Lemke thinks schools are effed beyond repair

Hey, Moonbats. I've uncovered a recent article by Jay Lemke in which he explains why school as an institution is dysfunctional beyond repair and explores alternate approaches to education. As he explains in setting up his argument:

Education, we should remember, is not the same as schooling. Education consists in what a community does to promote learning and understanding of what it values. Schooling is a particular technology for doing education in some human communities. It is a very old technology. I believe that today it is largely dysfunctional and that schooling is seriously in need of radical re-engineering if we are to succeed with education.

I want to describe just how schooling is dysfunctional today as an educational technology. I want to argue that it is beyond reform and repair and that it is urgent that we begin to develop more effective alternatives. I will sketch some ideas for what such alternatives might realistically look like, how we might get from here to there, and what we need to know in order to create a new educational future.

For Lemke, one of the significant faults of the institution of education is structural. He explains:

Thirty students in an empty room with one teacher. In a building that has no other function than to house and support what happens in those empty rooms. Add to the empty room a set of textbooks, and maybe some maps or charts on the walls. What do teachers and students do in these rooms? For the most part they talk, listen, and write. Traditionally the teacher does most of the talking, writes out an official knowledge, which is copied down by students. All the students are the same age to within one year. Very often they have fairly similar social backgrounds and life experiences. The teachers also are a pretty homogenous bunch, compared to the diversity of our society as a whole. The students, past the early grades, change teachers and subjects every hour in the course of a day, and every few to several months in the course of year.

What is wrong with that picture? We live in a complex society in which a myriad of different kinds of knowledge and forms of human activity take place in different institutions, different walks of life, different jobs. Which ones is schooling preparing students for? all of them? or none of them? Why do we imagine that in a society as complex and diverse as ours that you can learn what is important and valued in our society by sitting inside an empty classroom, by spending all your days in one building? We bring in books and pictures, slides and films, television and the Web. But those are very poor substitutes for observing and participating in at least some of the millions of real activities in real places in our society. No other buildings are as empty as schools, except perhaps for prisons. We do not bring other people into schools for the most part, and even if we did, they would be fish out of water, unable to demonstrate what they do in their jobs and lives, able only to talk. Students would not be able to observe or participate in what they do, only listen and maybe see a picture here and there, at best a short movie. Schools and classrooms are impoverished learning environments compared to any office, factory, farm, hospital, courthouse, laboratory, department store, or even prison. Teachers spend their lives teaching. They have little to teach about what goes on in any of the rest of the world's jobs and professions, though we can be grateful for those for whom teaching is a second career.

Questions for discussion:

• Surely Lemke's argument is slightly more sweeping than necessary. Surely there is something salvageable in schools as currently structured. Isn't there?
  
• In omitting the notion of Communities of Practice (and a new term that Moonbat Katie introduced to me yesterday, Communities of Interest), does Lemke's argument overlook a key element needed to consider the value--and, perhaps, the lack thereof--of schools?
  
• Lemke identifies two elements of effective education, (1) deep understanding, and (2) critical perspective. Then he explains how these are not obtainable in schools as currently structured. Yet all of them Moonbats are products of the very education system Lemke excoriates. What's the deal with that?
  
• Solutions? Solutions? Solutions? Lemke does offer some. What do we think of them? Are there others he has not yet identified?