Mass-reduced education

There are two motivations for learning: fear or enjoyment. While fear-based learning is externally driven and so needs constant monitoring and fear-based discipline to maintain the necessary authoritarian control, enjoyment, or inquiry-based learning, is self-motivating, independent and self-sustaining. In contrast to centralised enforcement, inquiry-based individual exploration encourages student motivation, participation and self-discipline.

Fear is usually in response to threat and hence is convergent. It focuses on producing specific outcomes so as to avoid specific consequences. Being convergent, it promotes no greater exploration than is needed to meet the targeted response and hence is superficial and non-adaptive to change.

By contrast, enjoyment-based education wanders almost aimlessly at times across the learning landscape. This is because it is making its own broad, knowledge-based, connections. It is divergent and for no obvious reasons, pauses here and there to take in the sheer delight of what it finds. With few specific objectives, it builds a broad personal understanding of a topic and moves on, linking thought to thought, concept to concept.

In a changing world, target-driven, fear-based learning faces constant inadequacy, because the targets keep shifting. It trails along almost blindly, groping toward each new set of standards in an endless game of catch-up.

We learn whatever interests us and while fear is sometimes useful to create a sense of relevance, if it doesn’t ultimately arouse the learner’s interest, it will be worse than wasted in the long-term.

We rarely learn well what we don’t enjoy. What we’ve learned is gauged by what we remember and, in the long-term, we only remember what interests us. Thus the key to effective teaching is to first awaken interest and then to maintain it. If we don’t arouse interest we don’t teach and if we teach what isn’t interesting, we still don’t teach. True teaching requires that we arouse the interest of each student individually, by making what we teach, intrinsically inviting and hence memorable. This implies a close personal relationship between the teacher and the student and this implies trust. Since fear erodes trust, a regime of impersonal, fear-based outcomes destroys any systemic hope of genuine education.

While accountability-based learning appears supremely efficient in the short-term by its rigid goals and targeted use of resources, it is immensely wasteful in the long-term. For since it is in a constant state of self-confessed future ignorance, over time it is simply at the mercy of unanticipated change. Step beyond its task-specific use-by dates, and it is seen for what it is: a never-ending quest for outmoded information. It is a subversion of the term “Lifelong Learning”, for it appears accountable in the short-term and yet is irresponsible in terms of what really matters in life. 

By contrast, an education that is philosophically-based on the changeless, universal principles underpinning the unique divergence of individual development, stands as firm as a rock amidst all the pointless, energetic ebb and flow of tides and seasons. It sees not the vast waste of human energy, time and expense that is the hallmark of system-focussed, change-addicted, accountability-driven reform.

There are schools like this. They are independent and targeted to individual learning rather than cohort benchmarks. They are also expensive and that is the problem.

A new model is needed whereby the vast efficiencies of scale inherent in mass-production can be ported to individualised learning in the same way that personal computers have democratised the expense of mainframes, or podcasts have redefined viewing.

For example: a recent patent application by Apple Inc. describes automatically assembled, personal, pod-casting, whereby the recipient clicks pre-defined buttons and/or customisable ones to create a personal media recipe. The content is then automatically gathered, assembled and downloaded to their computer, TV-web media device, WiFi enabled iPod or phone, at whatever update frequency is indicated. Outmoded information can likewise be automatically deleted. To make the service free, targeted advertising specific to the interests indicated by the automatic programming, can be automatically inserted between the assembled information.

The knock-on educational implications of this are enormous, for they envisage a way of precisely targeting the individual educational needs and interests of students. Using such a framework, electronically-based standard student assessment could automatically assemble the precise resources needed to correct inadequacies and shortfalls. Not only so, but individualised learning programs could be automatically produced from a library of interchangeable components according to a cumulatively demonstrated, personal educational profile. This would consist of things such as: gender, personality type, interests and skills, and then be automatically refined according to the specifics of each individual’s on-going success.

Because of the embedded standards in each tiny module, accountability would wear a whole new face and there would be a constant stream of micro standardised assessment data, negating exams and the whole marking train. This would then free teachers to redefine their role in terms of learning orchestration via mentoring and personal assistance. As a result it would actually enlarge the individual social aspect of the job.

Each student would have a completely different program that would peg their differing performances to standard benchmarks. For instance, extroverted, socially engaging, kinaesthetic learners could be involved in what would appear to our current thinking as LAN-based, interactive games. Yet their individual performance just like a game score would be tracked and the tasks altered to suit. Meanwhile the performance data would accumulate on their educational profile indicating their demonstrated ability against standard benchmarks and hence negating the need for arbitrary testing. Other temperaments and learning styles could be just as easily and appropriately targeted. Tasks could also require real-world activities (homework, or out-of-class work) to gather information in order to respond to questions.

Taking it a step further, the preferred learning style and ability of each individual could also be matched with the specifics of every occupation and the educational program be precisely targeted to bridge the gap by the most beneficially direct route. This would of course have to take a wide variety of circumstances into account, but would ultimately contribute to lessening the stress inherent in a mismatch of ability to occupation and would ultimately translate into a happier, healthier and more efficient workforce.

Such a regime would not mean that students would be sitting at computers all day, for the density and richness of one-to-one tuition fuelled by the engaged, on-task interest of the students, would remove the need for ‘packing’. Normally a lot of the day is spent keeping the varying abilities present in a class together, simply because of the high student to teacher ratio. It has nothing to do with learning but is the result of a centralised, sequential, uniform learning environment. By changing this delivery-style, you change the fundamental model and that changes everything.

By compressing the time needed for formal education, the school day could be freed up to allow for socially cohesive tasks in which the teacher could become one with the learners: sports, gardening, outdoor-recreation, excursions, and so on. Not only so, but it frees the technology for a two or three shift day, greatly reducing the school plant size. This could also open the doors to the wider community to continue with lifelong learning in, say an evening shift. Further education could be achieved using the same automated model of individually tailored programs.

An adult could, in fact, complete a higher degree simply by meeting the benchmarks embedded in their self-motivated pursuit of personal development.

Once the framework is envisaged, the reality can follow and the resources will be gathered and adapted to suit. Then the race will be on to fill the vast automated library’s various sub-branches with interactive learning ‘shelves’. Schools could specialise in certain areas.

To prevent duplication, and hence speed deployment, resources could be traded between institutions, either collegially or for a small fee based on usage. Google-like web-tagging could provide an automatic update of resource availability and a central register of interest could collaboratively connect those intending to develop similar resources.

We have passed through an era of overt, centralised control to a turning-point where centralisation will either completely dominate every aspect of an individual’s school life or it will be replaced by something else, hopefully better, and almost certainly as yet unseen.

We are right on the brink of a major watershed in general education. Whatever happens, teachers will have a decided interest in the outcome, which, for better or worse, will be determined by their interest in the input. Will the current accountability-based regimes lean one way more than the other? The answer is: ‘Yes, they ultimately will’ - but which way is for us to decide.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mr Peter Connolly graduated in 1989 with a Bachelor of Education majoring in Fine Art. He currently teaches graphic design at Helensvale State High School, on the Gold Coast, in south-east Queensland, Australia.

 

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