I would like to see everyone finally acknowledge that the United States, though into the second decade of the 21st Century, still has basically a 19th Century education system. Alternative educators have been saying this for years, but now national Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said as much in his open letter to America’s teachers…

Working together, we can transform teaching from the factory model designed over a century ago to one built for the information age.

When it comes to Arne Duncan and the Obama Administration, I certainly wouldn’t count on any transformation happening any time soon! I agree with commentators that say Duncan’s letter was just a sop to teachers. What the Administration is pushing is a standardized national one-size-fits-all academic-focused curriculum for every school, that seems much closer to Henry Ford’s assembly line (where you could have the car in any color as long as it was black) than the differentiated niche marketing of our current century. (Granted, Ford made cars starting in the early 20th Century, but the mass production model he used was clearly rooted in the 19th.) But still, Duncan used the words that he did.

After fifty years of trying to retool our education system (first by progressives in the 1960s and 70s and in more recent decades mostly by conservatives) we seem to have made little headway, other than perhaps everyone now finally acknowledging that we provide a very uneven and unequal education (where the more dysfunctional the neighborhood the more dysfunctional the schools are likely to be). Meanwhile the Education-Industrial complex continues to consume ever more billions of our educational budgets selling text books, consulting and special programs to support whatever the latest reform effort is, but essentially adding their money interest to maintaining the status quo.

So whenever I start complaining like this I imagine my mom the activist asking, “Well… what are we going to do about it?”, and as a parent and life-long learner, I continue to try to think (pragmatically yet outside the box) about how the United States can reinvent its antiquated education system to make it relevant for life and learning in this new century for all our people.

We need to change the paradigm, which of course is much easier said than done!

A paradigm is a system of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality. Thinking “outside the box” is all about examining the current paradigm and considering how it might be changed. Putting on my analyst’s hat, my take on our society’s current educational paradigm is as follows…

1. Modern society is complex, difficult to navigate, and a generally hostile environment for children and inadequately trained adults.

2. All children need to be given extensive training and separated from society until they are adequately trained adults.

3. There is a single “best practice” curriculum that all students should be required to learn and directed by the government to do so.

4. A failure to get that training as a child condemns an adult to a difficult life at best, and can threaten society as a whole if they fall into an underclass or otherwise have not real stake in society.

5. The natural safe environment where children can get that training is in school.

6. All children should be in school, so school should be mandatory.

If my six points above accurately capture that paradigm, then I would say that we should start by acknowledging that schools and mandatory attendance are a form of societal “remediation” or even a “martial law” of sorts, to compensate for an adult world that has become mostly unfriendly to youth and their development.

Some of my alternative education colleagues would go so far as to call it “cultural aggression”, due to that mandatory attendance along with a mandated curriculum, since there is no escape from being “schooled” for 13 years in the officially approved knowledge and the biases of what’s taught and not taught. One could easily characterize this extensive period of mandated formal training by the state as indoctrination. Also, supporters of Critical Pedagogy claim that the state is requiring young people in at-risk minority communities to attend schools that are failing not by accident but by design.

Remediation or martial law when used appropriately are generally intended to be temporary. Remediation is generally employed to address a particular deficit situation towards the goal of resolving that deficit and returning to “normal” development. Martial law is put in place for a short while during a crisis (except say in the Middle East and elsewhere where it has become essentially a permanent feature of strongman rule).

So I suggest we consider beginning to change this paradigm by acknowledging, that at least for some of our youth, there are good learning venues outside of schools. Those venues may be homes, family businesses, internships with community organizations, or other venues. Also access to the Internet as a “virtual venue” should also be on that list. My kids, for example, have developed many of their significant work and life skills from home on the Internet. (See my pieces “The Adventures of an Unschooler on the Virtual High Seas” and “Massively Multi-Player on the World Wide Web”.)

This would then allow us to consider what I see as a big (though admittedly problematic) step forward. That step would be to end, or at least begin to end, mandatory attendance in school. The new agreement between government and its citizens would be that the state would “offer” every child an education rather than mandate it. This along the lines of equal “opportunity” rather than results.

Schools could focus more on being true learning centers given a lessening need to hold students against their will. Many schools could still offer the complete “day school” program, where kids stay on one campus all day every day, that all public schools offer now. But other schools could truly become specialized learning centers (rather than the current “magnet schools”) for a particular subject area of focus and not even attempt to offer a “comprehensive” curriculum. Over the course of ones youth, you could combine “participating in” (rather than the more passive “attending”) any number of different learning venues part-time, full-time, and/or for a limited duration. And, of course, full-time every-day “day schools” would still be an option.

Its essentially a “cafeteria” approach to education (including “take out” consumed at home) and it puts the student and their family firmly in the drivers seat with ownership of that education, though they could still cede the “driving” to the State if they wished.

Given ending mandatory attendance, I suspect that nothing would change, at least at first, for the majority of current students and schools. Most kids would still attend their current schools and most school programs would still offer what they offer now. But slowly, as people gained comfort with the new paradigm, things would change among all stakeholders in the educational process. Parents and students would increasingly “vote with their feet” and school districts would have the freedom to react to that and diversify their offerings accordingly. Alternative schools and “alternatives to school” would have a much better chance to come to fruition.

This would of course introduce a raft of new problems to be solved, including perhaps…

1. A whole new approach to mandated curriculum, including mandates as to in what year what must be learned.

2. Educational contracts with individual families rather than a blanket state mandate.

3. More need for government agencies to investigate and intervene on behalf of kids whose family provides no “appropriate” learning environment for them.

4. Society wrestling with what constituted an “appropriate” learning environment in this new context.

But these would be problems of dynamic development rather than moribund stasis.

So given that there is an array of gaping loose ends here, I put forward for your consideration that we start visioning and moving towards this new paradigm. This moment in United States history seems an appropriate time, particularly because the Internet has transformed the relationship between individuals and the existing body of societal knowledge, plus the fact that there seems to be growing evidence and a resulting consensus that nothing else is really working.