As a lecturer and, well, I hate to say it, de facto educator, I run into a lot of people who run various conferences and other educational events, and a fairly hot topic these days is different styles of “learning.”
Just one discussion today had to do with the difference between Gen X and Gen Y (I was slightly put off that no mention was made of baby boomers, but, I digress…)
The gist of the discussion was the difference between people who were more comfortable in a teacher/classroom setting as opposed to all these digital natives who just want to tweet during English class. I felt a big piece of the pie had been left out of the discussion.
To illustrate, well, I went to a music school, and in music school, one takes classes, but one also has a private instructor for your entire time there. I ran into a high school classmate while I was attending said school, and when they asked me how I liked it, I said, “I really like my teacher.”
They looked at me with rather wide eyes: “your TEACHER??” The idea of having one single teacher was totally unfamiliar to someone who was probably sitting in classrooms with hundreds of students, where there was no long-term commitment or relationship to any one instructor.
If you go back in time before the Industrial Revolution spawned our current educational system, it’s not like nobody ever learned anything. But it was much more of a one-on-one situation. Rich kids had tutors, i.e., one person who taught them basic stuff of reading, writing, mathematics, and “the classics.” It was fairly common, in the days before stratified and highly specialized and compartmentalized academic departments and tracks of study, that one person would teach one kid music, law, history, and architecture. Thomas Jefferson is a good example of this kind of approach.
For less rich kids, one would take on an apprenticeship and again, your technical/professional training would be given to you by one person over a fairly long period of time. Of course, since you spend so much in-depth time with that one person, you learn not just the technical element, but all sorts of social skills as well.
The whole concept of every kid in the world attending classes in a centralized school is a fairly recent idea. It was all based on factory management models, where instead of one person teaching one kid every subject, it was so much faster to teach one person how to teach 30 kids just one subject over and over all day.
The system fit well into a factory based economy, but as Marshall McLuhan predicted, we are falling into much less of a linear mechanical society and much more of a nonlinear global village, where personal interaction is a re-acquiring its proper status.
The advantages of the older system are hopefully obvious. Having one powerful bonded relationship with an instructor addresses all sorts of emotional issues that kids in an emotionally detached environment often suffer from. It’s very hard to fool around in class when there’s only one student per teacher. And there’s never a question of a kid being held back by some other kid who’s causing a disturbance. I think I could make a good argument that most of the problems we have with education are caused by trying to have one teacher teach 30 kids instead of one kid. You inevitably have to institute uniformity and obedience discipline that is totally unnecessary and a one-on-one situation.
(This system of long term one-on-one coaching is still very much alive in teaching promising music students as well as young athletes. It's understood that it is the best way to stardom.)
Now I have no doubt that some people will tell me this is a totally impractical idea, but given the hyper efficiency that modern technology has provided, we are no longer forced to ask one single person to teach all the kids in an assembly-line fashion. A lot of the work can be done by technology. It is quite plausible to bring all kinds of people of all kinds of skills and incorporate them into a learning environment. Of course, this runs right up against the governmental control of education that is ground into our society.
But people 120 years ago sat down and came up with a whole new system and instituted it. There is no reason why we can’t sit down with what we now know and come up with something slightly better, or least have the guts to experiment with it.
© Justin Locke
