Leading Learning

Schooling in the post modern world

If we are to understand schooling as it is we need to understand the key influences of the industrial age - the modern era- on education. If we are to understand what schooling can and should become we need to understand the essential features of the information age, or the post-modern world.

This paper was given by the New Zealand educator David Hood on 28 July 1999 at the Auckland conference sponsored by the New Zealand Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs. Professor Hood can be reached by e-mail at davidhoodassoc@xtra.co.nz

Introduction
There is nothing natural or given about the way schools are organised. The "rules" were not etched in stone brought down from Mount Sinai. Schools are the historical product of particular groups with particular interests and values at particular times. They are, in other words, political in origin. If we are to understand schooling as it is we need to understand the key influences of the industrial age - the modern era- on education. If we are to understand what schooling can and should become we need to understand the essential features of the information age, or the post-modern world.

The Modern Era
The Education Act of 1877 saw the introduction of universal [primary] schooling in New Zealand. There were four major arguments for its introduction:

1. social control
2. the production of a discerning electorate
3. the enhancement of productivity
4. individual "rights" to education

Social control has always been seen as an important role for schooling. Schooling was seen as the means of curbing the "larrakinism" of youth in the new colony, and "would assist in developing the moral character of the child, and in doing so, would help to prevent crime."1

The industrial age, and with it the emergence of public services, required increasing numbers of workers with the basic skills of numeracy and literacy. From the introduction of mass manufacturing processes arose the scientific model of management or Taylorism. Frederick Winston Taylor suggested workers were "as dumb as oxen" and management must provide all the brainpower. Managers identified the one best way to get a job done, and told each worker exactly how to do the work. Production efficiency was the over-riding objective. The attitude of "don't question authority" prevailed.

The question arose regarding how to "fairly" select those children who would become the professionals, administrators and managers - the decisions makers - in industrial society.

Early theories on intelligence and the advent of psychometrics provided both the justification and the mechanism for this selective process. Intelligence was seen as innate and fixed at birth. Educability depended on a child's natural or general ability - the "g" factor. Take any cohort of children and the "g" factor could be plotted on a normal curve. Psychometrics emerged from the assumption that if intelligence was fixed, then it could be measured [precisely]. And by such wondrous means, you can be classified as a competent scholar if you get 51 percent, and a learning failure if you get 49 percent.

The purpose of schooling therefore became increasingly focused on selection, not on learning, initially at primary level and later [and still today] at the secondary level. The objective, to progressively sift out the 15 or 20 percent of "decision makers" required for industrial society.

Schooling was also focused on preparing children for working in that society. Schools mirrored the system of mass production. Schools, in design and process, were modelled on the factory "in modern industrial society, conformity to the time of the train, to the starting of work in the manufactory, and to other characteristics of the city requires absolute precision and regularity.The student must have his lessons ready at the appointed time, must rise at the tap of bell, move to the line, return; in short go through all the revolutions with equal precision."2 I need not remind you that in this age of accurate timepieces, which most of us own, we still ring bells in schools.

While the overt curriculum was reading, writing and arithmetic and a limited range of other subjects, the covert curriculum was discipline, punctuality and repetition.

As knowledge "exploded," the curriculum reflected the breaking of "wholes" into an increasing array of "subjects," so as to better understand the parts: "relentlessly turning flowers into petals, history into events, without ever restoring continuity."3

The result in schools was well described by Postman and Weingartner in 1969:

English is not history and history is not science and science is not art and art is not music, and art and music are minor subjects and English, history and science major subjects, and a subject is something you "take," and when you have taken it you have "had" it, you are immune and need not take it again.4

Every distinctive historical period is ordered by a set of unquestioned assumptions that people hold about themselves and about the natural world. These influential beliefs of the industrial age were in progress, universality, and regularity. Every social institution, from government to commerce to science, embodied these convictions. Education was no exception:

schools were organised according to the classical conception of education [which] held to the view that knowledge comes from books, not from experience and experimentation.

The curriculum was organised hierarchically from the simple to the complex, from the concrete to the abstract, on the assumption that that was the normal path of intellectual process [and] the age grading of the curriculum presumed a stepwise, regular increase in students' skills, knowledge and values. Progress became the criterion of individual success and failure.

Textbooks made little or no provision for children who mastered material at different rates or who might be able to learn material more easily if it were presented in a non-linear fashion [and] presupposed a universal Anglo-American child whom all children could [and should] identify with.

Educational achievement was assumed to follow a normal curve of probability with most children attaining near the mean and fewer and fewer scoring further and further away from the norm [and] children who did not learn in the expected way, according to the rules, were assumed to have some kind of learning defect.5

All of these key characteristics of schooling were well established by the time universal secondary schooling was introduced in 1937. Schooling had become like one of the most influential metaphors of the 20th Century - the machine.

Well-oiled, efficient and measurable, the ideal machine had a clear purpose or function which it carried out perfectly. Everything could in principle be conceived as a closed system, consisting of cogs and wheels, instructions and commands, with a boss or government at the top, pulling the requisite levers and engineering the desired effects. 6

Whether we are teachers, parents, people in business or industry, or politicians, we are stuck in an historical paradigm about what schools are and should be - of subjects with no connections between them, of filling heads with knowledge that might be needed one day, but which we know is not remembered, of rigid and inflexible timetables, of age cohorts and locking groups of children into classroom boxes, of national one-shot examinations, of rules which emphasise obedience rather than responsibility, and with traditional views about the nature of intelligence and the ability of young people to learn.

The Post Modern World
In 1999 we live in a dramatically different world. The foundation beliefs of modernity are being increasingly challenged. Post modernism stresses difference as much as progress, particularity as opposed to universality, and irregularity in contrast with regularity.

As we approach the 21st Century we have a much better understanding of how things work, or how they don't work, to a prescribed set of "rules." Society, parents, the workplace, students, are all different. So are the problems. The answers, or the "rules," need to be different.

Parents are different. The nuclear family is decreasingly the norm. The values and sentiments which supported the nuclear family have also faded significantly, as has the influence of other agencies. Parents [and the wider community] have higher expectations of schooling, yet, because of their own experiences, are often conservative in their beliefs and actions.

Students are different. Students can no longer be treated as "innocents." They are consumers of goods, services and information. They choose between an increasingly wide range of alternatives. Many are already highly sophisticated and skeptical agents. They have an "unerring eye" for hypocrisy! Authority has to be earned through respect; it is not automatically given. Students have their own values and culture.

Schools must therefore "compete with a dazzling array of alternative information, distractions, and sources of motivation and example". If we don't deliver education in different ways we should not be surprised if many students do not see the average school day as "seven very dull television programmes which cannot be switched off."7

We also know that students, as individuals, are different in other ways. We are in the middle of an unprecedented revolution of knowledge about the human brain, including how it processes, interprets and stores information. We now know that every one of us has unique learning, thinking and working styles. We now know that every one of us possesses a different mix of a number of different intelligences, and that we learn in different ways. Modern education and assessment has tended to recognise and reward only two intelligences, and only particular styles of learning. Learning does not have to be linear. Research shows children of primary school age are capable of higher-order, critical thinking. Because of these new understandings schooling has the potential to be successful for many more students.

The workplace is different. Taylorism is on the way out. Quality and innovation are essential to international competitiveness. Organisations benefit from the input their employees can provide, and to be successful must gain the commitment, not just the compliance of their workers. Workers are expected to use their brains. Division of labour is increasingly horizontal in teams, rather than vertical, in a hierarchy of command. Under 30 percentof jobs in developed countries now require manual skills or muscle power; that figure is expected to rapidly fall to 20 percent. We are moving into the era of the 'knowledge worker' - not about a fixed unchanging body of knowledge, but about a commitment to life-time learning, about constantly updating one's resources of knowledge to cope with and expand one's job horizons and life opportunities [Alvin Toffler in Powershift]. Today, engineers find that half their knowledge is obsolete in 5 years. 80 percent of children in their first year of primary school will enter careers that don't exist now, involving technology that hasn't yet been invented. The amount of information in the world is doubling every 2-5 years.8 In the past, the key resources of wealth generation have been land, labour and physical materials. They are now ideas, creativity and knowledge.

The problems are different. Most young people engage with moral issues all of the time. Industrial society has extended the range of moral issues. Debates over animal welfare, the environment, domestic violence, ethnicity, genetics and reproduction, the social responsibilities of corporations, have all become mainstream issues, where a generation ago they were largely confined to narrow corners of society. It is hard to avoid being confronted by moral dilemmas and conflicts in any area of life. "It is more questionable, however, whether young people are adequately equipped to resolve them successfully."9

What needs to be recognised is that these issues transcend traditional 'subject' boundaries. They require us to integrate knowledge and thinking across a range of disciplines; that is, to make connections in the same way the workplace is more and more demanding employees who can think across knowledge boundaries, make connections and solve problems.

The basic skills are different. Increasingly it is recognised that to successfully cope with the challenges of the post modern world people require the basic skills of communication, co-operation, computation, computer literacy, creativity and critical thinking - the 6 C's, rather than the 3R's.

• The [Political] Responses
  In recognition of some of these issues many countries have embarked on significant reforms of education systems. It is interesting to note the similarity of these reforms:
• decentralisation i.e. put decision making at the individual school level
• open schools to the market i.e. introduce competition through parental choice
• make schools accountable through testing of children's learning
• external audit, through agencies such as ERO, to also improve the accountability of schools
• performance management systems, to make individual teachers more accountable.

Unfortunately international research shows little evidence that these reforms have led to quality improvement. In fact there is strong evidence to suggest that they have simply advantaged those already advantaged.

However that should not be a surprise as "The school reform movement has ignored the obvious: what teachers know and can do makes the crucial difference in what children learn student learning will improve only when we focus our efforts on improving teaching."10

In New Zealand we have a new curriculum. It is, however, still subject based, it is still organised hierarchically. While the importance of the essential skills is emphasised the assessment regime ensures a lack of emphasis within the classroom context. Instead of reducing the curriculum, emphasising depth rather than breadth, we continue to add to it. It is already beyond the capacity of any individual to learn. It is not surprising therefore that in some countries, including Germany, there is currently much debate about streamlining and getting rid of the unnecessary "educational ballast" and subject matter "which has been handed down unsolicited for decades."11

We also have new forms of assessment. However, because assessment of student learning still determines access to different levels of education, the struggle for control of policy and practice between educators - schools, the universities and government policy makers - with the consumers - students, parents and employers - often the pawns, continues. The forms of assessment which dominate are more influenced by the changes in the balance of power than developments in cognitive science or the technology of assessment. Achievement 2001 is the most recent example.

The machine under pressure
Systems which cannot respond to radical changes in their environment will always fail in the end. In the short term there are some productivity gains from working the machine harder, reprogramming more often from the top, tightening specifications and quality standards, and setting ambitious targets. But in the end, if the only response to a new environment is to run the machine harder, the result is that its components break down faster.

As schools move into the post modern age, something is going to have to give. It might be the quality of learning as teachers and the curriculum are spread increasingly thinly to accommodate more and more demands. It might be the health, lives and stamina of teachers themselves as they crumble under the pressure of multiple-mandated change. Or it can be the basic structures and culture of schooling, reinvented for and realigned with the post modern purposes and pressures they must now address. These are the stark choices we now face."12

The evidence is clear that the machine is breaking down. It is all around us. It simply requires us to open our eyes: teachers under stress; what this conference is about; the dramatic increases in suspension and absenteeism rates from our schools [especially secondary] in recent years; the continuing failure to close the gap between majority and minority children across a range of education performance indicators; the increasing number of children diagnosed with learning difficulties when research shows that many of those children can learn successfully if the learning environment is changed; the overwhelming appearance of boys in all of these statistics; and the increasing numbers of parents, and teachers, and students - when rarely they are given the opportunity - who are asking serious questions about the appropriateness of a model of education designed for a world that no longer exists.

Starship Enterprise of Star Trek fame goes where no one has gone before. The 21st Century is like that. We don't know what it will look like, but what we do know is that the young people currently in our schooling system will be in charge. It is our collective responsibility to ensure that schooling provides them with the knowledge and skills to successfully face the challenges of that uncertainty. Education needs to be firmly rooted in the future, not the past.

Research and Innovation
Research, and experience, is increasingly demonstrating that learning is more successful for many more students:

• When students are involved in decisions about what to learn and the how to learn, in the setting of learning goals and in the setting of rules that govern behaviour and practice.
• When learning is connected to the world in which students live their lives, and to their abilities and interests.
• When learning recognises the individual nature of intelligence and learning style.
• When students receive continuous feedback, including [and importantly] from external audiences, and when evaluation is closely integrated with the student's own learning.
• When learning is seen as a collaborative rather than a competitive process.
• When the teacher acts as facilitator, coach and mentor, rather than as a knowledge expert i.e. when learning is seen as a partnership based on mutual respect.
• When the teacher has high expectations of every student i.e. expects high quality, excellent work from all students.
• When the teacher is passionate about learning, and demonstrates that he/she is a learner.
• When parents are actively involved in their children's learning.

None of these, either separately or collectively, are impossible to achieve. They are happening now. There are numerous examples of innovative approaches to teaching and learning which embrace these principles. In New Zealand they are much more prevalent in primary and intermediate schools. We need to ask why, and we need to identify and remove the constraints, whether perceived or real, which inhibit innovation and creativity in our secondary schools. We need also to find ways to ensure that innovation is common across the system, rather than isolated to individual schools or to parts of schools.

Unfortunately Machiavelli's dictum of nearly five hundred years ago is as true today as it was then: "There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things, because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and only lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new." And the reality is that in education those who have done well under the old conditions are those who hold the balance of power, rather than those who have been disadvantaged. If we want to change the system, we have to exercise leadership, and not leave it to others to decide for us what our future will be.

Several years ago Sir Christopher Ball, ex-dean at the University of Oxford and Chairman of the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in Britain, commented:

Our hopes of health, wealth and happiness depend on learning - our own and that of others. Just as the medieval world relied on religion for answers to all important questions, and the modern world has looked to politics for solutions, so in the post-modern world of today and tomorrow it is learning that provides the key to prosperity. In short, the provision of lifelong learning for all is the new agenda for systems of education and training, typically designed in another age on the basis of three false premises; the idea that they should serve only an elite of fast learners; the belief that initial education can be sufficient; the prejudice that education and training are different in kind. The principle of lifelong learning for all inevitably offers a resounding challenge to initial education and to schools."

We tend to point the finger of blame for the failings of our schooling system at others; at politicians, teachers and parents, and even at the students themselves. We need, however, to recognise that we are collectively responsible for what the system is. We need to take collective responsibility for what it can become. The challenge is a challenge for all of us.

But, as Einstein, who probably would be described as a learning failure if he was in school today, said many years ago -

The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them!"

Appendix
The New Basics

• communication in all its major forms - listening, writing, speaking [one to one, small and larger groups, reading, the powers of persuasion
• co-operation including teamwork, working with peers, managers, subordinates, clients
• computation including basic arithmetical computation, ability to interpret data, make estimates, understand and apply concepts related to quality assurance and control processes
• computer literacy using screen and keyboard and including basic information technology skills and applications
• creativity including the ability to think outside the square, to take risks, to make new connections between old ideas
• critical thinking including self-reflection, judgement based on higher order thinking, skills of analysis, interpretation, evaluation, synthesis.
  References

1. Coxon, Eve, Massey, Lauran and Marshall, James. Introduction. Politics of Learning and Teaching in Aotearoa - New Zealand. The Dunmore Press. 1994
2. Marshall, Ray and Tucker, Marc. Thinking for a Living : Education and the Wealth of Nations. Basic Books. New York. 1992
3. Ferguson, M. The Aquarian Conspiracy. Collins. London. 1980
4. Postman, Neil and Weingartner, Charles. Teaching as a Subversive Activity. Penguin Books. Hammondsworth. 1969
5. Elkind, David. Schooling and Family in the Postmodern World. Rethinking Educational Change with Heart and Mind [Ed. Andy Hargreaves]. 1997 ASCD Year Book
6. Mulgan, G. Connexity: How to live in a connected world. Chatto and Windus. London 1997. Quoted by Bentley, Tom. Learning beyond the classroom - Education for a changing world, Routledge. London. 1998
7. Bentley, Tom. Ibid 6
8. Prashnig, Barbara. The Power of Diversity. Bateman - Auckland. 1998
9. Bentley, Tom. Ibid 6
10. Darling-Hammond, Linda. The Right to Learn: A Blueprint for Creating Schools that Work. Jossey-Bass Publishers. San Francisco. 1997
11. Schirp, Heinz. Germany. Performance Standards in Education: In Search of Quality. OECD. Paris. 1995
12. Hargreaves, Andy. Changing Teachers: Changing Times. MacMillan. New York. 1994

Source: 21st Century Learning Initiative