Unstructured

                As schools in Michigan move past ‘count day’ and start to stabilize their budgets, another right of fall begins.  Schools in the state, indeed all over the country, are starting the first round of standardized testing.  That means children as young as 5 years old are sitting at a computer or tablet answering questions that will determine how the educational system labels and treats them.  Setting aside the fact that children this young don’t have a clear developmental status and the tests are biased by wealth, education of the parents, race and gender(and that’s a lot to set aside), the bigger problem is that the tests promote an idea of intelligence and learning that is antithetical to the lives these children are going to live.  They are not going to be sitting at computers spitting out predetermined answers.  They are going to confront some of the biggest and most fundamental changes in history.

                It’s one thing to structure an educational system this way in a stable culture with a low rate of change and a high rate of dependability and confidence in the information taught.  Perhaps, most of our history has demanded just such a system.  There were aspects of Egyptian tomb painting that remained the same for over three thousand years.  But this is ancient Egypt.  We live, and our children are being educated in, one of the most unstable and changeable periods imaginable.  There is little that these children will face that can merely be settled by established precedent or practice.  The environmental issues alone will force them to think in ways that we never had to contemplate.  Far from the structured environment of computer testing, our children and grandchildren face a completely unstructured future.

                Living in an unstructured time demands different intellectual and pattern recognition skills.  There is less value in stock answers and more emphasis on adaptability and creativity.  There is less value in individual intelligence or genius and more importance placed on collaborative and community- based thinking.  We are failing our responsibility to prepare them for any of this.  Even where the educational system has adopted ‘group work’ and collaboration, the final measuring stick always goes back to those tests of those computers, because that’s where the money is.  Unstructured thinking isn’t just a cool unit in the curriculum stuffed between reading and science, it is an entirely different approach to learning.  We tend to start with answers, and unstructured learning starts with patterns and problems.

                The fact is that we don’t know what they need to know.  We can help them, but we can’t direct them.  Instead of drilling the enthusiasm of learning out of them by taking away their curiosity and initiative, we should be developing a transgenerational network of interests and possibilities they can build on and we can contribute to with our experience.  Instead of a room full of silent children staring blankly at screens that score their responses instantaneously, imagine a school full of children and adults in play and conversation.  We know what their test scores are going to be before they even take the tests in many cases.  All we’re doing now is confirming and locking in the social and economic status they were born with.  They need discovery and not judgement.

                Dewey called this blending of ideas, ages, ethnicities and genders inquiry.  He thought it was the heart and soul of a democratic culture that was always striving to improve and be more inclusive.  Sometimes, the most important questions come only in the aftermath of failure and confusion.  We never let our children experience the positive outcomes of either of those.  In the world that is emerging, learning isn’t acting out someone else’s agenda (particularly if that agenda is driven by text- book and testing companies) but in setting your own.  We have trapped generations of teachers and students in a zero-sum game of predictability and statistical illusions.  We have drained the life out of schools and the love out of learning.  There is no need for every school to be the same or for every teacher to teach the same unit on the same day.  That isn’t accountability; it’s sterile and pedantic. 

                The problems of democracy are all unstructured problems.  We shouldn’t be surprised that as the American political system comes unraveled, so many people are confused and indifferent.  We’ve been teaching them to be that way from a very early age.