Why do we still educate our kids like we did in the 50’s?

I verified the date on my computer this morning, it is indeed the year 2011. As I drove to work this week, the roadways were festooned with children standing at the end of their driveway waiting for the school bus to pick them up and whisk them away to school for the day. This is as much a part of the warp and woof of American life as the crop cycle and the sports seasons from the opening day of baseball to the Super Bowl. There is very little fundamentally different from the way kids are educated today compared to when I was school age or even my parents. Therein lies the problem. The America of 2011 is a vastly different place than the America of 1961, technologically and culturally.

The basic process of educating kids is hardly different from half a century ago in America. At the same age, kids start school getting onto buses that take them to the same or very similar school buildings that are structured the same way they were decades ago. The buildings look the same: an office, water fountains, a gym, hallways full of lockers interspersed by classrooms full of desks facing the front. The classes are organized the same way. All children of the same basic age from the same basic geographic area are put into the same class and taught the same subjects the same way. Kids that are not up to “grade level” are held back. Kids that are way ahead of grade level are either bored to tears or pushed ahead a grade. Most kids just trudge along in lowest common denominator classes so rather than being challenged they are being spoon fed. The result? Failure.

As the world changes, our educational system tinkers around the edges and yet we wonder why we are rapidly “falling behind”. The rest of the world is catching up and passing America by and our response is “more of the same!”, i.e. more money.

There are almost 2000 public schools in Indiana, all of them doing the same basic thing the same basic way. Sure the methods are modified but the essential model is the same. Classrooms full of children grouped together based on their age and where their home is. Those 2000 schools are full of teachers all recreating the wheel in school after school. Thousands of teachers teaching American history. Thousands of teachers teaching math, English, science, etc. Some very good teachers and some really bad teachers and for students it is all luck of the draw or based on the size of their parents mortgage so that they can attend “the best” schools. Meanwhile other kids in lower income school districts have to make due. The solution proposed by the educational bureaucracy and teachers unions is always more money. More staff, more spending, more classrooms, more union employees putting money into the coffers of the education unions and paying tuition into university education programs. Left out of the equation are parents and students, the very people funding this giant Ponzi scheme and the very people being shortchanged by it. To compound matters, many young people want to help kids get an education but the one and only road to doing that boils down to getting an education degree with some sort of specialization, doing your student teaching and then being stuffed into the same system that has turned countless bright eyed and eager young teachers into disgruntled and discouraged school employees. Not every teacher of course but the grind of trying to teach kids in the 21st century by mid-20th century methods is enough to wear even the best of us down.

I am not suggesting I have the right answers. After all I have no skin in this game because we have intentionally elected to live in a state with some of the most favorable homeschooling laws in the country. That doesn’t mean that this conversation doesn’t need to happen. In a nation drowning in computers, tablets, iPads, smart phones, Kindles, etc. how is it that we still stick millions of kids on busses to repeat the same process that has been used and increasingly has been shown to be failing for decades? How can an education system designed for an agrarian society where typewriters were the high tech invention of the day produce results in a day and age when technology is exploding? Simply adding computers to the classroom setting is like putting a GPS on a horse and buggy. It is high time that we completely revamp the entire education system. Video conferencing? Charter schools? I don't know all of the answers but I know that we were are doing is hugely expensive and not working.

Insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. What do you call it when you do the same thing over and over for half a century and expect different results?