When others find that my wife and I have decided to homeschool our children inevitably they ask, "Why?" I've always tried to answer this question with tactful precision and achieved a varying degrees of success. Today I discovered a description that defines how I feel about what's wrong with public schooling in a wonderfully clear and precise way. It's found in The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences and authored by R. Keith Sawyer:
By the twentieth century, all major industrialized countries offered formal schooling to all of their children. When these schools took shape in the ninetieth and twentieth centuries, scientist didn't know very much about how people learn. Even by the 1920s, when schools began to become the large bureaucratic institutions that we know today, there still was not sustained study of how people learn. As a result, the schools we have today were designed around commonsense assumptions that had never been tested scientifically.
Sawyer goes on to outline these problematic "commonsense assumptions" as follows:
- Knowledge is a collection of facts about the world and procedures for how to solve problems. Facts are statements like "The earth is titled on its axis by 23.45 degrees" and procedures are step-by-step instructions like how to do multidigit addition by carrying to the next column.
- The goal of schooling is to get these facts and procedures into the student's head. People are considered to be educated when they possess a large collection of these facts and procedures.
- Teachers know these facts and procedures, and their job is to transmit them to students.
- Simpler facts and procedures should be learned first, followed by progressively more complex facts and procedures. The definitions of "simplicity" and "complexity" and the proper sequencing of material were determined either by teachers, by textbook authors, or by asking expert adults like mathematicians, scientists, or historians - not by studying how children actually learn.
- The way to determine the success of schooling is to test students to see how many of these facts and procedures they have acquired.
This traditional vision of schooling is known as instructionism (Papert, 1993). Instructionism prepared students for the industrialized economy of the early twentieth century. But the world today is much more technologically complex and economically competitive, and instructionism is increasingly failing to educate our students to participate in this new kind of society. Economists and organizational theorists have reached a consensus that today we are living in a knowledge economy, an economy that is built on knowledge work (Bereiter, 2002; Drucker, 1993). In the knowledge economy, memorization of facts and procedures is not enough for success. Educated graduates need a deep conceptual understanding of complex concepts, and the ability to work with them creatively to generate new ideas, new theories, new products, and new knowledge. They need to be able to critically evaluate what they read, to be able to express themselves clearly both verbally and in writing, and to be able to understand scientific and mathematical thinking. They need to learn integrated and usable knowledge, rather than the sets of compartmentalized and decontextualized facts emphasized by instructionism. They need to be able to take responsibility for their own continuing, lifelong learning. These abilities are important to the economy, to the continued success of participatory democracy, and to living a fulfilling, meaningful life. Instructionism is particularly ill-suited to the education of creative professionals who can develop new knowledge and continually further their own understanding; instructionism is an anachronism in the modern innovation economy. (R.K. Sawyer, The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences, Cambridge University Press, 2006.)
It's not that instructionism isn't good, it's that it's incomplete. It was never designed to be more than an instantiation of, and a response to, these fundamental "commonsense assumptions" about what it means to be educated.
I believe there are probably as many different approaches to education as there are people, but this approach, embodied in instructionism is the problem. As long as any educational pursuit approaches learning from this perspective alone, young people will continue to enter the global workforce unprepared for the demands of the modern economy.
I want my children's minds to be factories for new ideas, not just warehouses of facts and procedures.
Great post!
Dad
I have not met many home-schooled individuals that were, um, as well adjusted in social dealings as non-home schooled folks. Part of going to school is learning to deal with adversity (sometimes beyond your control), putting up with teachers you can't stand, dealing with subjects you'd don't consider important. You are also likely to be exposed to more diverse points of view on a variety of subjects, some with which you may not agree with, and sometimes forced to deal with very mundane material that bores you to death. These are often problems encountered later in life, whether you learned how to cope with it or not.
If you home school your child, I think your child could miss out on that type of learning, accumulated from Kindergarten all the way through college. Those skills developed over the years will help them in the real world job scenarios.
And while you point out some problematic "commonsense assumptions," the truth is a lot of those same situations apply to things later in life, including the workplace. As a result, school gives your child a chance to hone the skills needed to navigate these types of situations.
I think many folks undervalue the social learning and a variety of other non-academic skills learned in the public school experience. I think that home schooling is a great addition to public schooling, but isn't a substitute.
David, you put together a great post. Everything I could have and did learn in High School, I learned better and more effectively at home. If a home is a modern American household, Mother and Father working 40 to 60 hours a week, then it makes sense why certain homeschooling families have difficulties raising socially smart children–capable of verbal and written expression. But thanks to the experience we had at home with a loving mother and an insightful father with a home office, none of us are lacking on a social learning, that might have taken place in the public school system. I like it when Dad would say that homeschooling is not for everyone, but it was right for the Weiss family. I think in the case of your family in continues to be right. It will be interesting to see how many of us siblings will end up using homeschooling to raise our families. Thanks for posting again. I was worried I would have to wait another month or so before reading another thought of yours.
Interesting point David.
Have you seen this TED video win which Ken Robinson argues that Schools kill creativity?
http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
Its mighty interesting, and one of the reasons my little brother is being homeschooled.
Roberto, I love that video! Thanks for reminding me of it. I think it's exactly these assumptions of instructionism enshrined in public schools (and elsewhere) that do so much damage to a child's creativity among other things. Thanks again for sharing.
I wonder whether people choose home schooling based on their own bad experiences in public schools or perhaps based on negative media coverage of a few bad schools. There seems to be an implicit assumption from home schooling proponents that all public schools are bad and therefore all home schooling must be good. That logic simply doesn't follow.
Keep in mind public schools are under incredible scrutiny that home schoolers (and private schools, for that matter) don't have to deal with. If home school proponents are going to demand a rigorous scientific assessment of the success or failure of public schools to educate children -- and they are well within their rights to do so -- they should focus that same level of rigor on their capacity to educate their own children rather than simply assuming they can do it better by default.
I still consider the education I received from public schools to be top-notch, and I will have no hesitation sending my own daughter to public schools as well. If I didn't feel she would receive the best education possible, I would first ask whether I'm sufficiently involved in her education (hopefully yes). Then I would ask whether our schools are receiving the funding they need to do the job (probably not). The last thing I would ever consider is home schooling her.
Instruction at home based solely on instructionism will yield the same bad results as the public school system.
There are many public (and private) schools that have been able to break out of this model, but there are also many that are stuck in this very top-down, instructionist model that's more inclined to treat children as empty vessels than dynamic human beings--and it can be very difficult for a single person to change that.
I went to a public school in elementary school, and learned quite a lot; I went to a private middle school--one that my (caring, involved) dad was teaching at, so he would certainly have been in a position to affect my education more than most. I hated it there, mostly for the reasons that the post outlined--the general philosophy was one that was not conducive to creative or critical thinking, and both the students and teachers tended to act accordingly. I ended up opting out in favor of starting an early college program when I was 14 (and in response to an earlier poster, I developed into a more mature, socially capable, and happy person there than I ever would have as a bookish, isolated kid in "regular" school.)
The problem is not public vs. private vs. homeschooled. The problem is in the philosophy of education that's used.