We live in a Command and Control world (Taylorism). Therefore, the inevitable question becomes:
How do we determine who becomes the worker and who becomes the manager?
For those of you thinking our educational system is broken; quite the contrary. Our 21st century operates exactly as intended.
From preschool forward, we are sorted according to how we perform on a standardized educational curriculum designed for the average student. Why?
Because 100 years ago, the most prolific and influential psychologists at the time (Edward Thorndike) believed that if a person was talented in one thing, he was likely to be talented at most other things too.
School was designed to separate superior students from inferior ones: So we can shower them with support: And clear a path for these talented students: So their superior abilities can be used to lead the country. Meanwhile:
Average students could go straight to work in the industrial economy. And we can quit wasting resources on the slow students…
(Do you have any idea how much neuroscience has progressed just in the last few years? How lacking it was 100 years ago? Remember, this is a one size fits all approach to “learning…”)
Curriculums and classrooms in American schools were designed to serve average student and create average workers.
By 1920, most schools were organized into Frederick Winslow Taylor’s vision of education: Treating each student as an average student and aiming to provide each one with the same standardized education regardless of their backgrounds, abilities, or interests.
In 1924, American journalist H.L. Mencken summarized the state of our educational system:
“The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment to all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissonant and originality. That is its aim in the United States… And that is its aim everywhere else.”
Over the past century we have perfected our educational system so that it runs like a well-oiled, Taylorized machine, serving its original goal:
Efficiently ranking students in order to assign them to their proper place in society.
The earliest education reformers with a humanist perspective argued the goal of education was to provide students with the freedom to discover their own talents, by offering an environment that would allow them to learn and develop at their own pace. Some humanists even suggested that there should be no required courses and that schools should offer more courses than any student could possibly take. But when it came to establish A nationwide compulsory high school system, the humanist model was passed over in favor of a very different version of education, a Taylorist view.
It was never a fair fight. Educational Taylorists pointed out how public schools had 100 kids in a single classroom. Half were unable to speak English. Many lived in poverty. Educators could not give young people the freedom of choice. Taylorists declared the mission of education should be to prepare mass numbers of students to work in the new economy that followed Taylor’s maxim: His system of average workers was more efficient than a system of geniuses. This is why our schools provide a standard education for the average student, instead of trying to foster greatness.
For example: John D. Rockefeller published an essay describing its Taylorist vision of schools:
“We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up from among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians… nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesman, of whom we have ample supply… The task that we set before ourselves is very simple as well as very beautiful… we will organize our children into a little community and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.”
According to Taylor, there is “one best way.” We have to organize and teach our children to become workers who can perform industrial tasks in this perfect way. Therefore, the architecture of our entire educational system conforms to this central tenet of scientific management:
Standardize everything around the average.
Schools around the country adopted the “Gary plan.” Named after the industrialized Indiana city where it originated: Students were divided into groups by age (Not by performance, interest, or aptitude). These groups of students rotated through different classes, each lasting a standardized period of time. School bells were introduced to emulate factory bells. In order to mentally prepare children for their future careers.
In summary of the more advanced (Thorndike) theory;
The purpose of schools was not to educate all students to the same level, but to sort them according to their INNATE level of talent.
Am I crazy or is it deeply ironic that one of the most influential people in the history of education believed that education could do little to change its students abilities and was therefore limited to identifying those students born with a superior brain and those born with an inferior one.
(In all fairness, these theories worked wonders at the time. The economy flourished. Poverty reduced. High school graduation rates went from 6% to 81%. Taylorism was a wild success. However, our world is different. Times have changed. New strategies required…)
(Please note: To make the job of Manager easier and more secure, they make decisions about people using types and ranks. You will not be right every time. However, you will tend to be right ON AVERAGE. This is good enough for large organizations with many standardized processes and roles. On the occasions where managers do make a wrong decision, you simply blame the employee for not fitting into the system.)
I pulled this information from books written by Todd Rose. I highly recommend his books as well as those written by Dr. W. Edwards Deming.
If you want a quick superficial overview or the Deming vs Taylor battle for control over the state of management: Find my “Welcome” page below.
I cannot shake this idea that most our systems are exactly backwards.
In drafting a post elsewhere I want to analogize school to business. I have witnessed this hundreds of times: Teachers, administrators and employers blaming helpless students and staff for their own ignorance. The analogy I want to use:
A teacher or administrator blaming the student for not wanting to learn. The irony being: Thinking and Learning is precisely what makes us human and gives us advantage in the world. The desire to learn is innate; we are born with it. You can see it in children. They love to learn. It is only when they attend school that this desire gets beaten out of them.
If you ever hear me rant about destroying our intrinsic motivation beginning around age three…. this is why. As I reading I got so riled up I had to set the book down. I’m not even trying to get into a rant on higher education….
I always thought school was a joke. School doesn’t even teach us HOW to learn. What are you thoughts on school?
I am taking this information from Todd Rose’s other book: The End of Average.
Averagarianism: Normative Thinking:
We owe our sense that there is one right pathway, in large part to Frederick Taylor, Edward Thorndike and their disciples.
Taylor laid the foundation for the idea of a Standard career track within hierarchical organizations. His management ideas and his beliefs that there was “one right way” to accomplish any task in the industrial process, helped determine the duration of a workday and workweek – temporal norms originally designed to maximize factory efficiency, but which today serve as nearly invisible pacesetters for all aspects of our personal and professional lives.
Taylor standardization of factory time also inspired the inflexible pathways of our educational system developed and implemented by Thorndyke and the educational Taylorists. Our schools still follow the same rigid march through the time as they did a century ago, with fixed class durations, fixed school days, and fixed semesters proceeding through the same unyielding sequence of “core” courses, all of which ensure that every (normal) individual graduates from high school at the same age with presumably the same set of knowledge.
When you put together a normal education pathway with a normal career, you end up with the normal pathway through life.
If you believe only one pathway exists to achieve your goal, then the only way to evaluate your progress is by how fast or slow you hit each milestone compared to the norm. Consequently, we bestow tremendous meaning on the pace of personal growth, learning, and development, equating faster with better.
If two students earn the same grade on a test, but one student finished in half the time, we assumed the faster student is the more gifted one. And, if a student should need extra time to complete an assignment or to finish the test, the presumption is that he is not particularly bright.
The assumption that faster equals smarter was introduced into our educational system by Edward Thorndike. He believed that the pace in which students learned material was correlated with their ability to retain it. This was in turn correlated with academic and professional access. Or, in his words, “it is the quick learners who are the good retainers.” He explained this purported correlation by arguing that differences in learning were a result of differences in a brain’s ability to form connections.
Thorndike recommended standardizing time for classes, homework, and test based on how long it took the average student to complete a task as a way of as a way to efficiently rank students. Since he equated faster-than-average with smarter-than-average, he presumed the smart students would perform well when given an average allotment of time.
On the other hand, he presumed the dull-witted students would not perform much better no matter how much time you gave them. There was no point in offering more than an average allotment of time, especially since it would only hold back the bright students.
Even today, we remain reluctant to grant students extra time to complete tasks or assignments, believing that it is somehow unfair – that if they are not fast enough to finish these tasks in the allotted time, they should be appropriately penalized in the educational rankings.
But what if Thorndike was wrong? If speed and learning ability are NOT related, it would mean that we have created an educational system that is profoundly unfair, one that favors those students who happen to be fast, while penalizing students who are just as smart yet learn at a slower pace.
If we knew that speed and learning ability were not related, we would, I hope, go to great lengths to provide students with as much time as they needed to learn new material and complete their assignments and tests. We would also evaluate students based on the quality of their outcomes, not on the quickness of their pace.
The fundamental nature of educational opportunity in our society hinges on the question of how speed and ability are related.
It turns out that we have known the answer for the past 30 years thanks to the pioneering research of one of the most famous educational scholars of the 20th century, Benjamin Bloom.
He believed the reason many students struggled in school had nothing to do with the differences in the capacity to learn and everything to do with artificial constraints imposed upon the educational process, especially fixed paced group instruction. When a curriculum planner determines the pace at which the whole class should be learning the material, Bloom argued that argued that if you removed this constraint, student performance would improve.
Bloom and his colleagues randomly assigned students to two groups. All students were taught a subject they had not learned before, such as probability theory.
The first group, the “fixed-pace group” was taught the material in the traditional manner: in a classroom during fixed periods of instruction.
The second group, the “self-paced group” was taught the same material and given the same total amount of instruction time, yet they were provided with the tutor who allowed them to move toward the material at their own pace, sometimes going fast, sometimes going slow, taking as much or as little time as they needed to learn each new concept.
When bloom compared to the performance of the students in each group, the results were astounding. The students in the traditional classroom performed exactly like you would expect if you believed in the notion that faster equals smarter. By the end of the course, roughly 20% achieved mastery of the material (which bloomed defined as scoring 85% or higher on a final exam). A similar small percentage did very poorly, while the majority of students scored somewhere in the middle.
In contrast, more than 90% of the self-paced students achieved mastery.
Bloom showed that when students were allowed a little flexibility in the pace of their learning, the vast majority ended up performing extremely well. Blooms data also revealed that students to individual pace varied depending on exactly what they were learning. One student might breathe through material on fractions, for instance, but grind through materials on decimals.
There was no such thing as a fast learner or a slow learner.
These two insights, that speed does not equal ability and that there are no universally fast or slow learners, had actually been recognized several decades before Bloom’s pioneering study. And have been replicated many times since, using different students in different content but always producing similar results.
Equating learning speed with learning ability is irrefutably wrong.
The conclusion that logically follows is both obvious and terrible:
By demanding that our students learn at one fixed pace, we are artificially impairing the ability of many to learn and succeed. What one person can learn, most people can learn if they are allowed to adjust their pacing. Yet the architecture of our educational system is simply not designed to accommodate such individuality, and it therefore fails to nurture the potential and talent of ALL its students.
When you let every student work at their own pace, the same kids that you thought were slow six weeks ago, you now think are gifted…. This evidence is demonstrated over and over again. It really makes you wonder how our labels are due the coincidence of time.
If every student learns at a different pace… If individual students learn at different paces, at different times, and for different material, then the idea that we should expect every student to learn at a fixed pace is irredeemably flawed. Think about it.
Were you not really not good at math or science? Or was the classroom just not aligned to your learning pace?
Our schools teach information, not knowledge. Our schools have us memorize information. They do not teach us how to think.