For the past fifteen years, I’ve focused on supporting teacher and student agency. For teachers, our motto is “Continually becoming the professionals we already are.” I’m realizing that for students we don’t have a particular motto. Help us out! What might be a good student agency motto?
Tim Logan, the host of the Future Learning Design podcast, recently interviewed Susan Blum about her conception of Schoolishness (and her book Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning. Across the world, school is so uniform, based on very similar assumptions. Need it be?
Schoolishness and other books by Susan Bloom
To the episode of the Future Learning Design
“What we do in school began to seem stranger and stranger and stranger.” So the podcast begins, with Susan explaining how her anthropological research in education brought her to the conclusion that our accepted educational system is often truly alienating.
“All these rules, all these artificial constraints … “ What if, she wonders aloud with podcast host Tim Logan, the rules and constraints we accept as schooling don’t line up with how people learn? “The mismatch,” she summarizes, “became so salient for me. There is “ … a tension between what we do in school, which is so strange, and what we do everywhere outside of school.”
At the beginning of my teaching career, say for the first decade or longer, I was very aware of how the veterans knew so much about standards, rubrics, objectives, SMART goals, standardized assessments, grading, all of it. They had so much insider terminology that they were comfortable with. I felt inferior, I felt like an outsider, I admired their comfort and confidence in the ways of schooling.
I suspect that at some point I could have come to understand what they knew. I could have learned to think and act in manners consistent with their thinking. I could have become a teacher in their image, comfortable with mainstream schooling. But it didn’t happen that way. Over my years in education, and it’s about 35 of them now, I grew further and further from understanding their practices. Actually, that is too simplistic. As I grew to understand them, to become more like them, I deliberately distanced myself. I was looking for the comfort of being a veteran, a professional, but I found myself too at odds with so many accepted practices. One result is that I now feel very on guard in “regular” conversations about teaching and learning. If I say what I’m thinking, well, what will happen? Yeah, yeah, I imagine being dismissed with a wave of a hand. Dreamer, they might be saying, applying a label that serves to discount my point of view.
But back to the podcast. Susan thinks things education could be different: “It could be different. If it could have been, it still could be, but the institutional entrenchment is very powerful.”
Yeah it is. I’ve tried to suss out what the factors are that make schooling so good at maintaining its own status quo, and I read with interest what others write about this, yet I still don’t have a satisfying and simple answer. Yes, we tend to teach how we learned, and that’s a powerful reinforcement of the status quo. But it’s more than that. There’s history (the feeling that we’ve always done it this way, so it must be largely right to do so), finances (a school cannot compete with other schools if it moves away from one teacher and lots of students in a room), curriculum (to be considered knowledgeable, you have to learn these subjects), the available pool of teachers (state organizations recognize certain subjects, so we produce teachers of certain subjects, and that’s who is available to place in a classroom), and a whole lot of other factors that, in combination, have a lock on what schooling looks like.
But as Susan says, it didn’t need to develop this way, it just happened to. So there could be a different way to educate, it is just crazily hard to imagine given the educational assumptions of our global hive mind.
“Schoolishness has to do with all of the things we take for granted in a school. You have a building and you have teachers and you have students and you have time set aside from life for this kind of learning that somebody has predetermined and they are going to evaluate the learners on how well they can replicate whatever the learning is as the teacher decides.”
Questions with correct answers, consequences for knowing or not knowing the answers, anxiety and fear associated with evaluation, the threat or promise of the built in rewards. Yikes. She goes on to describe how uniform school is across the world, how you can walk into almost any school and know exactly what to expect. I’ve repeatedly done, for example, a simple exercise with groups of teachers from many countries and educational contexts. I get the same answers every time.
- Imagine some 5-year olds are playing school. What do they do?
- Imagine some 17-year olds in a classroom. The bell rings and the teacher isn’t there, what do they do?
The nearly universal answers to these questions are:
- One child assigns themselves the role of teacher and tells the others to sit down and be quiet.
- Nothing. The students wait, dependent on the teacher.
Command and control and not a whole lot of agency. That’s where we are. “We are talking, perhaps, twenty years of school, and if school in itself is harmful, that is a huge problem.” That’s Susan, not me. If we are not careful, all those years of schooling aren’t just neutral, they may even be harmful, at least for some students. Schoolishness. We can do better.
I have a couple of colleagues who have shared with me how they’ve gotten to a place in education where their convictions are so far from general practice that they can’t really be educators any more. That’s sort of tragic, but I understand what they are feeling. If you can’t stomach operating in the accepted manner, well, for your own health you need to quit trying at some point. (Note that this is another factor contributing to the lock on schooling-as-it-currently-is. The most frustrated teachers, the ones most likely to see the need for change, leave the profession instead, taking their opinions and possible initiatives with them.)
One friend took up something she calls school tourism, traveling the world to experience different ways to educate. She turned it into a dissertation, in which she concluded that she had to settle for something less than finding the ideal school. Instead, she focused on some gems she found here and there.
Another friend bounced around a bit as a head of school, looking for the right place to put into practice his progressive ideas. He didn’t find that place and has now put in his notice, not for another head position, but to retreat and get his thoughts laced together in book form.
Both of these colleagues expressed a similar sentiment to me: I’ve learned so much about school, I just can’t be an educator anymore.
Whoa. Perhaps we need to take Susan to heart. The institutional entrenchment is powerful, as she says. But she also reminds us that we could have a different approach to education. It is up to us to imagine what that might look like, and then to experiment with our ideas, big and small, whenever we get the chance, and however often we may be ridiculed from the safety of the crowd for being too idealistic, too whatever.
We can do better.