Posts from — June 2008

To me, this is a rhetorical question but I believe there are people in the world that might not think so. There are many people in the world that have no desire or see no need to change the public school system – except maybe to ‘get back to the basics’ (which are reading, writing, and arithmetic). 

Human beings have a natural capacity to learn, to change, to grow, to improve and to create. These natural tendencies are systematically drummed out of people that attend public school. 

Why? Because the school system wasn’t set up to encourage creativity or encourage growth and improvement. The school system was set up to support the industrial revolution and produce people that could follow rules and stay within the lines.

The hierarchy of subjects taught in schools is designed to put the creative elements at the bottom (or not at all). The schooling process values ‘academics’ and much of the natural capacities that people have.

Here’s a short video that makes an argument for the reinvention of schools and for rethinking the fundamental principles we have for school and schooling. He says our task is to educate the whole being of children. 

One thing I didn’t know is where the design for high school came from. In reading the first chapter of a book called, Personalizing the High School Experience for Each Student, I have learned that it comes from a model to reach about 5% of the young people in this country – and it was developed in the 1890′s. 

In a previous post I included a table that shows the graduation rates in US High Schools. Now that I understand that High School was really designed to graduate about 5% of the population I think we can reasonably say it’s a miracle that more than 50% actually graduate. 

In our work we make a distinction between incremental innovation and breakthrough innovation. In a previous post I’ve asked the question whether schools as we know them need to be improved or redesigned. 

I hope we can see that it’s time to provide support for the re-invention of public schools and to move beyond incremental improvements and get to breakthroughs. We are, or were, the innovation leader in the world. With a public school system that we have now that leadership is surely in jeopardy. 

Here’s a quote from the first chapter of that book:

In the 1890s, Harvard College, a regional institute of higher education, desired to become a national university. To guide Harvard leaders in how to do this and to ensure that they would be getting students from across the country who were properly prepared to be successful in higher education, the college convened the Carnegie Commission. Yes, we’re talking about that Carnegie Commission—the commission that decided that our high school students needed to earn course credits based on seat time. This 19th century concept, which is based solely on educating students who would be able to go on to Harvard, is still the basic organizing structure of our high schools in the 21st century.

The United States in the 1890s was a country whose population felt that an education past the 4th grade was a waste of time for most individuals. It was a country where high school was only for those who needed the connection between elementary school and higher education. It was a country where very few women and at most 5 percent of the young men went to college. That’s who our high schools were designed to educate: 5 percent of our young men. The rest of our adolescents were employed in our mills, mines, and farms.