One Person Schoolhouse
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Martin Luther posted a list of grievances on the church door. He didn’t want the church to go away; he simply wanted some reforms.
Listing grievances against the existing school system framework is a call for reform.
The current educational system served the United States well for the past century. But an institution such as the current American educational system dominates all others only so long as it produces favorable results for a majority of people at a reasonable cost. The American people changed and technology advanced, and the existing educational system no longer produces favorable results for a majority of people at a reasonable cost. We are at the end of an era in American education.
Radical personalization of education characterizes the One Person Schoolhouse era now replacing the century-old era of assembly-line education. You choose your educational destination, you choose the path you’ll take to get there, you choose your mode of transportation, and you travel at the speed that suits you.
The American people are moving toward radical personalization of education, but still exist in an educational system modeled after a manufacturing assembly line. From this conflict between the people’s expectations and an outdated educational system comes this list of grievances.
Grievance: The cost-effective mass production by the educational system of near-identical graduates leaves little room for your individual interests and passions.
The value of an assembly line comes from its ability to minimize manufacturing costs by constructing similar products in large volumes. Every product that rolls off an assembly line is fundamentally the same, even if features vary somewhat. The current educational system acts as an assembly line, rolling out young adults with nearly identical educations for the least per unit cost.
The school saves money and expedites your education by instructing people in groups. Most teachers admirably attempt to make the content in their classes interesting to the students. But capturing and holding the attention of 30 students is nearly impossible. And the teacher has a schedule to maintain if she wants to meet the objectives of the class.
The school system simply cannot teach every person in a group using a different area of interest (space, animals, etc.) as a platform and still maintain the cost efficiencies of a 30-person classroom.
So, you get one teacher using one interest as a platform, and you learn according to that one interest. Maybe you share that interest, maybe you don’t.
Grievance: Even in a class of only two students, at least half the class is either bored or struggling.
When you go to the movie theater, the movie continues through every one of your trips to the bathroom or concession stand. You are watching the movie at the same pace as every other person in that theater.
This is classroom education today.
Imagine going to the movie theater to watch a movie and the ticket agent gives every person attending a remote fob they can use to pause the movie while they step out. Every time a person stands up, the movie pauses. And everybody waits.
This is why individualism in classroom education today is not a workable model.
When you watch a movie at home alone, you inconvenience nobody when you pause the movie to go to the bathroom or pop the popcorn. You can even rewind the movie to catch that important line you missed in the conversation or fast forward through the boring scenes. You can watch it a second time to catch those clues you missed the first time through. You control the movie.
This is the power of learning at your own pace.
Classroom education is not so different from attending a movie in a movie theater.
An instructor of a class of two students can only satisfy at most one person. That one person is either the instructor or one student.
The instructor sets the pace. The instructor has two options. The instructor can set the pace to match her comfort zone or agenda. Or, the instructor can set the pace to maximize the progression of one student.
To minimize the educational gap between the students, the instructor must toggle attention between them. One naturally lags behind the other, since neither will grasp every concept at exactly the same time. You cannot pull two people up a cliff at the same time with one rope.
So, if the instructor sets a pace best suited for the instructor, then you get one of four outcomes.
For how long can two unique people progress at their optimal pace in the same class? Not long enough. Scratch this outcome.
If the instructor favors one student, the other student is either bored or struggling. This is true even if the instructor toggles her attention between the students to minimize the gap between them.
That’s in a class of two students. Most classes are twenty to thirty people in size. But the same rule applies. The instructor can set the pace to her convenience or to the skill level of a single student. That single student might be a virtual student created to represent the average learning speed of all students in the class.
If one student excels in the course and another takes substantially longer to grasp the concepts, the first student becomes bored and the second student becomes frustrated. But the class lasts the same length for both the bored and struggling student. The school is not going to move the one student to a higher level midway through a semester and extend the semester for the other. Both students are on the same conveyor belt, and the belt runs the same speed for both until the predefined end point.
The school controls your schedule like the movie theater controls the time of the movie. Each course has a set start date and a set end date. Every class session has a set start time and a set end time. You receive a grade at the scheduled end of the course. The pace of the class is often completely out of your control. You are bored or struggling, and sometimes you alternate between those feelings through the semester. Either way, you are not progressing at a pace optimal to you. And neither is just about every other student in your class.
Schools waste your time by forcing you to sit through instructions on a subject you understand.
Schools rob you of an education when the semester ends before you grasp the concepts of the course.
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Grievance: The educational system assembly line is a manufacturing process without quality control, resulting in some products (students) never finishing school and others exiting the assembly line incomplete (without an education).
An assembly line without quality control results in an unacceptably high defect rate. A high defect rate in an educational system manifests itself as a high drop-out rate. Another indicator of a defective educational system is an inability of graduates to read or write even close to their grade level.
In the current educational system, the assembly line never stops running. Under-performing students present the school system with a problem. The school system cannot provide individualized service to every under-performing student. That destroys the cost savings of the assembly line! The school system either moves the student to a slower conveyor belt on the assembly line, a belt that moves at a speed more compatible with the student’s abilities, or the school graduates the student to the next level without the skills necessary to succeed at that level. That is how young adults graduate high school unable to read and write.
Some students simply leave school altogether. They leave with nothing to show for their efforts to that point. The longer the student stays away from school, the harder it is to return. Schools are designed for classes of students in a narrow age range, especially in secondary school grades, but less so in universities.
Continuity is built into the system, and a break in continuity results in the school system resisting having a student return, to pick up where they left off. Would a high school allow a 32-year-old to take classes with teenagers? We hear of the occasional grandparent returning to high school to earn a diploma, but this is the exception.
Three problems with this system present themselves. First, school systems allow students to continue along the assembly line conveyor belt to levels beyond their proven abilities. Second, schools are incapable of offering individual attention on a grand scale. Third, dropping out of school quickly becomes a permanent choice.
Grievance: The educational system carries each student along a conveyor belt as their education is assembled, leaving few opportunities for any student to take ownership of their own learning.
The young person carried along the educational assembly line can traverse the entire twelve years of school without ever taking ownership of their own education. Education becomes something being done to you. You don’t appreciate it, and possibly come to resent it.
Personal ownership of one’s own education is a life skill all students should learn. The school system won’t be there to guide the student through their educational career the rest of the student’s life.
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Grievance: Learning is a lifetime activity, but the current educational system erects artificial stopping points along the way.
The current educational system conditions people to see a beginning and an end to their educational career. You get your high school diploma and you walk away from education, because you met your minimum requirements as defined by society. Some people get a 4 year degree from a university. Fewer still continue their school work, earning higher-level degrees.
In the past era, when technology evolved at a slower pace, people tended to remain in the same career all their lives, and possibly even at the same employer that entire time. The structured educational system with a beginning and an end made sense. But technology today changes at an unimaginable pace, and people might switch careers several times and employers a dozen times. Spending four years studying to get a degree for one career makes little sense.
People today need to see their education as a life-time commitment, having a beginning but no end. Their jobs will change as technology brings new efficiencies and opportunities.
You stagnate in your career when you see your education having an end-point.
The current educational system gives people the impression that education is primarily for the young. The artificial completion dates of high school and college give people the impression of being “done” following graduation.
Grievance: Far too many people never recoup the costs of their university degree, meaning a four-year degree was a poor investment for them.
The number of degrees offering a negative yield is surprisingly high. Universities sell a product, a degree, based upon the promise the cost and effort will yield a return in investment in the form of a well-paying career. But many careers offer low pay despite having a degree. A teacher is of course one of the first careers that comes to mind.
People forget to calculate the opportunity cost of spending four years to earn a degree. Those four years could have been spent earning money. You could have lived where you really want to live for those four years instead of in a dorm room in a city you’ll rarely visit again.
The cost of a university degree can trap you in the system. If you drop out without completing the degree you leave possibly deep in debt and without credit for the education you completed. You feel obligated to finish what you’ve started, even if it no longer fits your objectives.
For many individuals, their university education leaves them in debt for a lifetime. They discover too late their chosen profession pays too little to cover living expenses plus student loan debt.
The rise in the cost of education has continued to outpace the rise in the incomes of those who obtain that education. Eventually, the cost comes down or the people stop buying the education.
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Grievance: The grade you earn at the completion of a class is a poor representation of the knowledge you acquired in that class.
You associate grades with knowledge. You assume the student with “straight A’s” is smarter (or at least more knowledgeable) than the student with all C’s. But are grades a realistic representation of a successful educational experience?
What is the purpose of school? To educate the student. Should a student get an A for a course if the student can demonstrate mastery of all the material, then skips all classes for the second half of the semester? If you responded that the student should fail the class then what, exactly, is being graded? Certainly not the knowledge of the student, as the student has attained an understanding of the material.
Many factors influence the grades of a student. Few of them directly relate to the knowledge of the student.
Doing extra work raises the student’s grade. Does the extra work demonstrate an increase in knowledge or just an extra effort? Is effort the objective?
It seems the grade is based upon the time expended just as much as the knowledge gained.
When a student does a presentation, is the grade based upon the content or the presentation? Unless the course is on the finer points of presenting content, how much should presentation influence the grade?
Presentations increase stress in people who prefer to remain hidden in the crowd. This stress can translate into a dislike for a class the student might have otherwise enjoyed if given the opportunity to learn in ways more compatible with the student’s personality.
Effort and participation count toward the grade in some classes. Does demonstrating interest in the subject to the instructor increase knowledge or understanding? If the content bores the student because the student already knows the material, then effort is low, which negatively affects the grade.
Some people simply dislike participation learning. They are happy reading a book to learn the material. Their reluctance to participate due to their discomfort unreasonably affects their grade.
Attendance often affects a grade in a class. Why? If a student can skip every class and still pass the final exam without fault, should the student not get an A for the semester?
If a student skips every class and still aces every test, but earns a lower grade due to lack of attendance, then the grade system clearly rates students on factors other than understanding of the course material. If a student can earn a high grade in a course based upon anything other than mastery of the course content, then of what value is the grade system for the employer seeking the “smartest” graduates?
A student’s ability to fill a role on a team and advance the agenda of the team in an Agile/Scrum course should certainly weigh heavily on the final grade. Should teamwork be a factor in the final grade in a math course? Did learning how to work well with others increase the student’s understanding of arithmetic, or just exploit an innate talent for being a people person?
Working in a team is a technique some people can use to learn the subject material but is not the objective of most courses.
Turning in correct answers on homework affects the grade in most classes. The instructor assigns the same set of problems to all students and reduces the grade on the paper with each incorrect answer. Homework provides good feedback to the teacher as to the level of understanding of each student.
However, if the student knows the material inside and out, doing homework on that material becomes a boring waste of the student’s time. The student comes to resent the push to do unnecessary work.
How does the instructor gauge the understanding of the class without work such as homework (or in-class work)? Let’s flip the question. If the entire class lacked understanding of the material, but the teacher is obligated to cover a predefined set of topics, does it really matter if the homework shows a lack of understanding? Will the teacher slow the pace to the point students come to a complete understanding at the risk of not completing all the required chapters in the text book?
Homework provides the student the means to gauge readiness for the next exam, provided the exam reflects the assigned homework. For this reason, homework has merit. But should homework affect the final grade? The student is learning the material by doing the homework. It’s practice and discovery. Is homework a tool for learning or an objective to achieve?
The teacher’s opinion of the student potentially weighs heavily on a grade. The instructor can make the time spent in class go smoothly for the student or can apply friction to the efforts of the student. An instructor can motivate a student to achieve more than the student thought possible by being tough on the student. Or destroy the student’s self-confidence.
If the instructor goes rough on the student, and the student earns a C in the class, but the student learns more than the student would have otherwise, the grade does not reflect the final outcome of the student’s knowledge. What if the student might have made an A in the class without the teacher pushing, but learned less?
A teacher who resents academic superstars can take them down a notch with an undeserved B instead of the earned A.
If a student clearly holds a political view opposite that of the instructor, the instructor may feel tempted to punish the student through the grading system. Many college students rely on high grades to maintain scholarships, and an activist professor can ruin an entire educational career and limit future employment opportunities.
Your educational opportunities should be such that you learn in the most favorable conditions possible as often as possible. Being locked into a class with your grade dependent on one instructor interferes with your education.
When the entire class performs poorly on a test, sometimes the instructor changes the scale to allow a certain percentage of students in the class to appear to have done well.
Maybe the instructor provided an incomprehensible examination and expresses remorse by elevating all grades across the board. Or perhaps nobody in the class understands the material, and the test results are accurate, but nobody wants to deal with this reality.
Artificially raising grades to avoid dealing with poorly designed examinations or, worse, a poor understanding of the material, shows grades, not understanding, are the objective of the class.
Should quizzes affect the final grade for a course for the student? A quiz is more a tool for the teacher to determine the understanding of the class midway through a course and by applying the outcome of the quiz to the final grade the instructor motivates the student to try hard to pass the quiz. But the student may be having difficulties understanding the material at the time of the quiz. If the student realizes a full understanding of the material between the time of the quiz and the final exam, should the grade for the quiz be counted? The course instructor achieved the goal of educating the student by the end of the semester, but the student gets a poor grade because that understanding came so late in the term.
Is it not fair to state that the final exam should be the only grade for the entire class experience? The time spent in class involved learning the material, and the final examination for the class assesses the ability of the student to demonstrate understanding of the subject matter. A student who fails the final examination cannot demonstrate understanding and should continue with the lessons provided as part of the class.
A final exam that counts for a percentage of the overall course grade discounts the value of the student’s knowledge at the end of the course. By not counting the final grade as the one determinant of the outcome of the course, the grade becomes a mixture of learning, effort, and knowledge.
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Grievance: Dropping out of school is an educational death sentence for far too many people.
What happens to the student who falls behind? Does this person attend classes with younger students in lower grades? Or will the school provide personalized tutoring to bring the student back to par with his or her age group?
It would seem the student left behind would be at higher risk of simply dropping out, having abandoned hope of finishing according to society’s expectations. A high school dropout can take the GED exam as an alternative to the diploma.
The assembly line model for education fails the student who cannot maintain the pace. Whether the student needs an extra week or two tacked onto each semester to come to a full understanding of the course material or takes a hiatus from school for personal or medical reasons, the system simply breaks down for that student.
Grievance: School assignments provide the student artificial stopping points for learning.
A curious child will spend hours researching a topic of interest. A wise instructor can inject lessons from different subjects into the time spent learning about that one topic of interest. But in school today, assigned work, once completed, signals the end of effort in that subject until more work is assigned. In effect, assigned work marks the most work the student does before stopping.
A school cannot provide each student with the individual attention necessary to integrate a variety of lessons into a package related to each student’s interests. Assignments come with fixed terminal points, and the student ceases work in that subject as soon as the assignment is complete. Learning is a chore to be finished, not an experience to be enjoyed.
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Grievance: In the interest of maximizing efficiency, all students in each class must sit quietly as they absorb knowledge from the instructor’s lecture, but many people cannot sit still that long and others have more efficient forms of learning they could be doing instead.
The classroom-based paradigm for education requires prolonged focus on the part of each student. While having a long attention span is commendable, should a student sacrifice a more efficient learning path to earn that discipline? What is the more important objective?
If a student needs to walk a lap around the building to burn energy after twenty minutes of study, and absorbs more subject matter doing this routine than sitting still through a ninety minute lecture, the educational system should accommodate this process. The objective of the educational system is to maximize learning.
Grievance: Summer vacation results in a significant setback in education every year for reasons no longer relevant to most students.
Closing schools for the summer serves no purpose for most students today. Few students need the summer to raise and harvest crops. Summer vacation is more a tradition now than a necessity.
The months spent away from learning result in weeks of refresher work eating into the schedule of the next school year.
Continuous education, with adequate breaks, keeps the material fresh in the minds of students.
Grievance: The school system insists on holding class from 8 AM to 4 PM weekdays, even if the student could learn more in less time by holding classes at different times on different days.
You attend school when the school says you attend school. Why? Because the school system is not going to keep its doors open 24 hours a day to accommodate the preferred schedule of every student.
A set school schedule reduces costs for the school. The buses run on a set schedule. The building is open during set hours.
You comply with the schedule or be truant.
As society makes more and more conveniences available twenty-four hours a day, the fixed schedule of schools appears increasingly archaic.
Teens seem to prefer staying up late and sleeping in until noon. If maximizing the potential education of students is your goal, schooling should take place at the time most students are ready to learn. Tired teens in class at 8 AM? If the youths of America were the priority, high schools would open at 2 PM.
What if the student has outside obligations on Tuesday and Wednesday? Could the school educate the student five days a week with those days off?
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Grievance: Schools teach as if the Internet does not exist.
In 1920, when you walked down the street and heard a familiar quote, you drew from memory the person who spoke it. Today, you whip out your smart phone and look it up on a search engine.
In 1920, to help you recall the name of the author of the quote, you ultimately went to the library for a reference book of quotations. Having a good memory full of facts saved you time and resources. Memorization had value. For better or worse, memorization today has less value. Search engine skills are far more valuable in the marketplace, as you can get a wealth of information to assist you in your job. There’s just too much to remember.
Schools force you to memorize dates and facts, just like in 1920. It’s OK, you just have to know it for the test, and you can forget it again. Comprehension is far more valuable than specific dates. If you comprehend the fundamental reasons for the American Revolution, along with the major actors and their specific roles, does it matter if you botch the answer when asked for the date General Washington crossed the Delaware River? You can look up a date but comprehension is a far superior possession.
In a few short years, people will implant small computers in their heads that will allow for direct access to information from the Internet. It’s inevitable, because to have that implant provides the wearer with an edge in business. Information is power. What purpose does memorization serve in this instance?
Schools of the receding era are built upon memorization as a fundamental metric of learning. Can they function in a world with other priorities?
Grievance: Schools have become an ideological battleground in the United States.
How much of the instructor’s ideology belongs in the classroom? The people of America are going to have to answer that question.
Having a teacher inject an ideology into a lesson is preferred by some. Parents send their children to private, religious schools hoping their children absorb the ideology of the teachers.
Many parents have no choice in the school their children attend. They didn’t sign them up for an indoctrination; they simply want their kids educated to improve their chances of success in life. Do parents choose how their children are educated, or do their parental rights end at the schoolhouse door?
This question and others regarding how much influence educators should have over the decisions of their students must be decided by the American people.
In the American school system today, parents and teachers are at odds, grades make a poor representation of knowledge, and school systems force everybody into a common schedule and location for the sake of efficiency. Different cultures, expectations, languages, and ideologies keep the American people from agreeing on something as basic as what a school should do.
The American people are past the point where a common educational experience benefits them. The technology exists for every student to be in a school of one. The One Person Schoolhouse. Our paths will cross as we further our education, but no longer will we sit passively on a conveyor belt as the assembly line moves us through the educational manufacturing plant.
Copyright © 2022 Ken Judkins
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