"Twenty years of schoolin'
and they put you on the day shift."
For most of my working life, I've been in publishing, in the restaurant business, and in the nursery (plant) business. It's been a great many years since I attempted to teach in a classroom, and those attempts were complete failures. After an academic career aimed at teaching, I turned out to be a really lousy teacher, and I've spent the last 40 years trying to figure out why, by examining my own experiences and those of my kids, as well as by reading theorists. I've come to the somewhat satisfying conclusion that it wasn't entirely my fault; I was working in a system whose definition of education was too narrow. I didn't have the personality for the "jug to mug" model, in which the teacher pours knowledge into the students. While that process is an important part of education, it's not as important as the system makes it out to be. There's plenty of room, and need, for other approaches, and certainly for other teaching, or mentoring, styles. My main hope now is to help flesh out the ways in which those other styles and approaches can be combined into a system that replaces the old one. And do I think it will have to be replaced, rather than reformed. The traditional system of education has too much inertia for tinkering around the edges to have much effect. It needs to come down, and I think it will, eventually, from its own weight and pressures from newly-available alternatives.
I also want to explore ways in which corporations, which have pretty much usurped our democracy, can be kept in a subordinate position with regard to education. Private enterprise is fine; a feudal system isn't. Many people want to reduce the role of government in education, and it does seem to me that the government should guarantee equity in opportunity and then stay out of the way. But what many anti-government critics fail to understand is that the government is mostly under the control of corporate enterprise. It's a two-headed snake, and it doesn't matter which head bites you.
I'll be commenting on and listening to others on issues such as how and why to implement truly student-centered education, how doing and making can be a primary means of learning, not secondary to the accumulation of information, how cheating....er, collaboration and teamwork can take precedence over individual accomplishment and reward, how assessment can be done without recourse to one-size-fits-all standards, and how technology, from MOOCS to mobile phones, can help form a new system, as opposed to putting the old one in new containers. Other than that, I haven't much to talk about.
