Voices

The 1950s and 60s were good years in education.  Dewey, Montessori, Piaget, and Bruner all began applying knowledge of cognition to theories and methods.  True individualization and interest-governed education began its course.  Steps in the long journey of accumulating knowledge emerged as unified theories.

Education in the public sector ignored these voices.

Montessori knew that children ultimately governed their own progress, so she introduced concepts of knowledge to them as they were ready, acknowledging that developmental stages could not be ignored, but  the public schools continued their lock-step, twelve-year approach to student growth.  Dewey and Piaget both knew that students had to be ready for knowledge before they could make it their own.  They formulated theories about taking in knowledge.  Bruner cleaned up the theories showing that learning was a rather ragged adventure and students should be presented with how facts fit a bigger, societal picture.  In no way was learning merely information to be dispensed by a teacher for instant student consumption over an equally distributed twelve-year period of time.

Public schools ignored these voices.

They kept the hard-nosed curriculum dispensed in twelve consecutive steps even though reports of progress in Dewey's schools and Montessori's schools showed that progress made by students surpassed the attempts at education in public schools.

Later voices emerged.  Madeline Hunter, Jane Healey, Marie Clay, Howard Gardner promised to bring education out of the dark ages with ideas about cognition and progress, instructional methodology and progress, reading and progress, and intelligence and progress.  Public schools tried to apply some of the ideas, but poorly, because the stalwarts of the educational system couldn't imagine that their twelve-year lockstep program had failed.  But it had - miserably.  Even the books Savage Inequalities and A Nation at Risk didn't deter the schools from becoming bastions of mediocrity, mistaking equal opportunities to learn  for learning as a function of the brain as the correct response to lack of student progress.

Since the days of Dewey, public schools have ignored and misapplied research to the extent that the public no longer trusts the schools to do their jobs.

The Departments of Education at universities were coaxed into creating their own set of experts to guide education.  But, voices such as Marzano's have produced only misunderstood, misapplied research, because it is nebulous, sloppy, and imprecise.  Not only that, but since the turn of the millennium some really good  and proven voices from technology have tried hard to get schools to use software and smart devices to advance the cause of education.  But, the inability of schools to allocate sufficient funding has limited the resources made available to students, and the world of technology has moved past what the schools have been able to provide.  Schools cannot keep up because of such poor planning, so they don't, opting instead to hold to the extremely outdated, lethargic, and disproved ideas of 12 years of lockstep instruction that leads to an ever-decreasing Bell curve average of knowledge as measured by the NAEP, SAT, and ACT exams, and as evidenced by the amount of money US businesses spend to train young people in deficient areas of communication and quantitative reasoning.

The appeal is clear.  Quit ignoring what is helpful, scientifically validated, theoretical, and individual.  Stop the twelve-year march of uniformity that dulls the mind and open the frontiers of education for the individual.  Use the tools of advancement propeling education a quantum leap ahead of what pen and paper have produced.  Recognize that reading is not the panacea for leading the way from the dismal depths of darkness.  Numbers lead the way.  Organization of visual thoughts are the best form of communication in the lives of young people, not using the imagination resulting from reading material, which is fast becoming an indecipherable and painful exercise and slows the progress of understanding concepts.

Quit turning the deaf ear to the voices that would lead to a more efficient, fuller, richer education!