#72. “The End of Education as We Know It.”

Here I reprint the forward I wrote for a thought-provoking new book by Ida Rose Florez.

Dear friends,

I was delighted to be invited to write the forward to Ida Rose’s new book, The End of Education as We Know It, which gave me a new way of thinking about educational issues with which I have long grappled. Here with permission of the author and publisher, is that forward. The only changes I have made are to add a few headings into the text to help guide the reading and a couple of notes at the end. Here goes:

The Book and It’s Purpose

One measure of a good book, or at least of a certain kind of good book, is that it challenges our routine ways of thinking. It creates some discomfort. At least it does so if we really attend to it and think about it. Ida Rose Florez challenges us to think about schools and education in ways that are unfamiliar to most. She introduces what to most of us is a new vocabulary for such thinking, to which we may feel some resistance. I urge you, experience and acknowledge the resistance, but don’t let it stop you.

Florez is passionately concerned with something that should concern us all, the way we are using up the resources of and despoiling the globe. Like many, she sees education as a key, maybe the key, to how the world can be saved. But unlike most other education reformers she does not think this can be done by altering our current educational system.

Adding courses on ecology, modifying courses in social studies to highlight destructive policies, testing students on their understanding of the causes of climate change, requiring students to read about the ways of indigenous people, adding courses on social-emotional learning or empathy—none of these, nor any other curriculum changes you or I might favor, will significantly alter our path of destruction. Other sorts of tinkering with the school structure—whether the physical layout of the building, the sizes of classes, the school calendar, or the tasks imposed on school personnel—won’t do much either. The educational problem is much deeper than issues of curriculum or details of administration.

Our educational system is one that implicitly and unavoidably fosters a way of thinking about ourselves and our role in the world that is competitive, materialistic, hierarchical (correct answers come from those who have power over us), and ultimately disempowering (the system assumes we must be taught by drill because we can’t figure things out ourselves). As Marshall McLuhan told us decades ago, “The Medium is the Message.” Schools influence our thinking not by the content of what they teach but by the way they teach.

Change by Extinction and Replacement

Florez believes, as do I, that real educational reform requires the death of the current system and replacement by new systems. She tells us that we don’t have to kill the current system or even rail against it because it is already dying of natural causes. I would add that it is dying because it runs counter to the needs of the modern world and is causing increasingly obvious damage to the young people who go through it. Ever more people are recognizing the harm schools are doing to their children and are removing them for homeschooling or some other form of alternative schooling. Teachers, too, are quitting in ever greater numbers and replacing them is becoming ever more difficult. It seems likely that the rate of such school attrition will accelerate over the next decade or two until schools as we know them become irrelevant.

As an evolutionary biologist, I am aware of two routes to change. One is the relatively gradual process of evolution, in which organisms change in form and behavior to meet new conditions. The other is extinction and replacement. The dinosaurs went extinct because they couldn’t adapt to a dramatic global change that wiped out many species, including them. In contrast, some little mouse-like mammals survived the global change, evolved, and some of their lines eventually inhabited the ecological niches previously dominated by dinosaurs. Our current standard schools are the dinosaurs. Some of the little innovative schools we see scattered around the globe, founded on various new ideas, are the mice.

The Crucial Distinction Between Complicated and Complex Systems

A key distinction at the core of Florez’s book is that between complicated and complex systems. Complicated systems are those that contain many components, which act on one another in preplanned, predictable, cause-effect ways. Human-made machines, such as automobiles and computers, are complicated systems. They are planned by engineers and built by those who make the parts and put them together. If something goes wrong and you know enough about the system, you can identify the part that is not functioning correctly and fix or replace it.

All biological organisms, in contrast, are complex systems. Nobody built them. Rather, they evolved. As a key aspect of that evolution, they acquired ways of changing themselves to meet continuing challenges imposed by changes in the environment. They are self-organizing. They are, within limits, self-healing when something goes wrong. This is not to deny the value of Western medical science, which has found some valuable ways to help the self-healing processes of our complex body. But as every good physician knows any alteration of the biological system can have unintended consequences, which emerge from the system’s complexity. You give a drug to a person to reduce pain and maybe you cause addiction, or maybe you suppress a self-healing process in some unknown way.

Just as individual organisms (such as you and I) are complex systems, so are the formations or social structures resulting from connections among individuals interacting with one another. As Florez notes, a swarm of locusts is a complex system, as is a plaque of bacteria, as is a school or school district or department of education. This is why schools and the larger structures within which they are embedded are so resistant to attempts at reform. We can’t alter them the way we might alter a machine, because the complexity precludes our ability to predict the consequence of any given intervention, and because the structures have evolved ways to repel foreign influences.

Education Itself is Complex, but Standard Schools Act as if It Were Complicated

Our standard schools are complex systems, but they approach education as if it were complicated rather than complex. If education is complicated, then we should be able to build education into a person the way we might build an automobile. Indeed, the similarity between the way schools attempt to educate and the way automobiles are assembled is striking. In every school day, the students are sent, strictly by the clock, from one station (class) to the next, where a new component of “education” is added. A little math here, a little English grammar there, then some history, and so on. The assembly-line process is even more obvious in the year-to-year graded system of our schools. The child starts, with others of the same age group (the raw material), in kindergarten, and then is moved through 12 more year-long stops on the assembly line where, at each stop, new bits are added to each of the subject-matter components dictated by the curriculum. The goal is uniformity of product, each child in theory ends with the same education as all the others. That’s not how real education works. That’s not how our complex brains respond to experiences to create meaningful, adaptive, insightful mental progress.

Our schooling system ignores completely the fact that we humans evolved to learn by becoming curious and exploring, by developing interests, by pursuing those interests, and by playing—all of which are complex processes motivated from within. No teacher, no school system, nobody, can “educate” a person. Education always comes from within; it emerges from the person’s interactions with the world around them. To facilitate education, we can set up conditions that help students educate themselves, but we can’t educate them, and we certainly can’t expect that all students are going to learn the same things, at the same time, in the same way.

Guidelines for Planning a School and a Real-World Example of Such a School

Florez provides us with a set of guidelines for planning a school or any organization that has a particular mission. The guidelines include thinking clearly about the mission of the organization, establishing the organization’s boundaries (that is, who is in it and who is not), and setting up Simple Rules (which she capitalizes) that will keep the organization on track toward the desired mission while also providing ways for it to adapt to new conditions without losing the mission.

As I read and thought about Florez’s guidelines, I found myself applying them to my understanding of the founding of a particular radically alternative school that I have spent some of my career observing and studying. The school was founded in 1968 and at this writing is still going strong. I’ll conclude this forward by describing the founding of that school through the lens of Florez’s insights.

The founders of the school were a group who believed strongly in the principles of democracy. They believed that children growing up in a nation that prides itself in being democratic should acquire an understanding of democracy by experiencing it as they grow, not by reading about democracy or hearing lectures about it, forced upon them in an autocratic school. One of the founders pointed out, in an early statement of the school’s intent, that our standard schools are the least democratic institutions in the nation. He and the other founders believed that our nation’s democracy would work better—would be more truly democratic—if children grew up experiencing, first hand, the privilege and responsibilities of democratic citizenship.

So, the first and primary Simple Rule of the planned school was that it would be run democratically by the school members. No member would have more official power than anyone else.

But who would be the school members? This is where boundary conditions had to be set. The founders knew of other innovative schools that fell apart because of disputes among parents, and they also believed that decisions should be made by those who are directly affected by those decisions, that is, by those regularly at the school. So, they decided that parents would not be school members. Parents could enroll their children or not, but they would have no vote on how the school operated. The school members would include only the staff and students. The students would be those, from age 4 on to the late teenage years who enroll.

To ensure democracy going forward, the founders also set the rule that no staff members, including those founders who became staff members, would have tenure. They would all be on one-year contracts that would have to be renewed (or not renewed) each year by secret vote of all school members. They also chose to refrain from using the term “teacher” to refer to any of the staff, in the belief that in a democratic setting all are natural teachers and natural learners, regardless of age. They were also concerned that, because in typical schools teachers are classroom bosses, some might assume that anyone called a teacher at this school would be a boss. At this school there would be no bosses.

The founders also believed that opportunity to play and explore in natural settings is a valuable educational asset. So, for the school’s physical location, they purchased a large Victorian farmhouse with adjacent barn, set on ten acres of land including a pond, next to a forested state park that could serve as addition to the school’s campus.

That’s pretty much it. Think of all the things they deliberately did NOT plan. They didn’t purchase equipment in advance, beyond the sort of furnishings that might be found in any household. They did fill bookshelves with donated books and equipped the playroom with some donated toys. They didn’t specify administrative positions or specific obligations of the staff. They didn’t work out requirements for admissions, except that prospective students would have to be at least 4 years old and spend a visiting week at the school to be sure they liked it and to demonstrate they could care for themselves in that setting. They didn’t work out any requirements for graduating, nor did they even discuss the question of whether or not the school would issue some kind of diploma. They didn’t create any kind of curriculum, because they believed that students would learn in their own ways. If there would be any courses at all, they would be in response to students’ requests.

So, the school was founded with certain startup conditions and boundaries, but it was not built. It emerged. All the many detailed policies, procedures, rules, and items of equipment required for the school to function well, as defined by its members, emerged from the democratic process. Because the democratic process is itself a process for change, the school has continued to evolve, for 56 years at the time of this writing, in response to changes in the interests and needs of its members and changes in society at large that have affected those needs and interests.

Studies of the graduates of this school, including one I conducted decades ago, indicate that they go on to successful lives. Many of them pursue careers that are direct extensions of passionate interests they developed in play at the school. Not surprisingly, they are generally less interested in making lots of money or achieving high status in some sort of power structure than are graduates of more typical schools. They are generally interested in pursuits that are both enjoyable and meaningful to them, where meaning often derives from the sense that they are adding to rather than subtracting from the long-term regeneration of society and the planet. Having taken responsibility for their own education and for administering the school as children, they go on to take responsibility for themselves and their surroundings as adults.

I have described the founding of a real school to provide a concrete example of some of the ideas in Florez’s book and to show that the ideas are not just pie-in-the-sky philosophy but can be implemented to start a long-lasting school that works. This is far from the only example one might give, but it is the one I know best.

Now, go forth. Prepare yourself to think deeply. Turn the page and start reading Florez’s lively and fascinating treatise on regenerative learning and the end of education as we know it.

—

Notes

For those who haven’t guessed, the school I described here as a model is the Sudbury Valley School. There are now many small schools throughout the world modeled after this school or at least inspired by it.

Among the founders of the school, the primary exponent of its philosophy was the late Danny Greenberg. You can read something I wrote about him after his death here. At this time, when American democracy is under greater threat than it has ever been before in my lifetime, Danny’s words are well worth reading and thinking about.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter