1
School Should Mirror the World as We Believe It Could Be
This book is borne of a spirit of hope that we can build healthier, more relevant, more caring schools that, in turn and in time, will help to build a healthier world.
According to Wolfram Alpha, there are fifty-nine million Kâ12 students in the United States.1 That's fifty-nine million families' dreams, fifty-nine million young people whose lives are still loaded with potential, fifty-nine million young people whose stories have yet to be written, fifty-nine million students who deserve to be encouraged to believe, âYou can,â before having someone tell them, âYou can't.â For that matter, the over three million teachers2 all over this country also deserve someone to tell them âYou can,â before having someone tell them, âYou can't.â
And yet, so much of what happens in school happens because we believe that we must prepare children for the world as it used to exist. Never mind that we have no idea what the world will look like for kids in kindergarten right nowâand we might not even know what it will look like for the kids in ninth gradeâwe continue to replicate the factory-age structures and compliance-based codes of conduct that have governed school for decades because it âfeels like schoolâ to parents and politicians and school administrators all over the world.
Worse, in the twenty-first century the massive technological changes that have vastly changed our society have had little effect on our schools; in too many places, the technology is merely being used as the next, best filmstrip, or worse, a better way to quiz and test our students, rather than as a way to open up our classroom windows and doors so that students can learn what they need to, create what they want, and expand the reach of their ideas to almost limitless bounds.
In 1518, Martin Luther nailed ninety-five theses to the door of the church. He envisioned a world where the church did not act as a go-betweenâand in his mind, a barrierâbetween God and man. We need to understand now that school does not need to be a go-betweenâand, too often, it is a barrierâbetween students and learning. We can remake school so that students can feel more directly empowered to learn deeply alongside teachers who share a vision of the sense of joy that learning can unlock.
For our ninety-five theses, we ask you to suspend your disbelief that schools can be better than they are now. In fact, we ask you to suspend your disbelief that the world can be a better place. Each thesis in the text could lead to more questions, deeper discussion, more research, and, we hope, positive action. It is our hope that, individually, each thesis could help students and parents and educators to examine specific practices in their schools as they exist, and taken collectively, they can help communities create a new vision of school, built on the best of what has come before us, steeped in the traditions of progressive educators of the past hundred years, but with an eye toward a future we cannot fully imagine.
From Theory to Practice
- To prime your thinking as you move through the text, pause and take a moment to describe what you think school should be doing, what its role is in a modern world, and what success looks like. Let this thinking be a signpost as you explore this book.
- Start a conversation. As important as it is to think deeply about your own vision of what school can and should be, this book is designed as a conversation starter as well. As a thesis strikes you as relevant to your own place of learning and teaching, consider how you might use it to begin a larger conversation. Could you get time in a faculty meeting or a Parent-Teacher Association meeting, use it to inspire discussion as you have coffee with a colleague, or track key quotations and share them with a Listserv? Be on the lookout and be mindful. The more stories we share, the deeper our thinking will become.
2
We Must End Educational Colonialism
Science Leadership Academy (SLA) was started by a group of educators with the idea that it would be the kind of school we would want our own children (real or theoretical) to attend. Our belief in an inquiry-driven, project-based, technology-rich approach to learning was not just for âother people's children,â but for our own as well.
It is important to say this because there are a lot of powerful people right now who are advocating for a pedagogy in our publicly funded schools that they don't find good enough for their own children.3 Some of these powerful people are even running networks of schools that have a pedagogical approach that is directly counter to the educational approach of the institutions they pay for their own children to attend. Moreover, these same powerful people tend to get upset when asked about the disconnect, saying that that question is off limits.
We don't think it is.
We should ask why people of power advocate for one thing for their own children and something else for other people's children, especially when those other children come from a lower rung on the socioeconomic scale or when those children come from traditionally disenfranchised segments of our society. It is, in fact, a very dangerous thing not to question.
Because we've done this before in America and around the world. Whether it was the United States government forcing Native Americans into boarding schools, which decimated families and societies in the name of assimilation, or any of the many global examples of destruction as explorers claimed ânew worlds,â history is rife with examples of disenfranchisement through systematic cultural colonizationâeach ending tragically.
For us, when you ensure that your own child has an arts-enriched, small-classroom-sized, deeply humanistic education and you advocate that those families who have fewer economic resources than you have should have to sit straight in their chairs and do what they are told while doubling and tripling up on rote memorization and test prep, you are guilty of educational colonialism.
And it's time we start calling that what it is.
The ideas in this book represent our best thoughts on education for all children, not just some children. If we are to truly engage in modern pedagogical education reform, it must be a movement of the cities and the suburbs, of public and private and charter schools, and for children of all colors and classes. To do anything else is to ignore the elephant in the roomâthat we are rapidly moving further and further into a bifurcated system in this country where the education rich children get is vastly different from the education poor children get.
Weâall of usâmust be committed to ensuring that the income of a child's parents or the color of a child's skin does not prevent the child from engaging in a profoundly humanistic, deeply empowering modern education. And if we allow those in power to advocate for a brand of education for other people's children that they would never allow for their own children, we will only perpetuate the worst abuses of our history.
From Theory to Practice
- Start the conversation. The best way to allow educational colonialism to persist is to remain silent about its presence. The best way to fight it is to start conversations across classrooms, schools, and districts that share our practices, our learnings, and our resources. Seek out colleagues in online and physical spaces that may feel foreign to you, and begin a conversation about what learning and teaching can look like.
- Make the conversation come from a place of questioning. If the conversations in which we engage around education are nothing more than us making declarative statements about the way things should be and what others need, we're not setting ourselves up to learn. By asking people who hold different perspectives to share their understandings of needs and their ideas for what will best serve to meet those needs, you're opening up to new understandings.
3
Citizenship Is More Important Than the Workforce
There's a movement afoot that says school should prepare kids for the twenty-first century workforce. And on its surface, that seems like a good goal. Who could argue with that? Kids are going to need jobs when they graduate, especially in a time when economic stability seems precarious at best.
But focusing on workforce development sells our students short. It assumes that the most we can hope for our students is a life of work when there is so much more to learn. The purpose of public education is not the creation of the twenty-first-century workforce, but rather, the cocreationâin conjunction with our studentsâof twenty-first century citizens. âWorkerâ is, without question, a subset of âcitizenâ; and if we aim for âcitizen,â we'll get the workforce we need, but aiming only for creating workers won't get our society the ci...
