The Unaddressed Problem Marion Brady Race To The Top: Note: Frame animation is complete when the blue arrow appears. Left-click the mouse (point anywhere) to advance to the next frame.

2 "For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, clean, and wrong." --H. L. Mencken National standards for education are certain to have unintended consequences. This presentation is intended to encourage discussion of one of those consequences.

3 members of Congress, members of Congress, state governors, state governors, the conservative Business Roundtable, the conservative Business Roundtable, the liberal Center for American Progress, the liberal Center for American Progress, most of the general public— most of the general public— —thinks there should be national standards and tests for math, history, science, and other school subjects. Almost everyone—

4 About the only people opposed to subject-matter standards and tests are experienced educators.

5 Suffering from “the soft bigotry of low expectations”? Resisting being held accountable? Locked into union agendas? Afraid of change? Why are experienced educators opposed to national standards? Are they:

6 Educators (at least the thoughtful ones) don’t oppose standards. They oppose poor standards. Neither do they oppose tests. They oppose poor tests. No, no, no, and no.

7 And thoughtful educators know that standards keyed to school subjects, and standardized tests keyed to those standards, are inherently poor.

8 The subjects that make up what’s usually called “the core curriculum” were adopted in It’s not unreasonable to ask if a 19th Century curriculum is equal to 21st Century challenges.

9 What, exactly, is the job the curriculum is supposed to DO?

10 It’s supposed to help learners make more sense – more sense of life, of themselves, each other, the world.

11 It’s the quality of their sense making that determines how successful learners are likely to be in building life, liberty, and happiness.

12 Is the curriculum doing a good job of improving the young’s sense-making ability?

13 You decide. Try a reality check. Ask yourself how well the core curriculum prepared you to make sense of, say, buying a pair of socks.

14 We want a pair of socks. Those available have been knitted in a third world country.

15 Power to run the knitting machines is supplied by burning fossil fuels.

16 Burning fossil fuels contributes to global warming.

17 Global warming alters weather patterns.

18 Altered weather patterns trigger environmental catastrophes.

19 Environmental catastrophes destroy infrastructure.

20 Money spent for infrastructure replacement isn’t available for health care.

21 Declines in the quality of health care affect mortality rates.

22 Mortality is a matter of life and death.

23 Buying socks, then, is a matter of life and death.

24 Buying a pair of socks is simple. Ordinary. Routine. But making sense of it (which is what education is supposed to help us do) turns out to require, at the very least, some understanding of marketing, physics, chemistry, meteorology, economics, engineering, psychology, sociology, political science, anthropology…

25 and …and it requires an understanding of the relationships between these fields of knowledge.

26 Making sense of experience requires the seamless weaving together of knowledge. Much present schooling doesn’t do that. It: (a) fails to link together what’s taught (or links it superficially), and (b) ignores a lot of real-world knowledge that sense-making requires.

27 “The division into subjects and periods encourages a segmented rather than an integrated view of knowledge. Consequently, what students are asked to relate to in schooling becomes increasingly artificial, cut off from the human experiences subject matter is supposed to reflect.” John Goodlad, A Place Called School, McGraw-Hill, 1984, p.266

28 “From a very early age, we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the world. This apparently makes complex tasks and subjects more manageable, but we pay a hidden, enormous price. We can no longer see the consequences of our actions; we lose our intrinsic sense of connection to a larger whole.” Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline, Currency Doubleday 1990, p.3

29 “We do not believe that the road to a coherent education can be constructed from a set of required subjects or academic disciplines.” Project On Redefining the Meaning and Purpose of Baccalaureate Degrees, 1985 Think “jigsaw puzzle.” It’s the whole—the picture on the lid of the box—that makes sense of the individual pieces.

30 The 1893 curriculum… …fails to help learners grasp the holistic, systemically integrated nature of knowledge. (As might be expected from a curriculum designed in another era, it suffers from a laundry list of other problems.)

31 Here’s the good news: Problems with the fragmented nature of the 1893 curriculum can be solved. The curricular potential of World War II-developed systems theory hasn’t begun to be explored. Neither have recent insights into how the brain organizes knowledge.* *See end of presentation.

32 Here’s the bad news: Failure to help learners understand the integrated, mutually supportive nature of school subjects is only one of many, many problems with the traditional curriculum.

33 This is why thoughtful, experienced educators oppose subject-matter- based national standards. Standards that freeze in place a curriculum—even a very good one (which the present one is not)—make significant innovation impossible.

34 To encourage dialog, this presentation is offered free of charge, and may be used, duplicated and distributed in its original form without permission of the authors. Excerpts must follow fair use rules, with proper credits. *An example of a curriculum free of the problems summarized earlier can be accessed at: It’s available without cost. Copyright © 2009 by Marion Brady and Howard Brady. Marion Brady 4285 North Indian River Drive Cocoa, Florida