The system design is not our fault. Its perpetuation is our problem.

I often tell American educators that if we are succeeding with a third to a half of our students, it is only because our educators are trying so hard. The system, after all, was designed and built with the intent to fail 80% of students before 8th grade ended, so we are far exceeding our "design capability."

I've written lots on this... the most accessible versions here as a One, Two, Three, Four, Five part series on the history of our system. It's an ugly story of a system designed to fail most our children, designed to create compliant factory workers and miners, designed to limit the opportunities for the poor to move between socio-economic classes, and designed to ensure an unchallenged power structure. And for 180 years it has done those things with intentionality, whether the hands on the wheels were Henry Barnard and Ellwood Cubberley, or Bill Gates and Salman Khan.

From age-based grades and grade-level-expectations, to textbooks, Carnegie Units, chairs and desks, the teaching wall, and the shape of our classrooms, we were handed a set of horrible paradigms - a virtual war against childhood - and asked to somehow lead our nation into a future...

That's the basic truth, it isn't our fault that our schools are literally built from the ground up to work against us. But, if we are not fighting to change that system every day, from whatever position we hold in education, that is our fault. If we are educators, we begin that profession with a commitment to children, and that is a sacred trust.

The change needed is radical. It is essential that we redefine almost everything about our schools, which is a very difficult task to undertake, but we have a system that is somewhere between 50 and 120 years behind the curve, and that should promote some urgency.

Misunderstanding Cognition

By the time our educational system, whether in the US or the British Empire, was codified and permanized between 1890 and 1910, it was already deeply behind, locked in the Second Industrial Revolution in the United States - the arrival of the railroad, steamboat, telegraph, and mass produced print media - and in the "Second British Empire" in Englland-dominated lands - a place of simply processing the spoils of the colonies. Of course both were already history, as the Boer War had proved to the United Kingdom and the arrival of airplane, cinema, telephone, and phonograph were proving in both environments.

Whether colonial resentments and migration, or the new cognitive authority of the motion picture, the "sit and git," "same for all," step-by-step filtering system of the educational design was already failing these nations, no matter what racist apologists for the past like Woodrow Wilson might say.

We know the failure because of the willingness of all these nations to rush into war with no critical thinking from 1898 to 1914 (including the ease of media manipulation). We know the failure because it remained the "non graduates" - from Henry Ford to Frank Lloyd Wright to the Wright Brothers - who dominated the new economy of the time.

Almost 50 years ago, Polaroid introduces the Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat era.

Notice that photography is no longer about memory, but is instead an
instantaneous social connectivity tool. Kids passed dirty pictures too...

Since 1910 the divide between reality and education has grown exponentially, rushing at breakneck speed over the past fifty years. Schools missed the critical changes even in print literature - from John Dos Passos USA Trilogyin the 1930s to the Beatsin the 1950s to Tom Wolfein the 1960s - and so - contemporary language continues to elude most teachers of the English language. Schools missed the impact of film literature on culture, the impact of visual media in general. Mass media, always minimally and poorly taught, has failed us from Orson Welles' War of the Worlds (really? can't tell news from drama on the radio?) to the Boston Marathon Bombing.

Schools missed the revolution in interpersonal communications which was created by the telephone, the automobile, the urbanization of the world, and eventually the contemporary technologies of chat, mobile devices, email, Twitter, et al...

This still horrifying bit of 8mm movie film (not even yet "Super 8") represents a
key moment in the citizen journalism we all know today. 50 years ago in November...

Each of these changes, despite what many in education will tell you, alters cognition because it alters cognitive authority - that which allows someone to believe something. We know how quickly this happens too. During the Spanish American War American filmmakers understood the need for people to see "moving images" so clearly that they faked them. Thirty years earlier a "cyclorama" might have been clear truth, now, something else was essential.

Scholarly material: The Gettysburg Cyclorama seemed
definitive until film appeared.

What is truth now? We were all reminded last week that if truth once came from organizations like NBC News and CNN, that's no longer true at all. So how do our students decide if they can trust us?

If your answer remains, "because I (or the book) told them," it may be time to go, because few will believe you, even if some pretend to for grading purposes. They know that educators lie - they make up silly simplifications because they think kids are stupid. They teach stuff even a casual Google search proves untrue, whether in math or social studies. They make up rules which lack any logic. They divide up subjects and time with no regard to how humans learn. They test in ways which measure nothing important. And thus, in the cognitive authority structure of this century - our students' century - educators, "we," have proven wholly unreliable. And no amalgam of initials after your name or collected diplomas on your wall will change that.

So we need to doubt everything. Question everything. Engage in "Zero-Based Design" thinking, which imagines that we can start from the ground up, instead of inheriting a dysfunctional structure. And we need to act. As an Iowa superintendent said on Monday, "This is urgent, we can't keep doing this to kids."

The system is not our fault, but every day we continue to tolerate it is. We need a sense of urgency. For our kids' sake.

- Ira Socol

Designed to Fail - Education in America: Part One

part two    part three    part four    part five 

"Schools should be factories in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products. . . manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry." - Elwood Cubberley's dissertation 1905, Teachers College, Columbia University

"We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." - Woodrow Wilson

In a time when our experts in education range from the operator of a software company, to a talk show host, to a Chicago businessman of no great success, to a woman from a wealthy family who went to an Ivy League school and met powerful friends, it is important to understand what the educational system in the United States was designed to do, and why it was designed to do that.

In the beginning there were two voices. As the 1840s began, a period when information and communications would revolutionize American society (the railroad, the telegraph, the steam-powered rotary printing press, machine made paper, penny newspapers with mass circulations, steamships), William Alcott and Horace Mann were the two people talking to the young United States about school.

Alcott, author of Confessions of a School Master (1839), was a close observer of students and children. He watched students and teachers and saw what was working for them, what made them uncomfortable, what seemed to make learning go, and what seemed to block it. In the 1830s and 1840s Alcott would re-design the American schoolroom, replacing benches and tables (where children squirmed and fatigued because they could not sit back) with desks and chairs, and he would blow apart the instructional model in use by bringing the "Black Board" and slate into the room, changing the presentation scheme and allowing students to make and correct mistakes.

Alcott saw student needs as central - "That the general arrangement and appearance of even inanimate things around us, have an extensive influence in forming our character, will hardly be questioned. Every object, and every individual we see, either renders us more cheerful and happy, or the contrary. The condition of those objects, therefore, which surround a collection of children, whether the number of those children be five, fifty, or one hundred, must of necessity have a very considerable influence in forming their dispositions, and giving a determination to their future character," he wrote in an 1831 essay on school design.  "Even the slate, if it were at their command continually, would become tiresome. To sit still, at times—entirely still—if not continued too long, is one form of doing something ; and I consider it as much a part of the teacher's duty to form his pupils to the habit of sitting still, as to teach them spelling and reading. Not of course an hour at a time, or half an hour, or a quarter, even. To some children, five minutes would be long enough; and to most, ten minutes would he the full extent of what would be useful," he  added in his book Slate and Black Board Exercises (pg. 11) - because he was working with a view from the ground.

Horace Mann, social reformer and historically proclaimed, "father of the American public school," looked at education from a different vantage point.

Mann looked down from heaven and saw a nation, and a human race, in need of perfection. I like Horace Mann, he's an incredibly eloquent believer in the potential of our children, and our potential to be "better."

“Had God, then, provided no means by which this part of our nature can be controlled, we should indeed say, that we had been lifted up to heaven in point of privileges, that we might, so much the more certainly, be dashed in pieces by our inevitable fall. But we have not been inexorably subjected to such a doom. If it befalls us, it befalls us with our own consent. Means of escape are vouchsafed; and not of escape only, but of infinite peace and joy.

“The world is to be rescued through physical, intellectual, moral and religious action upon the young.” - Horace Mann,  What God Does, and What He Leaves for Man to Do, in the Work of Education (1840) 

Mann saw education from that vast societal view. It was charitable, and of course, missionary in style and substance. He would bring education to all in America in an attempt to correct the social problems of the generations which separated post-revolutionary America from perfection. Yet he remains a humanist, a believer in human agency: "But it is not every child, nor even a majority of children, who, with any propriety, can be compared to mechanical structures, or to those pliant and ductile materials that are wrought into beautiful forms by the skill of the artisan. Children formed in the prodigality of nature, gifted to exert strong influences upon the race, are not passive; —they are endued with vital and efficient forces of their own. Their capacious and fervid souls were created to melt and re-cast opinions, codes, communities, as crude ores are melted and purified in the furnace. To the sensitive and resilient natures of such children, an ungentle touch is a sting; a hot word is a living coal," he says in that early lecture.

Mann is the successor to Jefferson on schools. He is the person who begins to convince the United States that education must be both a birthright and a societal commitment. Yet, almost as soon as he begins to move about the nation lecturing, another voice appears - that of Henry Barnard. 

Before Barnard saw schools as a path to fame and eventual fortune, he was a mercantile-oriented state legislator in Rhode Island with no interest in education. And yet before the 1840s would end he had seized the Public School Movement from Mann and had twisted that father of public education's words into something quite different. In the end Horace Mann became the Geoffrey Canada of the 19th Century. A man who set out to make a real difference, but whose image ended up licensed to people with an entirely different agenda.

Barnard, like Mann, looked at schools, education, and childhood from 'way above.' But his was not the view from heaven of Horace Mann. Rather, his view was from the banker's office and the factory foreman's post, and the mine supervisor.

At first, he sounds a bit like Mann - without the learning. "The primary object in securing the early school attendance of children, is not so much their intellectual culture, as the regulation of the feelings and dispositions, the extirpation of vicious propensities, the pre-occupation of the wildeiness of the young heart with the seeds and germs of moral beauty, and the formation of a lovely and virtuous character by the habitual practice of cleanliness, delicacy, refinement, good temper, gentleness, kindness, justice and truth." But quickly the purposes behind this desired docility are apparent. "By means of such schools, the defective education of many of the youth of our manufacturing population would be remedied, and their various trades and employments be converted into the most efficient instruments of self-culture."

In Barnard's world education was training, not learning. And in pursuit of this he imports the Prussian Model of education to simulate the assembly-line (recently appearing in the gun factories of his native New England) with age-based grades. He introduces rigid time schedules to schools in order to prepare the students for the emerging shift-work of textile mills. He also pushed to lower teacher pay (through replacing male teachers with women) and status, and to standardize both school buildings and instruction. (Mann had brought a dualism to the "women teacher issue" - "That females are better fitted by nature than males to train and educate young children is a position, which the public mind is fast maturing into an axiom. With economical habits in regard to all school expenditures, it is a material fact, that the services of females can be commanded for half the price usually paid to males. But what is of far higher moment is, that they are endowed by nature with a stronger affection for children; they have quicker sympathies, livelier sensibilities, and more vivid and enduring parental instincts." - Common School Journal (Boston), vol. 1, no. 6 (March 15, 1839), p. 85 - Barnard would use Mann's words while emphasizing the savings and ensuring that women never held decision-making positions within the system.)

Why this matters

From this beginning with see two fundamentally different ways of viewing the purpose of education, or, perhaps, two and a half. And these visions persist today and explain our current battles over schools.

This weekend this exchange appeared among friends of mine on Twitter:

"Spent last night with cousins, three of whom are teachers - never heard of KIPP, Rhee, or Waiting for Superman. Surprising conversation." Karen Janowski on Twitter

"@KarenJan doesn't surprise me one bit. The vast majority of teachers, for better or worse, are blindly focused on their classroom and kids." Jonathan Becker on Twitter

Teachers, and most teacher educators, are, as Dr. Becker says, "blindly focused on their classroom and kids." From Linda Darling-Hammond to Lisa Parisi, Dan McGuire, Patrick Shuler, Punya Mishra, Pam Moran, Dave Britten, Dave Doty, and tens of thousands more, are working with students every day, trying to make the changes we can in the lives and learning of our students. "We" are the William Alcotts of today, the Maria Montessoris of today.

At the other end are today's Henry Barnards (or Andrew Carnegies). Those building careers or reputations by making education work for American capitalism. Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates, Eli Broad - they look down from corporate suites and see that education is not producing the kinds of compliant worker/citizens their businesses need. These are education's industrialists, with absolutely no sense that a student is different than any other industrially processed part, and no sense that a teacher is any different than any industrial worker. For this group, education is measured as industrial processing is measured, parts (students) which are not successfully processed in any industrial step (grade) are re-processed (retained), and unions for the line workers (teachers) interfere with cost structure.

These two groups cannot conceivably understand each other because they simply do not see the same thing when they look at "school."

That half step - Horace Mann or Geoffrey Canada or Cory Booker or African-American leaders who sign-on with the industrialists - are the missionaries. Their heavenly view, however well meaning, plays into the industrialists hands, giving moral cover to brutal capitalism.

And brutal it is. We cannot really understand why American schools use age-based grades and standardized tests, and why two-thirds of students do badly - consistently - unless we understand why Barnard and his successors built the system they did. Because the system they built endures, operating, as Cubberley noted, "factories in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products," and discarding "defective" raw materials along the way.

Next: How Barnard's system became an unchangeable institution... Part Two

- Ira Socol

Returning School to Humanity

"Not to present a romanticized view," Richard Altenbaugh writes in The American People and Their Education: A Social History, "but preindustrial work moved at a very distinct pace and maintained a different culture than industrial labor." 

In the 20 years before the American Civil War, education's purpose and design changed in the United States as the economy changed. Without ascribing any utopian ideal to that "preindustrial" world Altenbaugh describes, we can clearly say that time and patterns of work followed something which might be described as "natural" directives. Workers had things to do, obviously, but when and how they were done represented individual - or family - responses to the world as it existed that moment.

Describing Lynn, Massachusetts - the shoe manufacturing capitol of the US in the early 19th Century - Alan Dawley wrote in 1976 (quoted and paraphrased by Altenbaugh 1979 p. 70), "Women decided when to boil tallow for candles, when to darn socks, and when to bind shoes. Men chose when to repair the front stoop, when to manure the garden, and when to bottom shoes. Running errands, a boy exploited this time to play games with friends. Work paused for relaxed meals, or when customers or visitors stopped, or simply to pass the time gossiping or debating politics."

"Because of task-oriented work, there was no standard length to the workday or workweek," Altenbaugh continues, relying on social-historian E. P. Thompson (1967). "The duration of work depended on the completion of the task. Such irregular work rhythms caused bouts of leisure to be followed by frenetic periods of labor. And no sharp demarcation existed between work and social intercourse."

And, naturally, the same social structure extended to education. Students came to school when they could (or would), after necessary family chores were finished, when the weather allowed, when the manufacture or farming schedule allowed. All students shared one classroom, there were no subject divisions or separation between skill building and content. This extended from the schooling for the youngest all the way up. Reading a biography of Alexander Hamilton, I was struck by the complete informality of his experience at Kings College (now Columbia University) in New York - no real classes, no specific reading requirements, a fully individualized course of study which would be virtually unknown today even in American doctoral programs.

And yes, students entered the classroom wherever they "were" and worked forward. Since the Prussian/Pietist concept of age-based grades had yet to be transplanted to the "New World" there were, as yet, nothing like grade-based curricula or grade-based expectations.

thanks to James Socol for the image

Which brings us, momentarily, to today. After 150 or so years of life within the "Second Industrial Revolution," work in America has changed radically. Jobs in the United States, and in Europe, and Australia, etc, are, today, largely of two types: Service and Creative. Both of these job types require very high degrees of flexibility (both time and job task), collaboration, independence, observation, and multi-tasking. As the waiter must scan the room effectively, and support co-workers, and extend tasks based on conditions, the creative worker (see Mozilla Corporation headquarters above "no sharp demarcation existed between work and social intercourse") must flip between individual and group work constantly, keep track of multiple elements, and operate in a purely task oriented environment. These skillsets have far more to do with the lifestyle of the preindustrial society than they do with that of the Ford Assembly Line worker of 1920. Even within "industry" the demands have changed. In 1960 the GM worker bolted the rear bumper onto the Buick and paid no attention if the tail pipe - installed "up the line" - was falling off. Now, that kind of "single-tasking" is completely unacceptable.

Yet our schools remain firmly about training those 1920 Ford workers or 1960 GM workers. Oh, yes, many schools are trying - and fighting the Obama Administration - to include collaboration and creativity, but that is within the "specified" curriculum. The far more important "Hidden Curriculum" and the entire so-called "reform movement" (of Gates, Duncan, Rhee, Vallas, Klein, et al) is devoted to education as a system of manufacturing industrial workers. ("The hidden curriculum is no hidden at all, it is the curriculum," Lynn Fendler))

Let's drop back in time again, to the days of New England mill owners trying to get workers trained in the concepts of work shifts and specific time schedules. Where did they turn for this training? To the nascent "common school" of Henry Barnard. Barnard could be blunt: "The primary object in securing the early school attendance of children, is not so much their intellectual culture, as the regulation of the feelings and dispositions." The function of the form being created for schools was not to enhance education, it was to enhance conformity and submission to the emerging industrial culture.

"As a result, apprenticeship and generalized vocational choice transmitted through family lines gradually were replaced by formal schooling and vocationally oriented training to better accommodate the realities of an industrial job market. Inevitably, schools took on the task- especially the burden of socializing the nation's youth for entry into the workforce. How the individual functioned within the schooling process- attendance, grades, and graduation - became the primary means of determining preparedness for work" (Jacobs and Phillips 1979). 

So, we expect students to be "on time" not because it is educationally important - in an individualized education program why would it be? - but because we are training workers to be on time. We create "standards" for each grade level not because it is educationally important - why is it important to study American History and Central European History at age 13? - but because we are teaching single-tasking and work conformity. We test individually, blocking collaboration (which we call "cheating") not because it is educationally important - why wouldn't we ask the humans around us to share their knowledge? - but because we are manufacturing workers for that assembly line. 

While people worry about testing averages, about whether schools should be run as public goods or for corporate profit, about the number of school days, about what topics to emphasize, the real question, as the 21st Century rolls on, needs to be the very designed structure of our schools. They were created by a certain kind of society for a certain kind of economic reality. Whether that was ever good or bad is a question for another time, but for today I believe we need to begin to return our schools back to the "natural humanity" of the time before the assembly line began to rule our lives.  

- Ira Socol

Architectural Assistive Technology

A recent New York Times article on adjustable classroom desks which allow students to choose whether to stand or sit, ends with this teacher quote: “We’re talking about furniture here,” she said, “plain old furniture. If it’s that simple, if it turns out to have the positive impacts everyone hopes for, wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing?”

But it isn't "plain old furniture." Every bit of furniture in every classroom, along with every light-fixture, every bit of wall, floor, and ceiling covering, every window, the room shape itself, the hall outside... these are all educational decisions which we have made, and like every educational decision we make, these enable some and disable others, favor some and damage others, and help to create specific educational outcomes.

The classroom did not "just happen." In fact, it was quite directly designed. In 1832 William Alcott (yes, of those Alcotts) began a campaign to re-design the American schoolroom. He wanted to replace benches and long tables with individual desks and chairs with backs. He wanted a certain amount of windows providing a certain quality of light. In the early 1840s he became the leading proponent of the biggest changes in classroom technology, introducing teachers to the idea of using the new "chalkboard" and having the students use handheld slates because it allowed them to try writing, and to make mistakes, without wasting precious paper.

He was quite specific. In one article he discussed the feelings of some that, for maximum flexibility, at least one whole classroom wall should be painted as a chalkboard. But he warned against this, suggesting that would be "too distracting," and that it would be better if a neutral wall color was used "above and below the chalkboard in order to focus attention."

Are you reading this in school? Look around? See any changes?

Later in the 1840s Henry Barnard joined in, basically designing the American multi-classroom school in his book School Architecture (download and read away my friends).

These educational reformers were responding to very specific ideas of education at a very specific moment in time, as the United States attempted convert a large group of foreign-language speaking Catholic immigrants into Protestant thinking Americans who could begin to work effectively in the ever enlarging mills which were just starting to make America a nation which could largely depend on its own manufacture. These ideas were not aimed at the children of the nation's elite, who continued to either be privately tutored or to attend English style private academies, thus the architecture was not aimed at creating leaders or a creative class. Instead they were heavily influenced by the design language of the Protestant churches of America. Barnard's exteriors might suggest Catholic cathedrals, but inside the walls were straight (and usually white), the distractions minimal, movement limited, and all attention directed straight ahead.

So, what we often consider "natural," or "unquestionable," was once a decision based on pedagogical assumptions. It is not “plain old furniture," it is a designed learning environment.

So, should children sit in chairs to learn? Alcott thought so, but most kids I know would rather be standing or on the floor, depending on mood and task. Should display systems cover the walls? Alcott thought not, but lots of museums are starting to think differently. Should students file into school hallways so that they know they are 'in control'? Barnard thought so, though some school designers in the 1950s (and Californians) thought students might enter classrooms directly from outside. Should classrooms have uniform lighting? Early 20th Century school designers believed this, though most other interior environments show an understanding of the value of letting the human eye shift from dimmer to brighter and back fairly often.

I was once invited to speak to a class of high school students with learning, attention, and emotional "issues." We met in one of the school's Special Education rooms. Overhead ancient fluorescent lights flickered and buzzed. There were no windows. Instead every wall surface was covered with what seemed liked thousands of pictures and blocks of text in a hundred different fonts. The seats were in rows, but placed so that one group of students faced the side of the other students. Therewere four computers and and a television set. The TV was on, the computer screens all flashed multi-colored moving screen savers. "I just can't get their attention, they are all crazy ADHD," the teacher confided.

Outside that classroom the sounds of the cafeteria and slamming lockers echoed through uncarpeted, hard-surfaced corridors. The paint was old, the lighting grim. Further outside the building was an uninspiring series of brick blocks, surrounded by fencing and guard shacks at parking lot entries. Creative grafitti at one of those entry points had converted "West BlahBlah High School" to "West BlahBlah Correctional Center."

Now, I don't want the schools Henry Barnard wanted, but he was right: Everything about your school impacts your students - from when they approach the grounds to how they enter the building. From how they get to their locker to where they sit and eat lunch. From the light in your classroom to the desk to the carpet or lack of it. The sounds, the windows, the schedule - the fencing, the trees, the PA announcements. Everything about your schools impacts the students and helps to decide which students succeed and which students fail.

I am an absolute believer in classroom technology, you who read me know that, but remember, the first technology, the biggest technology, is the classroom itself, the school building itself. When we think of technology solutions, perhaps we need to start right there.

- Ira Socol