THIS IS PODCAST #3 (29:37) -- CLICK ON THIS ARCHIVE.ORG LINK TO LISTEN TO IT. TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS.
Last month I spoke to blogger Rob Paterson, advisor
to NPR and other media and educational institutions, about the future
of education and essential competencies. I started by asking Rob what
he thought were the competencies we need to acquire to succeed in the
world, and to make it a better place?
Rob:
I think they're the same. We don't need masses of PHDs in English. We
need people who can cope with adversity, pull together, with real
skills that are pragmatic and practical. We need pioneers.
I say that because I think we're going to be facing some truly
disruptive and difficult times and all our current views of how
the world works are going to be turned right over. I'm looking for the
types of competencies or competences that are both social and
pragmatic. At the moment the schools do none of this. They teach people
to be obedient, compliant. In school kids don't learn any social skills
worth having either. I think we have a complete mismatch between the
education establishment and the kind of people we will need to get
through peak oil, overpopulation, all those kind of things.
Dave: If we can't get these through the education system, how do we acquire these competencies?
Rob:
I think reforming the education system is too titanic and difficult a
task. My son for example left school at 14, attended Central Tech in
Toronto where they have a wonderful art program, and he became an
artist. And I think this is leading practice. I've met several boys
recently in the 14-16 year age group who are so disenchanted with
school, boys with strong talents in the kinetic sense. One of them who
I met in North Caroline recently -- any piece of machinery that you
give him he could fix. He could make a very good living at this, but
he's forced to go to high school. I met another boy who is incredibly
clever but is so bored at school. I'm focused on boys at the
moment, because they tend to be very kinetic, they have to move around,
they like and need to see things, touch things, do things. They
are completely turned off by their experience in the system and so my
recommendation to them is to leave school.
Dave: Do we scrap the school system entirely then and leave it up to everyone to find more effective ways of learning?
Rob:
I'm recommending that Holland College, a technical school here on
Prince Edward Island (PEI) open its doors as a middle school choice, as
an alternative to junior high -- and let young people have the choice
to become a carpenter or an auto mechanic or something like that. I'd
love to talk to U PEI and recommend they set up something like UTS
(University of Toronto Schools) and say to kids in middle school
(because it's in middle school -- junior high -- where we lose them) --
I'd like to talk about early education in a second -- But if U PEI
could say "If you really want to have an accelerated path we've got the
school for you. I think that would throw such a spanner (wrench) in the
works that there might actually be some change.
There's another side to this that's even more important. Our behaviour
and our worldview and our ability to learn anything is set before
we arrive in school. At the moment in Canada 30% of children are
already incapable of learning or behaving in a social manner that would
equip them to do anything in
life, when they start school. In South Korea this number would be less
than 7%. That's bvecause of how we're all living today -- children are
objectified, and they don't get the attention they need from the people
who are most important to them -- their parents. This is a growing
trend. You can see it in the obesity, lack of academic progress and so
on.
What we're beginning to learn is that it's about genes but it isn't --
it's about what is called the epigenome. Let's say you and I were twin
brothers. We'd be born at the same starting point, but at the age of 20
we'd have about a 30% difference in genes, and by age 70 about an
80% difference. Various experiences that happen to us when we're young
switch off or switch on various genes. The most important aspect here
is the fight-or-flight response -- More and more children are not being
given the environment at home that is essential for small primates. All
the genes that are necessary for them to cope, to learn, to feel OK
about themselves and the world are being compromised.
So we have to work in the early childhood area and we have to work in
middle school, because when the 30% come in they're so disruptive that
being a teacher is a bit like being a lion tamer. You're lucky not to
be killed. We all get pulled by our social networks, so that by the end
of middle school, about 70% of the kids, well, they're done. They'll
never be able to hold a decent job, and they live in a kind of fantasy
world.
We end up with a school system now with 70% who will not be able to be competent citizens.
Dave:
Do you think it's that hopeless? I'm thinking of the work of Gustavo
Esteva who worked with young people of Southern Mexico in the Open
University in an unschooling system and found that, after goofing off
for awhile, they took responsibility for their own learning and applied
themselves to learn useful things. Isn't it possible young people could
bounce back and learn how to learn given the right freedom and space?
Rob:
I'm not writing off the whole 70%. I'm saying that without doing
anything, we have at the moment a 70-80% failure rate in our schools.
And the 30% who arrive in Grade 1 in that state are probably beyond
help by then. They're the ones who are pulling down the rest, forcing
the rest of the school to cope with that disruptive element. It's like
your immune system. If you have a small infection it's manageable. But
if you have an open wound your whole body is working full tilt to deal
with that infection, so that nothing else can get done. That's why the
scale of the problem, and the initial conditions, affect the whole
school system. So I don't have any hope for the system.
Dave:
So it seems to me then the answer is to just scrap the school system
and let people try different experiments and watch to see which ones
work, and allow people to learn from that. Wouldn't you say?
Rob:
I think I would. It can't be any worse. In 1900, 90% of children in
Canada and the US were literate. Now over 50% of Canadians and
Americans are basically not literate. It's shocking. And in Atlantic
Canada we're going to have almost no young here. We have a very low
birth rate, and all our bright kids leave. In fifteen years more than
half the population will be over the age of 65. This is a crisis.
Dave: What would you do if you were the parent of a five-year-old today?
Rob:
I would homeschool them. That doesn't mean the parents have to be at
home all the time. You could set something up with other parents, like
Chris Corrigan has done in Bowen Island. Unschooling. School is one of
the most terrible things we've inflicted upon humanity. And I enjoyed
school.
Dave:
If we did that, tried out experiments and came up with some workable
unschooling models, do you think we'd still need standardized testing
to gauge whether certain essential skills had been acquired?
Rob:
Absolutely not. You're connecting education to a job and a resume. We
don't get any work because we have a piece of paper, we get it because
people know we can do something. That's the world we are going to go
back to. The idea of all these people working in cubicles and pushing
paper around is a fantasy about what the future will be.
Dave:
Do you think we could have reached the stage where we are recognized
for our credentials if we didn't first have a piece of paper that gave
us the opportunity to work in an environment where we could acquire
those credentials in the first place? What if I as an executive need
someone to do research -- what would give me the confidence that an
unschooled, untested young person would be capable of doing that
research, and pick them over the person with the piece of paper?
Rob:
First, if they're brand new, you apprentice them, and find out if they
can really do the job. I have friends working in such organizations now
and no one is full time until they've apprenticed for six months
there. You have to prove you can do it. An interview only confirms the
intuition that a person might work out. It takes six months to see
whether the person has the skills and temperament to fit into the
organization. If they don't they're gone.
Dave:
But most organizations today would argue they're operating under such
tight constraints they can't afford to bring people on as apprentices.
They would say that's what the education system is for.
Rob: They can
afford it, because you can pay them minimum wage or nothing. Society
has now outsourced the business of education, which worked quite well
for four million years, to institutions.
Let's talk about the skill sets at my local university here (U PEI).
Most of the best, graduate business school students I taught are still
waiting on tables here. Most of them have at least $30,000 worth of
debt. And while they're very nice and clever people, they actually
don't have any skills. They know how to do a marketing plan for
Coca-Cola, but they've never sold anything. They know how to do
strategic finance for IBM, but they don't know basic bookkeeping. They
know absolutely nothing.
Let's look at science. I'm doing work here with the university labs.
But the professors tell me the absolutely worst person to hire is a
Bachelor of Science. They do know how to operate machinery though, and
if they started there, and built up a reputation working in the lab, then
they could take a Bachelor of Science. We've got it the wrong way
round. People do a BA in Business and they know absolutely nothing. And
the poor kids are debt-laden with a piece of paper that's worth nothing.
Dave: So if you don't have standardized testing, how do you develop a framework or program for self-learning?
Rob:
Why? Why not just let them self-learn, become brilliant at what they
want to do? In Atlantic Canada there's a new Hibernia field opening up
right now in Newfoundland. If every Newfie working out West came home
there's still be a shortage. And Irving are going to build a gas
terminal on the Atlantic coast. The demand for skilled labour --
welding for example I'd agree you'd have to have a piece of paper.
Though if you said you were a skilled welder and I was a skilled welder
it would take at most an hour or so for me to tell if you were really
good.
The 'currency' of the (university degree) paper needs to be challenged
now. You have to prove that you can do it. My software friends here
don;t pay any attention to degrees. And if people aren't pleasant to be
around you don't want them. The temperament issue is very important. We
seem to think that skills are merely the technical ones.
One last story. If you wanted to join an elite unit in Greece in the
Pelopanisian War, you'd have to fight alongside the unit for free until
they decided you were qualified. In the US submarine service today,
except for the captain (who goes through a ruthless peer review
process) you are on probation for a year and can be voted off the boat
even if you're an executive officer, by the crew. They know any one
person on a submarine can kill them all. That's a high-performance
technical environment and a very good model.
Dave: OK. You're the czar, the Education Minister responsible for the new unschooling unsystem. How would you make it work?
Rob:
I'd stay out of the unsystem and do three things to improve the system.
Offer three-year in-home support for parents of young children having
trouble coping, to help them develop their parenting skills. I'd shift
the resources for the first years of life from baby-sitting to a focus
on early learning. Pushing a lot more resources into preschool year
support and involving parents extensively in that.
Secondly, I'd open up the standard curriculum in the schools, to open
up opportunities for kids to go off and do what interests them.
Unschool the school.
Lastly: My school, Harrow, is nearly 500 years old, with a social
structure that has evolved from trial and error. So while there are 800
students in the school, far beyond the 150 top Dunbar number, all the
boys are in houses of between 60 and 80. Everything is competing with
the other houses. So you get a great deal of social cohesion there. The
discipline of the school is run entirely by the boys themselves, some
of whom have positions of significant authority. I'd be looking at
models like that.
So if you have a 3000-kid high school (not uncommon), with no formal
structures, it will be run like a prison. Cliques and gangs and
bullying and all those kinds of things. The social environment of the
school needs to be well thought through, so the discipline issues go
away.
Dave: What
do you do with the students who don't want to go to school at all, who
think that environment is part of the problem. Could they opt out and
just choose to learn at their own pace outside the system?
Rob: Absolutely. We couldn't do any worse than we're doing now.
Dave: What role would technology play in this new school environment?
Rob:
Technology isn't really an issue. Its current popularity is about the
desire of people to be connected in a more human and natural way.
Technology can facilitate that. Today you have a lot of people teaching
in school who basically don't know anything. How to teach, or their
subjects.
What's interesting about Bowen Island is that in the community there
are a lot of people who know a lot about certain things. Let's say
little Dave is really interested in astronomy. This technology would
allow you to hook up with other people and not be confined by
geography, other people who wanted to help teach you.
We're seeing this in music, where more and more music teachers are
teaching using Skype, with the video on, remotely. Remember what school
was like 100 years ago. The women running for senior office today --
Hillary Clinton -- would have been teaching school. Today's bank
presidents would have been teaching school. By contrast, the calibre of
teaching today is, I think, outrageously low. Technology would allow
students and good teachers to find each other all over the world, and
coalesce around people who are very gifted.
The school then becomes an agency for facilitation, rather than a force pounding 'knowledge' into children's reluctant heads.
Dave: What if we don't do any of this? What will we be looking at in the next fifty years?
Rob: Sometime
in the next few months or years the full impact of Peak Oil will roll
over us. Our whole way of life will be turned upside down. It will be
accompanied with changes in climate, increases in conflict etc. So
we're going to hit a hugely turbulent time in the lifetime of the
children at school today. Kids who are not resilient, who can't cope
well, who have no skills, will fall badly, and societies dominated by
people who have no skills are going to fail utterly.
The stakes are larger than they've ever been.
[Rob provided the following epilogue to the conversation after I stopped recording:]
Many thanks for the opportunity to talk about my extreme views of education. They,
my thoughts, have been influenced by a growing sense of why all aspects
of modern life are so unnatural - that is we tend us use kinetic force
is a machine way to act upon. Hence broadcasting was a one way deal
with the broadcaster holding all the cards. War is a kinetic thing
whereby until recently force alone was enough.
These one-way force-laden kinetic approaches no longer
seem to work well. The paramount example is how we see our education
system and child rearing - we knock stuff into our kids. They are
objects and so is knowledge.
I offer up 3 books that have helped me see a practical way of
seeing the child as a natural learner whose primary learning process is
curiosity, observation and trial and error.
Are we not moving
from an object oriented and externally motivated world to a relational
and intrinsically motivated world? If so then education and child
rearing has to go there too - is this not what you have been so
passionate about? A more natural approach?
The first is the
Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff
- Liedloff observes how indigenous people raise children. The book is
of course deeply offensive to many women today. It's primary thesis is
that the infant requires a close physical attachment to the mother for
the first year while paradoxically it also requires that the adult
remain focused in the adult world. So lots of touch and lots of
observation by the infant but no giving the child the illusion that it is
in charge. The opposite of how we raise kids today in the west. The
baby's need for touch - the key pathway for all development - is
maximised as is the ability to observe the adult world. This is the key
foundation for all development - touch and literacy are tightly
coupled.
The second is the culmination of a lifetime of work by the late John Holt -
Learning All the Time -
All of Holt's books are worth reading - but this is a quick summary and
full of how you might be able to help a child do really well. For
instance he is clear that it should not take more than 30 hours to
teach a child how to read - provided you do the right thing! The book
is based on the idea, as is Liedloff, that we are natural learners who
are most shut down when the thrill of learning is taken away from us.
The book is very practical and is the bible for all who seriously want
to home or un school - when you read it you may see why I feel so badly
about school as it is.
My last choice is - Punished by Rewards
- by Alfie Kohn. Kohn points out how destructive any extrinsic system
of reward is. Liedloff also makes this point when she points out that
in traditional societies no one talks down to a child - School is all
about marks and bits of paper and is not about the reality of learning
- also school reinforces a helpless view of the world where
satisfaction comes from outside and not from within.
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