The New System

The New System
The education system, as it stands, is inefficient, and breeds a ruthless cruelty amongst teenagers which in many cases remains with them for years afterwards. The system teaches students not to learn for the sake of learning, not to learn in order to master a skill, not to learn to serve any kind of useful purpose. The system has grown so convoluted that we now have schools that teach you to pass tests so you can go to schools. It is inefficient to the point of idiocy, and the time for reform is long past. If we as Americans are to stand any chance of competing in the new millennium, we must stop embracing such inefficiency in the name of tradition. This system has continued to exist only because no one cares to reform it, and it has done a good deal of damage to nearly all who have been subjected to it. Ultimately, the system requires blind, unquestioning obedience to authority, and as a side effect it encourages a great deal of conformity. This limits the diversity of our citizenry, hampering our ability as a nation to adapt to changing circumstances.

The system's main fallacy is the way it assumes that bribes and threats are a necessary evil of education, that no one will learn unless coerced. How do infants learn to speak? They have no taskmasters threatening them with lives spent doing nothing more than manual labor if they fail. People often wonder what happens to the creativity of youth, that is crushed into dust by seventh grade. The answer is simply that sixth grade happens.

But it is not enough to simply find the problems in the old system, of course. If the old system is destroyed and replaced with a void, things will only become worse. Thus, before we make any attempts at destroying the old system, we need something to take its place once it is gone, and it must be able to take the old system's place even as it is destroyed. This is the purpose of the aptly named New System. It is intended to educate with efficiency, to teach students not what to think but how to think.

The difference between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation is key, here. Extrinsic motivation, bribes, threats, and other forms of coercion, is a band-aid solution at best. Humans require intrinsic motivation to accomplish anything significant in the long term. There is almost nothing an authority can do to help intrinsic motivation, and almost anything can stifle it. But intrinsic motivation is hiding somewhere in all of us. We must only bring it to the front.



Projects v. Tests
The purpose served by tests is supposedly to prove competency. Tests can prove a certain degree of competency in that they can prove an understanding of a subject, but they lack the ability to prove someone's capability to actually do anything. Tests have the advantage of being relatively quick and cheap, and they're capable of covering an incredibly broad range of subjects. Their flaw, however, is that they are worthless to the person actually completing them, not in the sense that the diploma's that come from completed tests have no affect on one's life (I'm well aware of the income difference between a high school dropout and an MD), but in the sense that the test itself is worthless to the world at large, no matter how quickly and competently it is completed. Thus, humans instinctively do not want to take tests.

Projects are, in almost every way, the inverse of tests. They are extremely effective at proving competency, as obviously if you can do something now, you can do it again later (I'm positive you could think of a million unusual circumstances in which this statement would not hold true; this is besides the point, the point being that projects are more accurate measures of competency). By actually doing something, the student is more likely to retain the information longer. Further, once someone has started a project, they are often invested in seeing it finished, increasingly so as they invest more and more time into it. This is the intrinsic motivation that we're seeking.

Projects do suffer from having the inverse of a tests benefits, however. They are expensive (though new technology makes most projects cheap in the planning stages, and expensive only in their execution. The planning stages should suffice for our purposes, fortunately. Students can design a blueprint without actually building a house.), and take much longer, and every new skill incorporated increases the size and complexity of the project exponentially. Still, these drawbacks are minor compared to the advantages, especially that holy grail of intrinsic motivation. Tests may, if absolutely necessary, be used to supplement a project, but the project itself will come to replace tests in the New System.

The Projects themselves would be similar to the real projects found in whatever line of work the persons studies lends itself to (so, for example, someone taking a computer class would have a project to write a program, just as they might be expected to working for a software company), with two key differences. First, obviously the project must be simpler. People must learn to walk before they can run. But just because their finished project is so simple that similar products are being given away for free in real markets doesn't mean the project shouldn't be treated like a real project.

Second, the project must have static requirements (except, perhaps, the final project, which is intended to test skills, not teach them). In the real world, project requirements change with the situation, but in order to learn, people must be able to take things one at a time, and they can't do that if that one thing is changing all the time.

By no means do I believe that these projects should be easier than current tests, however. On the contrary, I think it is time that American students began using all of their skills and unlocking the full extent of their potential. I see a system that has students doing significantly more work than they are now, however with intrinsic motivation instead of extrinsic coercion, it will likely feel like less.

Fluid Scheduling
The way school is currently scheduled, students spend forty-five minutes on a subject, and then are sent off to the next immediately afterwards. To learn something, a person must have time to allow the information to sink in, to make connections with the rest of the brain. That is one of the most important aspects of human memory, that things are remembered based on their connections. For example, the concept of “horse” might be connected to race horses, cowboys, and any number of other concepts. Anchoring a concept by connecting it to other concepts is vital to memory.

A day doesn't need to be divided into seven arbitrary periods, or into three, to allow for longer classes. The day has already been divided into twenty-four hours. Why is another set of divisions, only tangentially related to this one, necessary? Instead of a third period class, let it be the 12:00-2:00 class. A real workplace is most likely going to use this kind of scheduling, not the kind currently used by schools (current school scheduling most closely resembles factory scheduling, which is ironically primarily the domain of the undereducated in our society).

On a related note, and in keeping with students working harder, it would make sense if, by the end of their high school careers, people are working as long as they would in a normal workplace, meaning until 5:00 at the lowest, and possibly an hour or two longer. This leaves little time for extracurricular activities, you may notice, however education would be more effective if extracurricular activities were incorporated into the curriculum. This opens up more options, certainly. Dan can go play football for the team from four to six, while Rob takes a chemistry class in the same slot. In the current system, Dan would be on the football team while Rob would be doing nothing at all (actually, Rob would probably be on the debate team, or in the chess club, or something similar, but the point is he would not be taking a chemistry class).

Specialization

Specialization is a good thing, to a point. Certainly you don't want someone who's only good at one thing and just one thing. What happens when they can't find any jobs doing that one thing? But at the same time, trying to teach students everything, while once a laudable and plausible goal, is now ludicrous. There's simply too much information. Thus, people must be allowed to specialize early on, but not in just one subject or skill. A certain degree of versatility must be taught. Of course, a thirteen year old just starting high school isn't nearly ready to choose a major for the rest of his life, so specializations must also not be set in stone until much, much later in one's school career, probably not until college, and the system must be set up in such a way as to allow one to switch from one specialization to another without too much difficulty. This has the handy side-effect of making the choice of a major in college a less daunting and nerve-wracking task.

The specialties offered must not be limited to the current curriculum of history, math, science, etc. The range of knowledge to be had is much, much broader than when the system was first set up, and it is no doubt going to become broader still as time goes on. Thus, while grouping the specializations together into clusters centered around these themes would be useful, attempting to teach a science specialization would not. Physics alone could be split up into a half-dozen or more specializations after the first, basic classes, and a basic class on science itself would likely be pre-requisite to that (not to mention a certain degree of mathematical knowledge).

A certain degree of generalization is necessary, of course. Regardless of your specializations, knowing the scientific method and how to calculate a variable by isolating it from static values will likely be vital knowledge to you, so a certain degree of general knowledge classes will also be necessary, however there is no reason for general knowledge curriculum to dominate ones school career the way it does now.

Conclusion

The New System as presented here is, of course, a very, very rough draft. Input from experts is necessary to fill in the gaps, and a good deal of effort will be required to design the details of the specializations, to make the system adaptable to the new knowledge that it will doubtless be called upon to instill upon its students at some point, and to insure that the system does not require too much form our high school teachers. Ultimately, however, the system will be better for everyone. The students, no longer coerced, will be happier knowing they're working for themselves, not the system. The teachers, no longer struggling to coerce the students, will have more time to do what they signed up for, that is, teach. The community will benefit from a more diverse and happier citizenry, and fewer unruly teenagers. The companies will benefit from more highly trained and versatile employees right out of school. Ultimately, the world as a whole benefits, as hopefully the system will prove to be as effective in practice as in theory, and spread to every corner of the globe.