This is a series of essays by Maren Schmidt in her Kids Talk newspaper column about creating a fresh approach to education.
Remember
that moment playing tic-tac-toe when you discovered if you were the first one
to mark a square you could beat your opponent? If you always won, what was the fun of that? It was on to bigger and better games.
In
the movie, War Games, a computer
designed to send off nuclear warheads calculates that war is a zero sum
game. No one wins.
Today
our systems, or institutions, in America are in a state of uproar. Our systems are caught between
tic-tac-toe and War Games—where the first to play always wins or where the
outcomes are such that everyone loses.
Systems
should be designed to protect and create.
The financial system should protect our financial resources. As Warren Buffet says, the first rule is
to not lose money. Our health systems
should protect and create health.
Our educational systems should protect and create knowledge. But I’ve left out a critical phrase
here. A system is designed and
maintained by people to protect and create for the benefit of the people it
serves.
At
its core––though we seldom look at it this way––systems are designed to protect
children to ensure children’s survival and thus the success of humanity.
To
use a system requires a basic level of knowledge on how a system works. Knowledge is the job of education. Knowledge has to be based on truth,
otherwise information becomes a wobbly fantasy foundation that cannot create
new knowledge or protect previous learning.
All
of our systems, from family relationships, friendships and schools—require an
educational system for the creation and protection of knowledge.
Our
problems in the world today are problems of education. We have to stop playing the blame game
of why things aren’t working. We
have great students, great teachers, great parents, and a system that chews
them up and spits them out. We’ve
created a system that is based on a factory model of getting more “units”
through the system versus a craftsman idea of quality. We’ve forgotten that all our systems—banking,
health, transportation, government––are to serve people, especially children.
It
is time to repair, rebuild and return our systems to help and protect the
people they serve.
We
have created an educational system where students don’t have enough time to
learn, to process, and to explore new ideas. Teachers are blamed for poor test scores. Parents are asked via homework to teach
children what teachers and children in our system don’t have the time to teach
and learn. Parents are asked to
pay for tutors, psychiatrists and drugs when their children don’t learn. Children feel like failures. Teachers feel like failures. Parents feel like failures.
Today,
one in every hundred adults in the US is incarcerated. We have at least 63 million adults in
the US that can’t read over the fourth grade level. Less that 7 out of 10 students graduate from high school. In 2005 about six million American
school children used Ritalin for ADHD symptoms.
Why? For those who feel like failures, and
the number is large, it is because we are on an old rusty bus going down an ill
prepared road. We have lost our
way in the maze we call our educational system. It’s nobody’s fault.
We
can choose to get off the bus and find another way, and realize that we don’t
have to play a game where many don’t and can’t win.
Our
world needs every mind to be able to focus and heal the world. Famine, poverty, crime, disease, family
violence, religious strife and war—all solvable if we solve the “Education
Problem.”
On these pages we’ll examine positive steps to change our system and find a
“bus” that is modern, efficient, and where children, teachers and parents work
together to design new ways to create and protect knowledge and truth. We live in times of exponential
change. We need exponential change
in education.
It is time to repair, rebuild and return our educational system to be a system that creates and protects knowledge, for the love of our children. Next
Did You Know? Watch this video on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY&fmt=18