky spaghetti sauce, because it’s not really a matter of want but a matter of need.
Classes are like wheat.
How?
Celiac Disease, also known as gluten intolerance. For most folks, wheat is a nutrient. For those with Celiac Disease, wheat is a toxin and it’s a toxin that sweeps nutrients out of your system that you may have consumed along with the wheat.
For many folks, especially the ones who are weird enough to be reading this, they’ve probably had some classes that nourished their minds and maybe figured out how to get some nutritive value out of all or most of the classes they’ve taken.
But for a great many folks, classes are a toxin that inhibits the ingestion of whatever bits of educationally nutritous bits that may spice up the class.
For that large section of the population, we need extra chunky educational choices. (Maybe pesto, as it’s an even more fundamentally different kind of sauce?)
I’ll point you back to the previous post and the video that inspired it and ask you if I’m contradicting myself. Am I?
It seems to me that the most important problems don’t involve maximization or minimization but rather optimization. How do we come up with an appropriately sized set of educational options? Or (as Sarah suggests) a way to navigate through a large set of educational choices?
My gut says we should have enough choices to keep it interesting but not so many as to catch analysis paralysis.
A closing note: I write this from a National Science Foundation Principal Investigator’s meeting on transformative educational research. It strikes me, as it’s struck me many times in the past, that the most powerfully educative research features aspects that make classes look less and less like the image that comes to mind when we think of classes.
We are getting some ideas about how to make those extra chunky options.
Cheers,
Don
