Educational failure to thrive

© 2008 by Michael Swickard, Ph.D.

Winston Churchill noted that there is nothing wrong with change if it is in the right direction. That is like a German proverb: To change and to change for the better are two different things.

Many politicians are advocating changing the public schools. Will it be for the better?

Some people say since there are students not thriving, school needs to become less enjoyable and much harder. Let’s see – a third of our students are dropping out because the schools are just too much fun. Nope, that statement does not pass the smell test.

America’s future walks through the doors of our schools every day. Some students do well while others do not. To take from a medical term, some students fail to thrive.

Every candidate for national office has a plan to make education better. It’s like the old saying, “Everyone has a plan to make a million dollars that won’t work.” Every plan is to make the schools more rigorous and to increase accountability. But something else is causing the problems, so they can focus on accountability forever and not get to the heart of the problem.

Simply, the problem in education is the use of the factory model. It assumes all students are basically the same, all teachers are basically the same and all schools should be the same. Anyone spending time in our schools will know that the factory model is crap.

The students, teachers and administrators are all different, as can be expected since they are human. Teacher and author LouAnne Johnson (Dangerous Minds) teaches effectively in a way I cannot. I teach effectively in ways she cannot. That is the secret that the politicians do not get. They want every lesson across America to be the same, every teacher in America teaching the same way and every American child learning in the same manner. The standardized tests required by No Child Left Behind are the darling of the data people who themselves have never taught.

I advise people thinking of going into teaching to go to their neighborhood community college and volunteer to teach GED classes. In these classes are students who want to learn but who have struggled in school. It is where teachers find that each student is a separate life and the best-made plans can fall apart amazingly fast.

What you learn is that you cannot administer the curriculum; rather, you have to teach it. Using political solutions for educational problems does not work.

Intuitive versus non-intuitive learners

But there is something even more pernicious about the factory model of teaching. There is a structural disconnect that is not being addressed in our educational systems. Teachers are all very intuitive about their chosen field, while some of the students are not.

One area you see this is when students learn to read. Every teacher is intuitive about reading, though many students are not. Most of us remember intuitive math teachers who say, “People, this isn’t that hard.” Yes, it is, when math teachers try to teach non-intuitive students.

The effect of academic intuition is that some students get subjects quickly and others do not. Teachers who are themselves intuitive readers often jump to the mistaken assumption that non-intuitive students are just not trying. Or they are lazy. Worse, some assume that non-intuitive reading students are stupid.

What is the effect of this dysfunctional view of reading? Abraham Maslov said, “When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail.”

Reading professionals who do not realize that some of their students are non-intuitive think that the way they, as an intuitive, learned reading is the only way to learn. So they concentrate on reading and miss the problem.

They try to increase the amount of time students spend reading with their parents, which will not hurt, but also will not teach reading. When it comes to getting phonemic awareness and really learning the rules of phonics, just reading will never teach non-intuitive students how to encode and decode language. Instead, the students will just fall further and further behind. Additionally, since they do not read well, all of the other subjects will be profoundly more difficult because all of the academic teaching in school is tied to reading.

If we are going to improve as a society we have to get away from the notion that all students learn in the factory way, as the same rate and in the same manner. That is like trying to pound a square peg in a round hole. We have to throw out the notion that students do not read because they are stupid or lazy.

If we do not change the schools for the better, we will regret it. I embrace the words of Dr. Denis Waitley: “There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them.”

We have to look at the failure of our students to thrive as a call to rethink the enterprise of public education, for the sake of our very future.

Swickard is a weekly columnist for this site. You can reach him at michael@swickard.com.