posts on the big summit - right to learn white paper (download)
great post, great read, great questions.
my answer - that is too long to post:
Have schools as we know them reached their limits in terms of real student learning?
I’m thinking yes.
But I’m not sure how much really needs to change, I’m thinking we just need to change who’s together in a room, or out in the field, or in the art hall, or the engineering hall, or going on a walk, etc. And it seems that change simply need to be: per choice.
And should we be shifting our focus away from how best to "deliver an education" to our students to, instead, building a new framework around each child's inherent "right to learn" from cradle to grave?
There’s so much research on the mind, on mindfulness, and on ownership of learning. We know better, or we can. Either by research or gut feeling, we realize our current focus is more on things that have been proven to matter for only a small percentage of us. Nothing is for everyone yet we keep perfecting standardization. If we get 1-1 web access yet still push a curriculum, we’re missing the ownership potential.
Facilitating the curriculum inside each learner is possible. A human connection, when you are known by someone, unleashes space for natural curiosity. Imagine if we revitalize our communities by matching up 1-1 mentors per passion. An authentic no-child-left-behind would really be about equity. And equity seems really about setting all learners free, interdependently free.
Dennis Littky tells of his push back for this community mentor idea when he started it at the Met over 10 years ago. People said there would never be enough mentors. He found that in Providence, RI, there were 500,000 some working adults to 40,000 hs students.
I’m not suggesting this would be cake, or that it would happen over night, or that it could all happen locally, but with the capabilities of tech and networking, I see organizations like http://www.seeclickfix.com/ and http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ as prototypes to our potential future of interdependence. Your school, design it.
I recently heard Michael Wesch in an interview saying that in the US when we say “real-life” we automatically think of - outside of school. Homeschoolers/unschoolers biggest pushbacks is - how will they survive in the real world, as if a classroom is the real world.
I see this disconnect both on a daily basis and over the course of a life-span. School should be real life literally. We need to start being mindful of what our current schools provide for everyone, (students, parents, teachers, admin, community), and respectfully question why we keep supporting it. (If we’re not helping to change it, we’re supporting it. This is like a massive multi-player game.)
Imagine if a community becomes it’s own school. Existing high school buildings are meet ups and resource centers. That would lead to walking more, noticing more, doing more.
Ellen Langer writes in Mindfulness, our focus on outcomes encourages mindlessness.
I’d guess (gut guess) 75% of our efforts and energy and time and money in ed go toward outcomes. Academic outcomes, behavioral outcomes, etc.
A focus on mindfulness could lead us to a culture of trust, where there’d be no need to spend ourselves on policy. Isn’t policy mostly evidence of distrust?
If instead we facilitated spaces where true ownership perpetuated hunger, we’d see wholehearted participants in life, and we wouldn’t be able to tell what part was school.