why change outside school system
[from writings of Peter Gray]
school system as major reason for play deprivation.. begs systemic change:
Why education reform must happen outside the school system: https://t.co/tFMj3HoAwy.
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/numbalum89/status/1032986054654152704(1) Children’s instincts to play and explore on their own provided the foundation for education during our long history as hunter-gatherers (8.2.08 posting).
(2) Children today can and do educate themselves very well, without coercion or adult prodding or direction, if they are provided with an environment that supports their instincts to play and explore (8.13.08 posting).
(3) Conventional schools are what they are today because of historical circumstances that led people to devalue play, believe that children’s willfulness must be broken, and believe that everything useful, including learning, requires toil (8.20.08 posting).
Why is it so difficult to reverse this trend? Why is it so difficult to institute fundamental changes within the school system?
1\ The Normality of Conventional Schooling – people will go to amazing lengths to appear normal..listen to almost any convo ..between an adult and a child that the adult has just met: “What grade are you in school?” “What is your favorite subject?” “Do you like your teacher?” “Are you eager for school to start?” We have to find whole new ways of talking with children who don’t attend such a school.
2\ The Self-Fulfilling Prophecies of Conventional Schooling – The premises appear to be true because we evaluate them within the context of conventional schooling and by criteria established by such schooling. ie:
school-aged children will not learn much if left to their own devices.. Almost nobody has that perception of kids younger than school age (7.23.08 posting), and hunter-gatherers don’t have that perception of kids of any age (8.2.08 posting). ie:
a\ comes from our culture’s general acceptance of the school system’s definition of learning
b\ kids who spend their day at a conventional school taking tests and doing work that they don’t want to do may, at the end of the day, spend their free time relaxing, kicking back, or letting off steam, much as their parents do after a stressful day at work. This interferes with the opportunity to become fully engaged in the sort of play, exploration, and conversation that we most easily identify as educational
black science of people/whales – we’re judging natural tendencies of kids as if they were whales in sea world
c\ Good performance in school predicts subsequent success. We have made this prophecy come true by setting up a world for children in which we essentially define “success” as good performance in school.
redefining success.. ie: flavors of success
d\ constantly bombarded with statistics showing correlations between years of schooling and career success as measured by income. But there are lots of reasons for those correlations that have nothing to do with learning. ie:
i\ We have set up a world in which certain high-paying jobs, such as law, medicine, and business administration, commonly require a certain number of years of higher education. In such a world, years of schooling inevitably correlate with income.
ii\ set up a world in which “success” is more or less defined as good grades during youth and as high income later on
iii\ Children from wealthy homes can afford more schooling than can those from poorer homes, so they obtain more schooling. Children from wealthy homes also have more opportunities for high paying jobs, because of family connections and lots of other advantages, than do those from poorer homes. This too helps create the correlation between years of schooling and subsequent income.
There is no statistical way to know if any of that correlation has anything at all to do with what is actually learned in school.
3\ The Entrenchment of the Education Business – In the United States, 6.8 million people currently make their living as teachers..comprise a huge portion of the higher educational establishment. The textbook industry is also massive and lucrative.. fundamental change of the type I have been talking about in previous postings of this blog would upset everything.
4\ Gradual Change Doesn’t Work – The change requires a paradigm shift, from one in which teachers are in charge of the educational process to one in which each student is truly in charge of his or her own education.. How can a good student justify devoting time to a course that is not graded if other courses are graded? In order to change that mindset, the whole system has to change.
has to be beyond that.. ie: no longer referring to ie: ‘student’.. ‘teacher’.. ‘education’.. ‘course’ .. et al[aka: not part\ial.. for (blank)’s sake…].. a nother way
The gradual change that will occur is that more and more people will opt out of conventional schooling. To permit that to happen, we need to be sure that people have the legal right to opt out.
can’t be gradual.. it’s systemic.. so begs we get to the roots of healing.. ie: sans any money/measuring.. et al
begs a means for 7bn people to leap to a nother way.. as it could be.. ie: 2 convers.. as infra
__________
Mary Ann Reilly (@MaryAnnReilly) tweeted at 6:35 AM – 25 Aug 2018 :
Incremental changes can alter schooling from within. But that simply isn’t good enough. Bored bored bored young people ought to weigh on our conscience & motivate us to redesign learning alongside them in idiosyncratic ways. Replication needs to give way to imagination. https://t.co/PRzXcmf3EJ (http://twitter.com/MaryAnnReilly/status/1033332151276777472?s=17)
__________
Roger Schank (@rogerschank) tweeted at 7:56 AM on Mon, Sep 03, 2018:
Your kids going back to HS? have them read my message about why they are right to hate it: https://t.co/Cn5Wy37106
(https://twitter.com/rogerschank/status/1036613975671283718?s=03)
___________
It’s weird watching edu-Twitter get outraged by little tiny elements of non-consent, coercion, manipulation, & demeaning treatment of young people in the classroom.
Hello.
THE WHOLE SYSTEM is based in non-consent, coercion, manipulation, & demeaning treatment of young people.
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/cblack__/status/1036063111290093568
The complete and utter failure to see this –– or if you see it, to see why it’s a problem –– is why people wind up deciding that education is un-reformable.
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/cblack__/status/1036063914377666562
___________
This is the argument that I make in the conclusion to Farsighted: that decision-making should be a required course in every high school. Multidisciplinary by nature (cog science, behavioral econ, philosophy, lit) and useful to every single student, no matter what they do in life. https://t.co/huYHojEvij
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/stevenbjohnson/status/1036609625385127936
the supposed to ness of school (no matter how kind) is one of the major reasons we are stripped of our innate ability to decide things not to mention the decisions it requires/coerces us to assume are the essential decisions
Mary Ann Reilly (@MaryAnnReilly) tweeted at 4:47 AM on Wed, Sep 05, 2018:
Interesting . The assumption of schooling as a given is a statement that must have exclusions if it is to be understood as logical. #Gödel
(https://twitter.com/MaryAnnReilly/status/1037291153010446336?s=03)
___________
be you. 