Learning to Be Free

We did not weave the web of life; we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.
– Chief Seattle

Every child is part of a human network. The nature and extent of a child’s network — its structure, interaction and exchanges of non-monetary value between the people in it — shape what learning is possible and predict much about who a child can become. We can help children build better networks for themselves as they learn, but not without radical changes in the way we think about what education is, how it really happens, and the resources it really requires. When young people deeply understand and embrace their interdependence with all things, they take the first step towards creating a new future for themselves, and for all of us.

In our podcasts we propose a new approach to education and why we need it now. In Episode One we started with some observations about children and about adult behavior, things that would need to be incorporated into a new approach. We took a network perspective on how children build and manage networks of people who can support their transition into adulthood. We conclude by foreshadowing the design principles that we explore thoroughly in Episodes Two and Three.

In Episode Four we propose a new architecture, built on the purposes, values, and principles introduced in the first three podcasts. It shifts greater responsibility backed by increased support to families and learners. It proposes new tools to manage education investments and existing resources, both monetary and non-monetary in nature. Most of all it radically transforms the social contract, demanding that we be more honest about the family resource gap and, as a society, commit ourselves to make up the difference with individualized family contracts that leverage the good will and caring of the many people who could play a positive role in children’s lives, but don’t because of bureaucratic and cultural barriers. In Episode Five we offer an approach to putting such a system in place, outlining the domains of work that, unleashing mass energy, creativity, and collaboration, would be needed to make the change.

We are not naïve. We know we propose a preposterously difficult thing – education by direct democracy and a major shift from paternalistic government control (a.k.a., “representative democracy”) towards higher expectations for all, a redefinition of optimal resources, and a shift of power to learners and families. Yet we think there is yearning in this country and in the world for an approach to education that acknowledges that its ultimate outcomes are people — human beings that are curious, creative, productive, ethical and committed to improving conditions for all of humanity.

Even a cursory look at global indicators of quality of life shows that our current mode of living is unsustainable. The gap between haves and have-nots grows wider, and instability and insecurity grow commensurately. However, the old constructs of rich vs. poor, developed vs. underdeveloped, right vs. left, you vs. me — these simplistic ways of seeing things won’t solve our current challenges. We can look to the example of the South Africa and the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions as an example of a different approach to solving the intractable conflicts of our time, and to healing from the effects of injustice and oppression — an approach that holds at its core the inescapable principle of interdependence. Educator bell hooks sums it up well when she writes:

For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?

bell hooks

bell hooks’ question is one we are trying to answer. Education seems like a good place to start.

After five years of No Child Left Behind data trends show that its ambitious goals will not be met by 2014. Several well-respected leaders have been saying publicly that the emperor has no clothes, as did recently resigned San Diego City Schools Superintendent Carl Cohn when he said, “I believe there is a place where no child is left behind, where all children achieve grade-level proficiency and there is no achievement gap. It is called heaven.”

What happens when NCLB falls far short of its goals? Will that create a new opportunity to rethink education completely, or will the policy pendulum just swing a little bit back to the left?

The reality is that schooling is losing out to the street, computer games, online networks, cell phones, and iPods in the competition for student interest and motivation. While charter schools have begun to capture significant enrollment in some urban cities (nearly 20% in Oakland where I live), on the whole, charter schools have not proven themselves demonstrably superior in the aggregate. Meanwhile higher education has become unaffordable even for middle class families, and it has a higher drop out rate than high schools.

Working from the inside to redesign a dysfunctional urban district has convinced me that the current system is obsolete — from the way education is measured and managed to the way it’s governed and financed.

The US system of public education emerged at the beginning of the 20th Century and has changed little since then. Despite incremental improvement over the last fifty years, K-12 education has demonstrated that it cannot meet the current demand for highly proficient, ethical and productive global citizens who can learn rapidly and effectively in the face of the high stakes social, economic and political challenges of the 21st century.

Our education system today was designed to complement a traditional social structure within industrial economy, neither of which exist today, an era of global economies, new technologies and dramatic demographic changes. As scholar and researcher Martin Haberman writes: Schools [and districts] are places organized on the bizarre expectation that groups of children and youth of the same age “learn” at roughly the same rate and in the same ways. Schools organized on the basis of age-grades are an American cultural and historic phenomenon that have not only survived but thrived (1/2 trillion dollars per year, 54 million children in 15,000 districts over four hundred years) and will not be transformed simply because their assumptions reflect neither the realities of student growth and socialization nor any research or theory of human development. Schools reflect what America wants not what America needs.

Many Americans do know that we need something different and we need it now — but there is no consensus on what or how. Unfortunately, our education system is representative of the mostly hierarchical public and private institutions that exist today — entities where the principle of organizational and individual self-interest prevails over the principle of caring for individuals and communities and the people they serve.

I think the world is ready for an evolutionary leap in how humans organize themselves to work for the public good and individual freedom. I think education is a good place to start.

Mario enters kindergarten and within the first few months the school tells his parents he is “behind” and “not on grade level.” Mario comes from a working class family of loving parents with very limited resources. Like many children entering school in the NCLB era, Mario is behind before he starts. What’s wrong with this picture?

In early December several news sources published excerpts from The Family: America’s Smallest School written by Paul E. Barton and Richard J. Coley of Education Testing Service’s Policy Information Center. The report analyzes the family and home experiences and conditions that impact children’s learning. The study identified four factors that strongly affect student achievement and which together “account for about two-thirds of the large differences among states in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) eighth-grade reading scores.” They are: “single parent families, time spent reading to children, time watching TV, and the frequency of school absences.”

One of the report’s main conclusions is that “the resources available at home — books, magazines, newspapers, a home computer, a quiet place to study — can have a lasting influence on a child’s ability to achieve academically.” Perhaps this is revelatory for ETS, but it shouldn’t be news for any family or teacher with struggling learners. And it is a pinhole view of a much larger landscape of challenges.

We keep studying a fact that we already know, but ignore repeatedly: the family and community resources (money, time, people, learning opportunities and daily conditions) to which learners have access outside of school determine much of what is possible for learners in school. This is why Mario, no matter how hard he works, is statistically likely to fall further behind his more privileged peers the longer he stays in school.

Countless studies have affirmed the positive outcomes for children when families involve themselves actively in their children’s education inside and outside of schools. Yet our system — the social contract for education — has not been able to address the changing nature of families and communities, economic opportunities, and generally higher expectations for learning in the world we now live in.

The real resource gap is not so much about what schools don’t have, but what families and children can’t provide or create for themselves because they lack the time, the knowledge, the resources or the community of support. Our education system today was designed to complement a traditional, two-parent family-based social structure within an industrial economy and homogeneous communities, none of which exist today, an era of global economies, new technologies and dramatic demographic changes. Unless we get beyond the four walls of the classroom and realize that education is happening all the time, we will not see clearly what we need to do to address this challenge.

That is why are proposing — as part of a new social contract for education — to reframe equity as addressing the resource gap for families and individual learners.

To learn more this download Podcast 2 from the right column of our home page.