Rote learning creates problems. First, because what is being learned is arbitrary, the learning is difficult: it can take considerable time and effort. Second, when a problem arises, the memorized sequence of actions gives no hint of what has gone wrong, no suggestion of what might be done to fix the problem. Although some things are appropriate to learn by rote (the letters of the alphabet, for example), most are not. Alas, it is still the dominant method of instruction in many school systems, and even for much adult training. This is how some people are taught to use computers, or to cook. It is how we have to learn to use some of the new (poorly designed) gadgets of our technology.

Most psychologists would argue that it is not really possible to learn arbitrary associations or sequences. Even where there appears to be no structure, people manufacture some artificial and usually rather unsatisfactory one, which is why the learning is so bad. For our purposes it does not matter whether arbitrary learning is impossible or simply very difficult, the end result is the same: it is not the best way to go, not if there is any choice in the matter. Thus, in teaching the alphabet, we try to make it into a tune, using the natural constraints of rhyme and rhythm to simplify the memory load. People who have learned to use computers or cook by rote are probably not very good. Since they do not understand the reasons for their actions, they must find tasks arbitrary and strange. When something goes wrong, they don’t know what to do (unless they’ve memorized solutions). Although rote learning is at times necessary or efficient–so that emergency procedures for things like high-speed military jet aircraft are handled quickly, automatically when the need arises–on the whole, it is most unsatisfactory.

Plus learning is a core principle of systems thinking.The bit I liked was about designing the learning dimension of the organization. It described the function and role of a learning system as reinvigorating the ability and desire of the members to satisfy their needs and desires both individually and collectively. How wonderfully put!

Very wisely, it includes not just ability, but desire as an equally important responsibility of learning systems. It continues, Ability without desire is impotent, just as desire without ability is sterile. How much of what we consider to be education concerns itself with desire as much as ability?

“Education isn’t the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” -WB Yeats

If you’re coming, but sure to register with EventBrite and then let your friends know on upcoming.org and Facebook. See you guys next week!

eh i could
but its actually for class
: (

What does that mean? It means he would, but this is just a class assignment. I asked him if he really wanted to make this site, and he said definitely. All of a sudden I remembered so many class projects that I was really excited about either because it really interested me or because it allowed me to do it around something that really interested me. The thing about all those projects was that I was never satisfied with how they turned out, but because it was a class project made that okay.

In fact, if I took the opportunity to take something I was doing outside of class and do it as a class project, that would almost certainly kill the project.

I hated that dynamic of school. You only really have time to do things for class, but the things you do are never enough of what you would really want to do if it wasn’t for class. Then because it’s for class, you don’t really want to treat it like it was something you really wanted to do. Instead it’s reduced to what most schoolwork is: busywork.

Instead of making it a WordPress theme and getting his site started, my friend made a very sane rationalization that it would be more work and more to learn than it would be worth as a school project.

Greatness is not encouraged in school because greatness is relative, and that’s very hard to industrialize. You generally get the lowest common denominator. Not all schools suffer from this, it’s mostly K-12, but even many colleges suffer from this and they used to be the hope after K-12.

Compare this to what some of the educators are doing that use systems thinking as a foundation. I saw a talk by Jay Forrestor that mentioned how some K-12 classes are daring to do things that nobody else is. One example was a class that was redesigning the population policy of China, and they actually engaged the Chinese government to get real data to work with on this real problem. It was a thrilling experience for the kids to actually engage a foreign government to work on something real. In that context it would be a bit harder to look at it as “just a class assignment.”

He poses a good question. How can you expect a kid to know what democracy is when for 12 years or more they’re raised in an autocratic, fascist society?

The Sudbury democratic school has been used as the model for 40 other schools around the world. One of them, Fairhaven School of Upper Marlboro, Maryland, was featured in a documentary called Voices from the New American Schoolhouse. The trailer gives a glimpse at what the Sudbury model is like from the perspective of the kids attending.

Then I realized I had seen some video lectures of Russ Ackoff that I couldn’t watch because I didn’t want to install Real Player, so I went and found them. Four hours of Russel Ackoff! Really fun stuff if you’re as into Ackoff’s work as I am. He told a lot of stories and covered a lot of his usual material in-depth. In the third hour he started getting into some of the work he did in Mantua, a ghetto of Philadelphia.

There were some great stories, including how he got an entire school that was suffering from illiteracy to become literate… by putting Charlie Chaplain silent films on in the auditorium that kids had the choice of leaving class for. A lot of what he does is like social engineering. There was also a story of a bunch of shops that were constantly broke into. Tenants would constantly move out because of it. What did Ackoff tell them to do? Hire the kids that were breaking in as a police force to protect the shops. Theft stopped immediately.

I decided to transcribe one of the stories about how he dealt with the gang problem in Mantua using education. He put on a program that they paid the gang leaders of Mantua to take, but let them decide the curriculum. They following is my personal transcription of the story:

There were 21 gangs in Mantua and the destruction was incredible. There was not only a lot of crime, but a number of kids killed in gang wars. There were 7 turfs and if a kid went into another turf without protection they would risk being killed. They came to us and said, “We’ve got to do something about the gangs.” The gangs were headed up by kids 17, 18, 19 year olds who were the real power brokers in the community. So we decided to open up a school for gang leaders.

Now the first question was, how are you going to get these gang leaders to come to school? We’d have to pay them. We calculated how much it cost to have a gang and the destruction they do in the community, and it was tremendous. We went to the Anheuser-Busch corporation, they have a foundation, and got a grant of money to allow us to develop an educational experiment for gang leaders.

At the University of Pennsylvania we set up a class for 21 gang leaders and it was unique in several respects. The curriculum was entirely determined by the students. They were paid $60 a week at that time which was a lot of money for coming to class. They were provided with whatever equipment they wanted. The first thing they wanted was walkie-talkies with disc players that turned out not to record the professors as they said it was for, but to play records while the professor was talking. But that was their business.

Now several things happened in the course. Some of it, and this is just an aside, but about 3 or 4 days after the course began, I got a call from the engineering college which was the building in which this class was meeting. They said to come over immediately there was a crisis. One of the kids in the class was hot that day, it was in the spring so it was hot, took his coat off and he had a gun in his belt, it was conspicuous. And he walked out of the classroom to find the men’s room and he couldn’t find it. He walked into an office to ask the secretary. You can imagine what happened. She screamed and immediately everybody came running. Of course the supposition was he was there to rape her. And so it was a great big fuss and it took a while to get it settled and we finally convinced the attendees not to carry guns to class.

After about two weeks, a deputation of about three came to me and said, “You know, the people that are coming to lecture to us are writing on the blackboard, and they erase it before we have a chance to read it. Can we have a speed reading course?” Now, it wasn’t speed reading at all. It was illiteracy, but they weren’t going to call it that. So they wanted a course in reading. We put one on, and all 21 of them came to it in the evening on their own time. And within a couple weeks they were literate enough to read the blackboard.

About a month later in the course, they came to us and said, “You know, they’re using a lot of numbers and they add and subtract and divide too fast. Can we take a speed arithmetic course?” We put on a speed arithmetic course for them.

The courses were unbelievable, sometimes I was so embarrassed I could hardly hold in. At one point, they wanted to find out how the newspaper operated. So we got ahold of the Philadelphia Inquirer which was the major newspaper. The publisher’s an old friend of mine, I said who’s the principle reporter who covers the ghetto? He said we got a young girl that’s a real crack up on this. So we asked her to give the course and she agreed. She came to class, and she’s a beauty, she was one of these typical white blond girls. And she started to talk but before she got five minutes in, one of the guys broke in and said “Would you ever date a black man?” First question that was asked of them! She said, “Well as a matter of fact I did.” He said, “How’d you like it?” And then he got very personal in the subsequent questions. But she had to put up with this.

The fact is, before long they found out a hell of a lot about how the newspaper worked. They wanted to know how foundations worked. They had the chief of police in to explain how the police worked.

With some absolutely incredible consequences, for example, the first methadone treatment center in the United States was in this neighborhood. And it was illegal. Because remember, methadone was not legal when it was initially introduced. They took over a building and made a treatment center for methadone, in which there was a lineup of kids every morning, mostly from the suburbs coming to get methadone. The problem was in the first week, they broke into it three times and stole the methadone. There was no way of making the building secure. So how do you solve that problem? That was given to the kids. They went to the police and said, “Will you store this stuff for us in your safe?” The police said yes. So we had the police storing illegal methadone every night. They were delighted because we were cutting down on drug usage and addiction problems in the community.

Now these 21 gang leaders, as they went through this course, towards the end they said, “We want a graduation ceremony.” Well what kind of ceremony do you want? They said, “We want the president of the university to give us a diploma, and we want to be in cap and gown.” So we agreed, got them the cap and gown and the president of the university agreed to give them the diploma. We had a regular diploma made up like a normal one. It didn’t give them a degree, but it gave them a certificate of completion of the program.

And then they said, “We want a prom!” Well what kind of a prom? “We want a nice ballroom and we want formal dress and we want our families to come.” Boy, let me tell you, that was one of the best parties I’ve ever been to in my life. All these young men dressed in tuxedos with gals in gowns and corsages with their families there. We had a band there, it was absolutely a marvelous evening.

Then they wanted a class trip. What kind of a trip do you want? “We want to go to a country we’ve never been in.” Because most of them had never been out of their neighborhood. And we said like what and they said, “Well, anywhere abroad.” The question was, how are we going to get 21 people abroad? We didn’t have enough money. We want back to Anheuser-Busch and we said, “You’ve got five planes, can we borrow them to take these kids somewhere?” They said, “You can, but not outside the United States.” So we went back to the kids and they said, “So what’s the furthest place we can go that’s in the United States?” We said, “Puerto Rico.” “Good,” they said, “we want a class trip to Puerto Rico.”

So we flew the 21 of them to Puerto Rico with two chaperones, one from the neighborhood and one from the university. Two days after they got there, we got a phone call saying “Can you get the planes, they want to come home.” Why? “They discovered the Puerto Ricans don’t speak the same language they do. They feel very disoriented and uncomfortable, and they want to come home.” So I said, “Look, use your heads. What can they do where language will not matter and which will keep them occupied?”

I didn’t hear from them, until the end of the week I got a phone call. I said, “What happened?” “Oh you don’t have to worry about it, the problem’s taken care of.” I said, “What did you do?” “We took them into a prison where they can play basketball with the inmates and they’re having a hell of a good time.” And they spent their so called class trip in prison in Puerto Rico playing games with the prisoners.

You see, self determining activity. They came back and they were just full of this. Now the follow up is what’s important. 17 of the 21 people are gainfully employed even today 40 years later in corporations or government. Two of them disappeared on us and we’ve never been able to track them. 2 of them went to jail for crimes they had committed before they came to the class.

Now you calculate the cost benefit of a course like that. It’s absolutely incredible, it runs in the millions of dollars. It wasn’t the pretense of educators telling these kids what they ought to learn. But giving them a chance to educate themselves in what they wanted to learn that they thought they might be able to use subsequently. The impact of that, was absolutely incredible.

You see, everybody recognizes immediately that teachers are the ones who learn the most. School is absolutely upside down. Students ought to be teaching. The faculty ought to be learning.

This points out two major deficiencies in our school system. The first is obvious: if teaching is how you learn the most, maybe we should be teaching kids to teach. The benefits of this alone would have a huge impact on the effectiveness of schools. Ackoff then goes on to describe how this used to take place in one-room schools as a necessity, and the success story of having 7 year old kids teach arithmetic to a computer in order to learn it themselves. It’s a great keynote and you can listen to it here.

The second deficiency is about the inability of schools to change. For whatever reason, possibly because of a government monopoly, our public schools have not fundamentally changed since they were introduced in the 1850s. Unless schools are able to learn, they will not be able to become more efficient at their purpose. Unless schools are able to adapt, they will not be able to remain effective in a changing environment, which is only going to happen faster.

I’m writing a manifesto for ChangeThis based on the educational work of Russ Ackoff, John Dewey, John Taylor Gatto, Peter Senge, and Ken Robinson. Hopefully it will elucidate the problems of education and inspire new approaches that will make a difference. Here is a excerpt on the topic of adaptability:

In the Industrial Age, the education planners could depend on just increasing how many children were educated, much like the assembly line increasing the production of goods. Henry Ford effectively dissolved the problem of “how many” with the assembly line and mass production. But he failed to appreciate the implications of this success by not addressing the problem of “what kind” that comes with abundance. Because of the statement, “They can have any color as long as it is black,” Ford gave GM the opportunity to eventually dominate the market.

With compulsory assembly line schools and college graduates at an all-time high, we’ve achieved abundance from a high-throughput education system. The problem has since been “what kind” of education, but with the alarming rate of new fields coming into existence, we’re starting to fall behind. It’s not just one target, it’s an increasing number of faster moving targets. We simply have no idea what’s going to be needed, and we must redesign the system to address this.

I think the significance of teachers is mostly forgotten or ignored. I have a theory that in the back of their minds, most people already know that most of school is a shallow institution of proving how smart you are as opposed to a resource for learning. And this is why we don’t value teachers as much as we should.

Still, we entrust our kids to teachers for the majority of their most pliable and influential years. Having a great teacher can have a profound effect on who you become as an adult. Nobody I know has said this better than Taylor Mali…

The book covers a lot, including a brief history of modern schools systems, which originated at the dawn of the Industrial Age. It was then when European states started building educational infrastructure to help compete in this new era of science and technology. As the book describes,

The result was an industrial-age school system fashioned in the image of the assembly line, the icon of the booming industrial age. In fact, schools may be the starkest example in modern society of an entire institution modeled after the assembly line. Like any assembly line, the system was organized into discrete stages. Called grades, they segregated children by age. Everyone was supposed to move from stage to stage together. Each stage had local supervisors–the teachers responsible for it. Classes of twenty to forty students met for specified periods in a scheduled day to drill for tests. The whole school was designed to run at a uniform speed, complete with bells and rigid daily time schedules.

This very mechanistic model of the school, as well as the assembly line, was the result of the Machine Age worldview, which was responsible for the Industrial Revolution itself. Since World War II, this way of thinking has started to have limited application because it fails to address new issues that we’ve since discovered because of the efforts of industrialism.

As it turns out, schools are the only remaining institution entirely based on this worldview. In hindsight, we can see the disadvantages of this model that we should probably not tolerate any longer.

Those who did not learn at the speed of the assembly line either fell off or were forced to struggle continually to keep pace. It established uniformity of product and process as norms, thereby naively assuming that all children learn in the same way. It made educators into controllers and inspectors, thereby transforming the traditional mentor-mentee relationship and establishing teacher-centered rather than learner-centered learning. Motivation became the teacher’s responsibility rather than the learner’s. Discipline became adherence to rules set by the teacher rather than self-discipline. Assessment centered on gaining the teacher’s approval rather than objectively gauging one’s own capabilities.