How to Take the Classroom Back from the Factory

A Broken System, A Broken Product

I want to introduce you to Sophia. Sophia is a third grader in the Delaware public school system. Her mom works from 8:30 am to 5:30 pm. Sophia gets dropped off at school before 8 am and gets picked up around 6 pm. She spends ten hours at school, and fourteen hours at home, ten of which are spent sleeping. As a before and aftercare professional I have worked with hundreds of children, and she is one of the most caring, sweetest, and brightest kids I have had the pleasure to work with; she is also struggling in school. One day while helping her with homework, she looks up at me and tells me, unprompted, that she wants to be a “doctor for kids” when she grows up. I was taken aback – because of her sudden expression of future aspirations, and because of my reaction. Typically, when my children express such lofty goals for themselves it fills me with pride and hope, but in this case my heart sank, the weight of remorse overburdening the fleeting buoy of hope. She has the heart to be a pediatrician; she has the brain for it too. However, if she stays in our current education system there is little to no chance of her goal being realized. This is a system that evaporates potential from the well of children’s hearts and whisks away their dreams – a system in desperate need of a change.

From Old School...

An understanding of how the current education system in America came to be is essential in order to understand the necessity of education reform. This system is often referred to as the “Factory Model of Education” due to its close association with the industrial revolution. However, this model originated in Prussia, and dates back to the late 1700s, a time before Prussia was highly industrialized. In reality, Frederick the Great was far ahead of his time, initiating major education reform. This was the first time education became universal and free. While the system was not necessarily created for the purpose of training factory workers, it closely paralleled a factory environment. Children were grouped into “buckets” of a particular age group and moved along an “assembly line” all while receiving the same instruction. In this model, the only variable is how well the instruction is received. However, it does not offer any remediation for this drawback. Herein lies the main problem with the Prussian model: a collection of unique children is subject to a single form of instruction and expected to achieve the same levels of success.

In 1840, Horace Mann introduced this model to the United States, in time for our industrial revolution. According to Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book Future Shock, “Mass education was the ingenious machine constructed by industrialism to produce the kind of adults it needed”. By 1870, public education was common but not uniform. Higher education institutions began pushing for standardization in order to have an idea of what level of education to expect of their incoming students. In 1892, that was accomplished…by only ten men. This “Committee of Ten” led by the president of Harvard University decided that school should be twelve years, and when each subject should appear on that twelve-year timeline. It is important to note that these men were forward thinking for their time, however, as Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy puts it, this “was a time before interstate highways, vaccines, knowledge of DNA, TV, mass media.” Yet, this system is still in place today, 125 years later.

...To New School

Education reform is necessary and happening in small cases across the country. The Prussian (or Factory) Model of education forces millions of unique children into boxes that limit their creativity and exploration, and subjects them to standardized instruction that is received differently by each child. It uses a pre-industrial age system to attempt to educate children in a post-industrial world. This is a system that values proficiency over growth. Its goal is not to allow children to discover and unlock their own potential, but reach a certain goal by a certain point as dictated by ten men 125 years ago. This results in minimal interactivity and valuable hands-on instruction in the classroom, limiting the potential learning spaces for children. Mark Esposito, Ph.D. and professor of business and economics at Harvard University, argues that modern education will be reinvented through digitizing, personalizing, and internationalizing of education. The digitizing of education will be explored through the concept of digital literacy and can be seen in the rise of massive open online courses. The personalizing of education is manifesting in the increasing popularity of project-based learning. Finally, the internationalizing of education will be explored through study abroad programs and a personal account of immersion school education.

Digitizing education exists in two main forms: the rise of a new type of literacy and massive open online courses. The biggest difference between education in 2017 and 30 years ago is the presence of the Internet and the role it plays for today’s students. The Internet is now a digital space for ideas, information, and ideals to be shared by many and accessed by many. This is a space for children to find the answers to their questions without the need for a designated instructor. It is also a place where students can present their own thoughts and perspectives about the world. Such an important and versatile space requires instruction on how it is to be navigated; this knowledge is digital literacy.

Digital literacy is a new type of literacy that teaches children to not only express themselves through written word, but to analyze and produce multimodal texts as well. According to Jesse Gainer in an article published in the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, “Such work can help equip students with tools (not just technical skills) for critiquing and creating culture and for voicing diverse and divergent perspectives to large audiences”. Who should be responsible for teaching children such a powerful tool? The fact that digital literacy is mainly acquired through out-of-the-classroom interactions with digital spaces is part of what makes it authentic in nature. If teachers were forced to instruct students in digital literacy within the framework of our broken education system, it could be damaging to its potential for culture-breeding creativity. Allowing students to share, create, and critique information in digital spaces is a learning practice that currently draws its value from existing outside of the classroom.

The location of the “classroom” is also changing as a result of the advent of the Internet. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) such as Khan Academy are increasing in popularity, for good reason. MOOCs move the classroom from a physical school building, to wherever one has access to the Internet. Not only that, but they offer instant access to a myriad of subjects that may not otherwise be taught at school. Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy explains that the Internet caused the distribution of information cost to approach zero. This allows for one-to-many and many-to-many information sharing to be possible. Khan Academy, as do many other MOOCs, utilize the one-to-many strategy of information sharing. The one-to-many strategy for information sharing is an effective method of using minimal resources to inform a theoretically unlimited number of people. An added benefit of MOOCs is that it allows the student to go through the information at their own pace. This is a solution to the problem that is faced in the Prussian model, or any proficiency-based model: students are forced to all learn at the same pace. Time constraints are to blame for this flaw; time constraints that are nearly eliminated through online education. However, MOOCs such as Khan Academy are not without inherent flaws. The one-to-many method of information sharing still suffers from the fact that the information is being presented by one person, and thus in (generally) one way. If the presentation of the material is inadequate or not conducive to a particular learning style, the amount of time spent on it will not change the ability for the student to absorb the information. Massive open online courses are a counter to the traditional experience of a single teacher at the front of the room teaching a lesson to students who are passively absorbing the information, going home to work on it, then getting tested on it at school. They play a pivotal role in decentralizing learning from the traditional classroom. Perhaps the greatest opportunity of online instruction is that they liberate class time.

Getting Your Hands Dirty

If the rote instruction of material is encouraged to exist outside of the classroom, class time can be devoted to more interactivity and hands-on learning. This can be an effective means of personalizing education through project-based learning. Just as massive open online courses allow students to go through the material a personalized pace, project-based learning allows students to interact with the material in a way that suits them best. Such learning environments are conducive to the multiple styles through which students learn. High Tech High is an example of one such environment. The entire curriculum at High Tech High is project-based learning. Rather than sit through lectures on a particular topic, students are given real-world problems that they are required to solve through investigation, critical thinking, and most often collaboration. The instructors serve as coaches and facilitators of inquiry, rather than the source of answers. The benefit of putting the student in charge of their learning is that each child develops their own way of absorbing information. The one-size-fits-all form of instruction present in the Prussian model does not apply.

A pitfall of project-based learning is that if students are given complete control over what they learn in addition to how they learn, there is little room for quality control of their education. The success of the project-based learning model depends upon the motivation of the student. Students would be inclined to learn and approach problems from subjects and perspectives they enjoyed, while avoiding ones they did not. This would lead to gaps in their overall education that would remain unfilled unless supplemented through outside resources. A former High Tech High student expressed her frustration with the gaps left behind from being in a fully project-based learning curriculum in a comment on a YouTube video highlighting project-based learning at the school saying:

“ In ‘leaving no child behind’ you actually get ‘every child is left behind’. At least this is how it was at HTH. They teach to the lowest denominator and we are all as dumb as the most unmotivated student wants to be…[I would] go work on my Geometry class through another high school, then leave school and get private math tutoring, and then go home and work on my biology course through the same online [high school].”

Left unchecked, the problems surrounding the lack of standardization, which led the Committee of Ten to create standards in the first place, would reemerge. With the proper balance of instruction and project-based learning, a personalized form of education could be optimized for each student.

This is the full comment from the former High Tech High student.

Dissolving Borders

While curriculums may be shifting towards individualization, the world is shifting towards globalization. The internationalizing of education is necessary in order to prepare today’s children for the increasingly globalized future. Two main forms of internationalizing are through study abroad programs, and immersion schools. Study abroad programs exist mainly in the post-secondary education space, whether it is a gap year or an opportunity to study abroad as an undergraduate. Immersion schools such as the école Fran?aise Internationale de Philadelphie (French International School of Philadelphia, or EFIP) provide an education that is fully immersed in another culture. These educational experiences provide the opportunity for students to acquire perspectives that exist outside of the U.S. In most cases, the curriculum being taught does not even follow the (adopted) American model, which allows students to receive an education beyond the Prussian model.

One form of education reform that allows students to experience a curriculum beyond the one set forth by the Committee of Ten is the study abroad program. Study abroad programs are often temporary, or a mere supplement to an American curriculum. The Minerva Schools at KGI, however, integrate studying abroad directly into their program. The higher education institution features seven sites globally: San Francisco; Buenos Aires; London; Berlin; Hyderabad (India); Seoul; Taipei. Students spend a semester of their undergraduate careers at each site, which fully immerses students in a foreign learning environment. This is the foundation of the learning experience of their students. The curriculum draws from the culture of each site, “coursework is supplemented by a range of programs that make each location an extension of the learning environment”. The internationalizing of their education allows students to not only learn within a different context, but also apply what they have learned in location-based projects to improve the global community. The flexibility of the study abroad curriculum differs greatly from the Prussian model in the fact that students are given the opportunity to constantly adapt their education rather than being forced into a cookie-cutter mold. However, a program such as this is costly and thus very selective. In 2016, over 16,000 applications were reported, for 306 available spots. Generally speaking, the more selective programs are, the harder it is for disadvantaged students to participate. The Minerva Schools at KGI offer insight into the benefit of receiving an education through a different cultural context, which can be experienced domestically through immersion schooling.

From Pre-K 3 to fourth grade, I was enrolled at the école Fran?aise Internationale de Philadelphie (EFIP). The school is a French-American immersion school. In Pre-K 3 the language breakdown is 87% French/13% English (although I believe the breakdown was 90-10 when I was enrolled) and balances to 50-50 English/French by fifth grade. Rather than teaching each language as a “foreign” language, both are just another language. The school uses the official national curriculum of France for classes taught in French, and the standards established by the State of Pennsylvania for classes taught in English. I directly felt the effects of this dual curriculum. It not only forced me to be intellectually flexible enough to switch between the two languages throughout the school day, but it gave me two different ways of thinking. I do not know if it was the different cultural contexts, or a biological unlocking of different parts of my brain that granted me cerebral duality, but it is likely it is a combination of both. When I am immersed in French language or culture, even now on trips to francophone areas of the world, I begin to think as the French do – as the teachers at EFIP thought. This allows me the option to approach problems from a perspective and thought process beyond the American way of thinking. It is this result that is the foundation of what an international education can offer – be it a study abroad program or an immersion school.

As with all systems, international education also has its flaws. When I transitioned to an American public school, I was actually behind in many subjects. This did not necessarily mean that I did not know the material; I simply did not recognize it when it was presented to me in an American way. For example, geometry was taught in French at EFIP and was done in the metric system. When we reviewed geometry at my public school, and I admitted to not knowing what a “polygon” was or how far “a foot” was, my math proficiency was called into question. The problem with obtaining a French education was that in some cases it left me behind American proficiency levels, even if I was ahead in others. While I could not name the second president in fifth grade, I did know the bulk of European history – a subject typically covered in upper-level high school history courses. Herein lies the overarching problem with the Prussian Model and the curriculum set forth by the Committee of Ten: by its standards, other models fall short and are therefore avoided or abandoned.

A Better System, A Better Product

The solution to approaching education reform is to combine elements from digitizing, personalizing, and internationalizing as a supplement to the current system until total reform is more feasible. I believe that education in its traditional sense should exist for only half of the school day. The second half of the day should be an open learning time where students have the option to learn through different means. This is where massive open online courses (no, MOOCs I did not forget you) can be invaluable. Now that computers are staples of many schools, and are becoming more available each school year, students have greater access to MOOCs. If half of the school day is allotted for students to explore topics and material in a personalized fashion, an online course is the most readily available tool. However, this part of the school day can also present time for teachers to employ project-based learning. The combination of the accessibility of information through MOOCs and the opportunity to interact with the material in a hands-on, problem-solving approach provides students with multiple ways of interacting with material in their own way and at their own pace. With this much flexibility, it would also be possible to incorporate an international aspect to the education as well. Some of the projects could be done through a different cultural context, or even in full immersion for younger grades (when language acquisition is most potent). The key is to not use any single means as an alternative to the Prussian Model, but a combination of digitizing, personalizing, and internationalizing in order to allow our education system to continue to grow and evolve with the changing needs of the future. Children like Sophia have always and will always exist; it is our duty to provide such children the means to reach their full potential.