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Schooling in America is broken; furthermore, it’s unfixable. Specifically, the prescribed environment and activities that children are subjected to for 12 years between the ages of 6 and 18 has long since been disconnected from true education and the cultivation of high-functioning human beings. This establishment cannot be reformed or repaired; it must be substituted with something of an entirely different nature.

There’s an important distinction between the two words used above:
Schooling – The process of being instructed or trained
Education – The process of acquiring knowledge and developing skills, including sense-making and problem solving

The key question is what exactly are children being trained to do? Are they being trained to be inspired, creative, diverse, compassionate, independent, and self-sufficient individuals? Or are they being trained to be manageable, complacent, dependent drones who are proficient in completing mundane tasks, seeking a predictable set of material rewards, and not daring to dream too big?

Here are some highlights from the perspectives of four different thought leaders on what’s wrong with compulsory schooling, and what techniques and attitudes we can play with to come up with a new paradigm.

John Taylor Gatto

Gatto was an award-winning NYC public school teacher who retired after 30 years because he was “tired of getting paid to harm children.” He has written a number of books about schooling, including The Underground History of American Education and Dumbing Us Down.

The Underground History is a 400 page account of how U.S. government adopted the Prussian education system in the mid-1800s and forced it upon American families, using military force when necessary to get the kids into classrooms. The Prussian system was designed to create a disciplined and obedient group of individuals with homogenous values and skills, so that they could all support the newly forming industrial economy without causing too much fuss or unpredictability for the ruling class.

In Dumbing Us Down, he presents a list of seven hidden lessons taught by our compulsory schooling system.

1. Confusion – You don’t need to know why this seemingly random collection of subjects is important, just take our word that they are
2. Class position – Your potential as a human is dictated by your rank among your peers according to the grades we arbitrarily assign you
3. Indifference – You must be able to pretend to care about a topic for about an hour at a time, but always able to leave that topic behind at a moment’s notice
4. Emotional dependency – You should not feel happy unless your peers and instructors like you
5. Intellectual dependency – Your ideas are not valid until they are approved by the instructor
6. Provisional self-esteem – You should only feel good about yourself if you get passing grades and the experts deem you worthy
7. Constant surveillance and denial of privacy – We will be watching at all hours – at school and at home (via homework), because you can’t be trusted

All of these lessons are corrosive to the human spirit, but the effect of the third lesson, Indifference, is one I find particularly disturbing. The teacher’s demand on the student to care about subject material is in direct conflict with the rigidity of the daily schedule. To be truly engaged with an activity means to be emotionally activated and vulnerable to the feedback you get from the activity. Imagine that you’re immersed in doing something that you love, but after 45 minutes, someone commands that you stop, whether or not you feel that you’ve completed the activity, and move on to something else. There is no possibility for negotiation or flexibility — the schedule dictates that you MUST stop.

Well, to ask a child to care, and then stop, and then care again, and then stop… six to eight times a day, day after day. That is a relentless taunting of their spirit. If the school instructor is really asking the children to care, then he’s really asking the children to ride an emotional roller coaster that surges forward, and grinds to a halt over and over again with little concern for the comfort of the occupants. The lesson of indifference is forced upon children by the schools themselves! It’s a strategy the kids employ to protect themselves from the emotional violence of the roller coaster. Another nasty detail is that the more engrossed in an activity, the less perceptive of time a person is. Meaning that the more you enjoy an activity, the more surprising and abrupt it will feel when the bell rings.

To ask children to care about what they’re being taught is absurd.

Gatto quit teaching because he saw that instead of cultivating vibrant human beings, he was contributing to the formation of kids that were uneasy with intimacy, without curiosity, had no vision for the future, and were materialistic and cruel to each other. If he was allowed to teach the opposites of those seven lessons, then he would be making good people.

Ken Robinson

In this 2006 TED Talk, he talks about how schools kill creativity.

To paraphrase one of his main points, modern schools and business stigmatize being wrong. By the time kids reach adulthood, they’ve been trained to fear mistakes. It’s not that making mistakes is equivalent to being creative. But, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.

Replacing a Broken System

Sugata Mitra

Mitra’s approach is a simple one, called “child-driven education.” He gives groups of children a task (e.g. “tell me about biomedical engineering”) and some tools, usually a computer terminal connected to the internet, and then he goes away for a while. He literally leaves computer terminals embedded into the sides of buildings in small Indian villages for any passing person to use. When he comes back, he often finds that learning emerges naturally without adult supervision, and his kids have produced results worthy of his challenge.

“Children will learn to do what they want to do.”

He finds evidence that when children learn collaboratively by asking questions to each other and helping each other, they have almost perfect recall of the material they learn. Their retention far exceeds that from watching a teacher lecturing from a chalkboard.

Jerry Michalski

Michalski teaches people to move from old-economy thought models of scarcity to relationship-economy thought models of abundance. Industrial age economics was defined by the efficient allocation of scare resources like coal, iron, wheat, and oil. But what happens when you enter an era in which the resources (e.g. knowledge, information, relationships, communication) are abundant and multiplicative, rather than scarce and consumable?

The underlying theme of scarcity is deeply embedded in how schools are run, but it doesn’t have to be that way. One possibile solution is the unschooling movement.

Unschooling is a range of educational philosophies and practices centered on allowing children to learn through their natural life experiences, including play, game play, household responsibilities, work experience, and social interaction, rather than through a more traditional school curriculum.

This presentation also points to more books and thinkers dealing with the problems of education.

And, credit where credit is due, it was Jerry who first recommended I read Gatto’s Underground History of American Education.

Why it worked: A timely question boosted by some luck on StumbleUpon. During the Occupy Wall Street movement, which is approaching its one-year anniversary this September, the We Are 99% Tumblr blew up and everyone, including me, was wondering “Who exactly is in the 1%?”

The best thing to measure would be the sizes of their piles of money (accumulated wealth) rather than the amounts flowing into those piles annually, but that data is not available with much accuracy. The flows (household income) would have to substitute. Ironically, it’s one of the most simple graphics I’ve made that got the most traffic, with help from 24k views on StumbleUpon.

23,900 views – How Much Does it Cost to Travel for a Year?

Why it worked: Work is drudgery for many, we dream about exotic escapes. This graphic taps into the desire for something that seems out of reach — an extended vacation to faraway places — and shows that it’s more feasible to do than it first seemed. 800 likes on Facebook is pretty good, a sign that the content is valuable enough to share with your friends.

 

22,700 views – Bring Food Education Back (Jamie Oliver)

Why it worked: A good social media team for a good cause. Jamie Oliver and his staff have strong presence across the major social media, bringing solid attention to this campaign to make people healthier by promoting whole foods. 3,000 Tweets and 240 Pins? Holy sassafras!

 

19,500 views – The Open Data Movement (GOOD Magazine)

Why it worked: Visual.ly promotion. This was published shortly after the Visual.ly launch and was featured on their homepage. That, combined with the quality of the content and appealing color palette, I suspect, was enough to make it stick. The 19.5k view count doesn’t include traffic on GOOD’s website or readership of the graphic when it appeared in their printed “Data Issue.”

 

11,700 views – NBA Championship Team Age Analysis

Why it worked: Visual.ly promotion and novelty of analysis. Also fueled by the launch of Visual.ly last summer, this was something unique in the market of sports analysis. There are loads of text-heavy blogs and databases featuring analysis of sports statistics, but I didn’t see evidence of anyone else asking this particular question (Are championships correlated with player age?), and certainly no one had ever visualized anything like this.

 

Honorable Mention: 6,300 views – Debunking the 50% Divorce Rate

Why it (sort of) worked: Personally relevant, emotionally charged topic. Marriage, divorce, sex, and relationships are big concerns for nearly everyone, and yet there is very little in the way of good content and understanding around these issues. In the case of divorce, shallow and unverified statistics are thrown around by “the media” and yield no insight into the fascinating complexity of social trends in marriage and family structure over the decades. This was great material for Pinterest (it did get some pins that aren’t shown below).

I must give huge credit to Visual.ly for creating the first community around infographics and visualization — without their platform and promotion, I wouldn’t have had as large an audience to launch these graphics and see how they fared.