Rule Breakers
Let me preface this post by saying that I know absolutely nothing about the internal workings of public education. I'm not qualified to offer suggestions about how to make how it works better. But I take it on good authority (by that, I mean teachers working in public education) that the tried and true solutions in the business world can't just be applied to public education.
I think they're right. And I'll go them one further: the rules of the business world aren't good for business, either.
In a large business, the strategy tends to come from the top down. Without any real insight or skill, this "strategy" tends to take the form of rules. Don't do this, don't do that, and so on. The orders come from the top, and they are expected to be carried out by the minions of employees below. Sometimes they have to trickle down through several layers of management, which means that some organizations are functioning like a Pachinko machine. Let's call it the command-and-conquer strategy.
It's works for the military, but it doesn't work when you're dealing with people who are knowledge workers.
If you look at what makes an organization successful, I'd say it's the people working for it. And what makes a person happy and productive isn't necessarily just the salary they receive or the difference they're making the world, but it's largely driven by the autonomy that their job affords them.
A knowledgeable nurse who's given the leeway to apply her own knowledge is more likely to save a patient's life than one who is instructed to execute the doctor's orders. Programmers are more productive if they're given space to sprint instead of step-by-step instructions to follow. Instruction displaces intuition, but intuition is where brilliant things happen.
Here's the key insight: teachers are NOT interchangeable cogs. They are knowledge workers. And the current public education system is working very hard to micro-manage the hell out of them. They have to answer to their administration, and to the parents of the children their teaching, both of whom feel they know how best to educate children, but most of them are not teachers!
We've taken the mentality of the factory, and of an assembly line full of workers, and applied it to our school system.
Think of the scene in Pink Floyd's The Wall where the students, their faces already indistinguishable from one another, are being marched into a meat grinder. This is happening today, but we're not doing it to our students...we're doing it to our teachers. And this mentality is, directly, adversely affecting the education kids get.
One thing comes from the business section that is relevant to this discussion: often, people are encouraged to ignore their managers and do what they think is best. It's that old chestnut about it being better to ask for forgiveness later than permission now, so to speak. I enjoy watching people who are affecting public education break the rules. The best example I can dredge up is Jamie Oliver, who, while he's working outside of education, is really pissing a lot of people off by questioning and breaking rules.
I really think that change in education is not going to come from the top, when the rulemakers finally recognize that things are broken. When we look at the revolutions that have happened in any industry, they don't come from the people in charge but from people at the bottom who decided to stir up trouble. Borders should have created Amazon, but they didn't...Jeff Bezos did.
If all of this sounds like I don't know what I'm talking about, you're probably right. Let me turn the mic over to Sir Ken Robinson. He's a brilliant man who has great ideas about education, and he's on a mission to persuade people that our current system doesn't need fixing...it needs replacing. And he's dangerous, because his ideas are lucid and sensible enough to stick with you for a long time. They just might change you.
Watch it here. If you like it, there's several other Ken talks online. I recommend you watch all of them.
I think they're right. And I'll go them one further: the rules of the business world aren't good for business, either.
In a large business, the strategy tends to come from the top down. Without any real insight or skill, this "strategy" tends to take the form of rules. Don't do this, don't do that, and so on. The orders come from the top, and they are expected to be carried out by the minions of employees below. Sometimes they have to trickle down through several layers of management, which means that some organizations are functioning like a Pachinko machine. Let's call it the command-and-conquer strategy.
It's works for the military, but it doesn't work when you're dealing with people who are knowledge workers.
If you look at what makes an organization successful, I'd say it's the people working for it. And what makes a person happy and productive isn't necessarily just the salary they receive or the difference they're making the world, but it's largely driven by the autonomy that their job affords them.
A knowledgeable nurse who's given the leeway to apply her own knowledge is more likely to save a patient's life than one who is instructed to execute the doctor's orders. Programmers are more productive if they're given space to sprint instead of step-by-step instructions to follow. Instruction displaces intuition, but intuition is where brilliant things happen.
Here's the key insight: teachers are NOT interchangeable cogs. They are knowledge workers. And the current public education system is working very hard to micro-manage the hell out of them. They have to answer to their administration, and to the parents of the children their teaching, both of whom feel they know how best to educate children, but most of them are not teachers!
We've taken the mentality of the factory, and of an assembly line full of workers, and applied it to our school system.
Think of the scene in Pink Floyd's The Wall where the students, their faces already indistinguishable from one another, are being marched into a meat grinder. This is happening today, but we're not doing it to our students...we're doing it to our teachers. And this mentality is, directly, adversely affecting the education kids get.
One thing comes from the business section that is relevant to this discussion: often, people are encouraged to ignore their managers and do what they think is best. It's that old chestnut about it being better to ask for forgiveness later than permission now, so to speak. I enjoy watching people who are affecting public education break the rules. The best example I can dredge up is Jamie Oliver, who, while he's working outside of education, is really pissing a lot of people off by questioning and breaking rules.
I really think that change in education is not going to come from the top, when the rulemakers finally recognize that things are broken. When we look at the revolutions that have happened in any industry, they don't come from the people in charge but from people at the bottom who decided to stir up trouble. Borders should have created Amazon, but they didn't...Jeff Bezos did.
If all of this sounds like I don't know what I'm talking about, you're probably right. Let me turn the mic over to Sir Ken Robinson. He's a brilliant man who has great ideas about education, and he's on a mission to persuade people that our current system doesn't need fixing...it needs replacing. And he's dangerous, because his ideas are lucid and sensible enough to stick with you for a long time. They just might change you.
Watch it here. If you like it, there's several other Ken talks online. I recommend you watch all of them.