The Web of Learning

Given the rapid growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, future requirements for education are uncertain at best. What kinds of jobs and professions will be needed as robotics and AI become more prevalent in our everyday lives is unclear. Educators, who have been living in an increasingly outmoded model of learning, are already facing the probability of extinction. The structure of our current schools and curricula originated in the late 19th century. The agricultural emphasis was surrendering to industrialization. Humans were frightened by the demands of new kind of work force. Different skills were needed; life styles had to be altered; family life was restructuring to accommodate father’s working away from homes; upheavals were everywhere.

Individuals facing societal changes needed to adapt. They went back to schools for different kinds of education. Work place training attempted to assist in this change. Some were unwilling to alter their routines and their values and remained in an old order, becoming increasingly irrelevant. The new world was challenging not only work habits, but deeply held beliefs about the meaning of life, of work, of family. Slowly, new opportunities emerged to support the new demands of the work force. Many found useful employment and gradually adjusted to a new world order. Men, predominantly, left home each day to earn a living. Women were expected to remain home, raising children and seeing to the domestic needs of home and family. Children gradually lost a clear idea of what their fathers did during their time away. In any case, the children themselves left home to be “educated” by strangers.

The information age swept quickly across the country requiring another major adjustment. Computer oriented language began infusing itself into every aspect of life. In schools, computers became a necessary means of staying relevant and great amounts of money were invested in technology, much of which would become outmoded before the boxes of new computers were unpacked. For some, the computer was seen as a replacement for many traditional fixtures in classrooms. For others it seemed to threaten the very essence of teaching. Futurists began predicting a time when teachers and teaching would become redundant as computers performed many onerous tasks without complaint. Others saw the arrival of faster and better technology as the salvation education had been awaiting. It was widely felt that access to information was now possible without teachers or even textbooks. How, we all wondered, would schools change? Would technology encourage a new assessment of what schools were for? Oddly, change would be, in most schools, more cosmetic than substantive. The old culture held fast to the foundations that have been around for over a century. In all fairness, many teachers found creative ways to integrate the new technology, seeing it as an additional tool for individualizing instruction. There were many questions, however, about isolating students from the social dynamic that occurs when project work engaged students in collaborative activities. It became clear for many that computers were not going to revolutionize the fundamental idea of schools and that ineffective practices continued with the addition of computers in every classroom. The internet further complicated the issue. With more and more access to information available to students, how would the veracity of facts be tested? Increasingly both parents and teachers would be excluded from the students’ interactions on computers. Eventually, technology began redefining the very idea of friendship. Peer groups and their pressures were now being replaced by anonymous sources unanswerable to any oversight. Children were teaching children in a language increasingly foreign to the adults in their lives. Parents no longer knew whom our children were spending hours with every day while engaged with social media.

Whatever value computers added to schools was not equitably distributed and furthered class distinctions. There are many who live in certain area codes where poverty is crushing and their schools cannot afford the technology enjoyed by more affluent students. Certainly, at the very least, the computer revolution was a mixed blessing for education.

Today, the acceleration of biotech and infotech research presents us with an unprecedented challenge. We are now facing wielding power not only by manipulating the physical world around us but, according to Yuval Noah Harari in 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, by controlling “the world inside us (that) will enable us to engineer and manufacture life.” (P. 7).

As brain research continues in parallel with discoveries in the biotech and infotech worlds, children are still getting on orange buses and traveling, in some cases over an hour, to places called schools. In schools they enter what is, in essence, a 19th century conception. Long hallways lined with cubicles are called classrooms and are the designated learning spaces. Walls separate classes as well as grades levels and for most of their day in elementary school children will be in the presence of a single adult responsible for their education.

If you visit schools, the layout will be familiar. It’s the same one you entered years ago and is essentially the same one your parents knew. Bells are still ringing, signaling ends of “periods” and the students leave one cubicle for another and are expected to change their mental focus to a new subject. They have spent perhaps 30 minutes to an hour in math. Then, on a bell signal, middle or high school students, get up, gather their belongings and march through crowded hallways, allowing about three minutes or so to enter another cubicle. Here, students’ brains are asked to leave math behind and think about WW2 or English literature. The pattern repeats itself seven or eight times a day before they’re released into a world where all these subjects seem to blend together randomly. In classroom discussions teachers, justifying the importance of their subject, point out the window and exclaim, “You’ll need this when you get in the real world!”

So how do we think about the needs of students, teachers and schools, given the real world of the 21st Century? What are schools for? What is it we’re preparing students for? Once we believed schools were places that could shape future citizens to participate in a democratic society. We paid attention to a shared narrative. Perhaps it was the story of the great experiment of a government of, by and for the people. For many years, this “idea” of the big picture gave us a sense of being part of something larger than ourselves. It also instructed us in the way we would take our places in such a vision. We would be needed to keep the country growing as we ourselves evolved into adults. Those who came from other countries held onto their own practices and loyalties but also agreed to become part of the American narrative. They would be Italians or Poles or Jews, but, as my own grandfather repeated each time we gathered for dinner, “We are all Americans.”

Cultural pluralism meant that we could hold both a love for our original cultures and become a member of the larger family called America. This was the opposite of tribalism, which pits one set of beliefs and customs against others. Without the presence of a unifying idea, we easily became a nation of warring interests, unwilling to accept the validity of values other than our own.

What, then, are our schools for? Is there a unifying idea that can help us understand what skills our children will need in a world where technology is god? That’s the challenge as I see it. There are few certainties. Lessons from the past might not serve us well. Remember, change occurred more slowly in the 19th century and, while new jobs were created to partially make up for outdated ones, people were always going to be necessary. In the new, rapidly growing world of technology, change happens at the speed of light. Everything we thought we understood is up for grabs. While a factory job was replacing the farm, we could at least visualize a factory and even see one. The biotech and infotech worlds are as invisible as the world of digital finance. Money, in a sense, exists only in electronic pulsations. Borders to states and countries have vanished as digital manipulations send deposits all over the world in nanoseconds. The old rules have seem not to apply and the new ones are often indecipherable to the average person. What are schools for, then?

It seems that our ability to adapt quickly and often will be critical for survival. Our individual worth is no longer guaranteed by life-long job security and we will, no doubt, have multiple careers in our lifetime, if we’re lucky. Many will fall by the wayside as technology replaces hands and brains. When Google’s AlphaZero program defeated the Stockfish 8 program, previously the world’s computer chess champion, it used, “the latest machine-learning principles to self-learn chess by playing against itself… Since AlphaZero had learned nothing from any human, many of its moves and strategies seemed unconventional to the human eye. They may well be considered creative, if not downright genius.” (Harari, p. 31)

Given the inevitable pressures from the world of technology, one might ask, “How do traditional schools and their fixed curricula remain relevant?” In my fifty plus years in education, I never heard that question addressed seriously. Failing to evolve, schools may have missed the opportunity to prepare students the new challenges of 21st century technology.

What follows is what I saw and learned in many schools. We were trying to create programs that develop children’s ability to change, reinvent themselves, respond to new challenges, use resources from many places and utilize the plasticity of the human brain to adapt to a rapidly changing world. Essentially, we needed to help students define for themselves how to remain relevant in the technological age.

One of the techniques we used was drawn from research indicating the variety of ways children approach the learning process. Using learning styles information and multiple intelligences research, as well as a host of other techniques that respected the differences in student preferences, we varied instructional time in ways that allowed for students to demonstrate their dominant learning styles. This approach required a different allotment of time because it focused on project driven learning activities. This also provided opportunities for them to stretch their strengths by experiencing and practicing styles that were out of their comfort zones. The intention was to make them more adept learners capable of shifting methods as circumstances changed. However, an effective assessment was difficult because the general environment students lived in remained the same. After leaving a class that respected and acknowledged differentiated learning modalities, they would enter classes that practiced only one or two possible approaches. Primarily, their classrooms operated on a lecture approach with limited opportunities to broaden the examination of subjects deeply and experientially.

I hardly had the answers to these sweeping challenges. It was clear to me and many of my colleagues who truly loved children and desired their continued growth, that the institutions we were working in were resistant to change, committed primarily to quantitative measurements and the standardizing instruction. This linear, text-driven approach did not seem sustainable in the rapidly shifting world our students would inhabit.

I’m sure there are many possible responses to the repeated question: “What are schools for?” There are assuredly many approaches that would be worth trying. That schools have a set curriculum and rigid expectations relating to state mandated testing and an abundance of regulations to which they must adhere, makes is unlikely that systemic change will occur. Teachers are extremely busy keeping up with these expectations and fearful of repercussions if they fail to comply. This is hardly the environment that encourages experimentation and deviation from the well-entrenched norm.

Many decades ago, charter schools were intended to be experimental, tracking new teaching approaches and mapping the way for the larger districts. They were, in a sense, pilot programs exempted from many of the built in restrictions the district was bound by. They have, unfortunately, devolved into private for profit operations employing many of the same practices that have failed in the public sector. They also have siphoned off many of the most successful students from public schools. Incidentally, these success stories are often learners who excel at note and test taking, the very skills traditional schools encourage most of the time. The more creative, unorthodox or hands-on learners are left in underfunded schools, which cannot and often have no intention to accommodate their approach for these learners.

Finally, there is little attention paid to what was once referred to as the “art” of teaching. But anyone paying attention to how the human brain operates will notice that much of the joy of living occurs in areas difficult, if not impossible, to measure. The emotive brain serves us with intuition, creativity, memory retention, relational skills, empathy, and a sense of well-being. It also triggers fear and anxiety. We are, after all, creatures of habit. Fortunately, our brains are adaptive by nature thus making us creatures of innovation and compassion, as well. Our cognitive selves are in constant dialogue with messages from our emotion centers. When we create learning environments that are attuned to the whole brain, we are more likely to engage our students on a deeper and more meaningful experience. Accommodating the whole brain requires a recognition that both the cognitive and emotional brains have much to offer in the process of learning.

In the cognitive function we experience rational thinking, organizational skills, data collections, problem-solving abilities, rational thinking, ordering and sequencing skills, certain mathematical functions planning ahead and language efficiency. Generally, the left brain pays attention to the past and the future. Each of these functional sets is critical for societies to operate successfully.

The emotive brain provides visual-spatial operations, intuition, unorthodox thinking, risk taking, emotionally based memory formation, creative thinking, being in the moment experiences, higher math abstract operations, imagination, play, inventiveness, metaphors, symbols, and a range of emotional sensations. The right brain is attentive to the present.

When our work with children includes both clusters of functions equally, we increase brain power exponentially. Our brains were organized to work in tandem. When this partnership is significantly out of balance, learning is compromised.

Our responsibility is to create techniques and environments that are compatible with the natural ways the brain operates. What follows are a variety of techniques, philosophies and approaches to learning, which attempt to keep the varied brains of students in mind as a primary injunction to every decision we make in the creation of learning environments, whether they are in homes or places called schools.