by Anya Kamenetz, The Hechinger Report
It’s almost back to school–a good time to clear out the cobwebs and challenge some conventional wisdom. Hype is seductive, and an enemy of clear thought. Luckily, I’ve recently come across some very well-spoken and thoughtful criticism of long-cherished ideas–even some of my own! Consider it a blast of compressed air for your brain instead of your keyboard.
1) Disruption. The term disruptive innovation, a huge buzzword in the technology industry, was coined by Harvard business expert Clayton Christensen, whose work in the last few years has concentrated on the advent of online learning alongside other education reforms. Generally, disruptive innovation is a new idea that is so different it creates an entirely new market and “value network”. Often it is inferior to the established players, but is also much cheaper and more efficient. The established players ignore it, and its utility goes unsuspected until it is suddenly ubiquitous, displacing what came before. For example, the mass-produced automobile, personal computing, and later smartphones.
In a New Republic piece calling disruption “Silicon Valley’s most pernicious cliche,” Judith Shulevitz singles out Christensen’s influence on school reform. Her argument: disruption is undemocratic; when it comes to public agencies and public services, stability is preferable to sudden change. “Not all civil services need to be hyper-efficient and bargain-basement and in a state of permanent revolution, especially when the private entities tasked with disrupting government operate largely outside public view. What the institutions of a democracy should do is attend to their many disparate constituents as effectively and inclusively and openly as possible without getting creatively destroyed in the process.”
A recent blog post in Scientific American supplies an illustration in support of Shulevitz’s argument. School choice, and widespread closings of “underperforming” schools, reforms adopted on a market analogy, it turns out, are disruptive in the wrong ways. In Chicago, poor kids tend to stay in their own neighborhoods despite school closings, partly because poor neighborhoods are less accessible by public transportation and more divided by gang violence. And while high-achieving kids are more likely to transfer farther across neighborhood lines into higher achieving schools, low-testing kids are more likely to stay in their neighborhood “subdistricts,” transferring to schools that are only a little better than the ones they left.
2) Digital Natives. A paper published earlier in the summer by Paul Kirschner, a professor of Educational Psychology at the online Open University of the Netherlands, & Jeroen J.G. van Merrienboer at Maastricht University, in Educational Psychologist labels three popular ideas about education and innovation “urban legends.” The first that they take on is the term “digital native,” coined around 2001 to express the idea that young people these days are somehow born knowing their way around a touchscreen. While the term is still in wide use, repeated studies have shown that young people tend to use the Internet in simple and passive ways, that they are not adept multitaskers, and that they rarely use technology to create content rather than consume it. “These researchers found that university students do not really have deep knowledge of technology, and what knowledge they do have is often limited to basic office suite skills, e-mailing, text messaging, Facebook, and surfing the Internet. According to Bullen et al. (2008), “it appears they [university students] do not recognize the enhanced functionality of the applications they own and use” (p. 7.7) and that significant further training in how technology can be used for learning and problem solving is needed.”
3) Learning Styles. The second learning myth Kirschner and Merrienboer take on is the idea of individualized learning styles. This idea goes back to the 1960s, and is extremely trendy today–I have heard high school students in Newark describe themselves as “visual learners.” But as the authors note, “the assumption that people cluster into distinct groups, however, receives very little support from objective studies…Despite decades of research, the field of learning styles has failed to make significant progress and so far it does not yield any valid educational implications.”
Damning words indeed. There is little agreement as to what the learning styles are–visual? kinetic? reflective? impulsive?–and experiments fail to sort people out reliably. Different modes of presentation might be better suited to different kinds of lessons, not different kinds of people. Also, learning is difficult, and giving people instruction in just the style they prefer might not be the best way to get them to stretch to understand difficult material. Just because someone wants to “learn” by watching kung fu movies doesn’t mean that’s the best way to master AP physics.
4) Self-directed learning: This paper , published earlier in the summer by Paul Kirschner, a professor of Educational Psychology at the online Open University of the Netherlands, & Jeroen J.G. van Merrienboer at Maastricht University, in Educational Psychologist labels three popular ideas about education and innovation as “urban legends.” As their final point, the authors take on the often-repeated argument, associated with thinkers like Nicholas Negroponte, Sugata Mitra, Howard Rheingold, Tim O’Reilly, and many more, that knowledge is all “out there on the web,” and that the proper educational paradigm for the 21st century is for people to be taught the basics of “digital literacy,” and then be set free on their own to search and discover whatever it is they need to know.
The authors counter that many studies have shown that actually, if you give students an assignment without much prior knowledge of the topic, they will not be good at choosing the right search words or at discriminating wheat from chaff and finding valid sources of information, but will tend instead to skip around, get distracted by irrelevance or hucksters, and even find it hard to remember the original question.
Superficially, I’ve been quite guilty of promulgating this myth, even authoring a book titled DIY U. And superficially, it’s demonstrably false: the people who do best in open learning environments are generally those with the most preparation to learn.
But beyond the rhetoric, as I detail in my book, taking a deeper look at the traditions of progressive education reveals that it is networks and communities, peers and mentors, evolving processes, norms, and practices, not individuals blundering about in response to “assignments,” that truly enable self-directed learning. Also, it’s possible to teach people better web search and research practices, but most important of all–which gets to the question of self-direction–is the motivation to learn: can you teach people to “long for the great, broad sea?”
5) Coding for Everyone: A corollary to all the talk about digital literacy is an often repeated commonplace–again, I’ve been guilty of this one–that everyone needs to learn to code, or in the memorable phrase of cultural critic Douglas Rushkoff, “program or be programmed.”
A thoughtful piece published in Slate last week argued that coding, in fact, is not for everyone. The author, Chase Felker, a software engineer, is not making an elitist argument; he acknowledges that he works alongside many fine self-taught programmers and that exposure to free learning resources is likely to increase the pool of talent. His concern is that a superficial, hobbyist-level interaction with one or two computer languages won’t necessarily give the layperson a deeper understanding of the complex unfolding forces at work in the technology sphere, but rather, simply fill schoolchildren’s brains with more disconnected, irrelevant bits of knowledge–not unlike the results of a long dive into a Wikipedia rabbit hole.
Felker, quite correctly, I think, diagnoses the “everyone should learn to code” craze as just the latest example of a lazy habit of thought. As someone who writes about education, I often have to listen to people at cocktail parties who tell me that if “schools all taught this” or “schools all taught that,” that the country’s problems would magically be fixed. It’s gardens. It’s anti-bullying. It’s makerspaces. It’s video games. It’s yoga. The problem is not that any of these are bad ideas. The problem is that there is limited time in the school day and often the basics aren’t being covered.
All five of these myths–self-directed learning, digital natives, 21st century literacies, disruptive innovation have a kernel of validity to them. They are expressions of the well-placed anxiety that the world is changing fast, that school is not serving children as well as it could, and that we could be doing better to empower our children.