Education's Ecology

Why Teaching, Textbooks, Testing & Technology are Not Enough.

Chapter IV

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

Albert Einstein

Expecting Better Results

Albert Einstein said that the very definition of insanity is doing the same thing we have always done and expecting better results. Education is, simply put, insane. The insanity is a paradigm of expecting schools to lead the way to a better future. Schools, I will argue, have reached the end of what they can accomplish for a society of the future; what a society of the future will require for our species, Homo sapiens, to survive and thrive. Humanity has, of course, not a single future but multiple futures. These futures are connected and will require solutions to inequality and planetary sustainability. Until we are able to see education as an ecosystem, solutions will continue to be elusive.

This chapter had a huge problem and, in an early draft, was not going to fulfill the promise of its title Better Results. This may because the premise embedded in the title is wrong, suggesting a prescription of sorts. So I have changed the title to Expecting Better Results., which reflects an aspiration for something beyond what we currently have. The original title seemed to promise a way for education to become better or to improve, but improvement will require a close look at why schools do not work for a highly complex society that includes a wide range of complex individuals and stuffing them into a classroom is doing the same thing we have been doing for centuries. Classrooms, perhaps used to fit a perception of what society needs, but that perception is changing massively and rapidly. If we want education to change we must change our Expectations.

Society is really troubled by education. What we have just doesn’t seem suited to the complexities that contemporary society seems to be demanding. Unfortunately we are baffled by what those demands actually are. Every list, no matter how carefully and thoroughly annotated is going to be both incomplete and inconsequential. We now have this monolithic establishment of schools, with teachers and educators and public processes electing boards of education or school boards, and making inflexible laws mandating attendance of any person between the ages of six and sixteen.

We don’t have any clear ideas about the distinction between school boards and boards of education. School borard claim an education for schools, while a board of education establishes schools for education. That confusing state of affairs is compounded and confounded by enormous ambiguities about who or what is “in charge?” Is the responsible party a local district board, or a state level department of education with either an appointed or an elected leader, or is it a federal department or one of several federal departments exercising an influence on education.

Our federal Constitution is silent on education. Policy for education, state by state, and even across a given state, was was a mess with uneven conditions district to district. In 1955 the Department of Education was established by an act of Congress aspiring many good intentions to even up the disparities between and among the various states. Sixty plus years later education policy is still a mess and getting messier by the day, month, year or presidential election cycle. The last three, four or five Secretaries of Education have created clever slogans lauding “charter schools;” “no child left behind;” “race to the top;” “parents rights”, “vouchers” and “freedom;” and under Betsy DeVos in the first Trump administration “hel-bent on supporting more private—read Christian—education:” Then along ame the the covid virus and a pandemic that caused havoc across all levels of policy and expectations or aspirations or at least the polemic political statements of someone’s aspirations for education.

Education itself is battered and torn into fragments that can make it harder to recognize. Is it so many little cherubs sitting at desks in a classroom? Is it what these cherubs and their growing successors are supposed to have “learned?” Is it what teachers do? Or, is it the rules and regulations that dictate the sequences and standards of student, teacher, and administrator conduct? Education is, of course, all of these and a great deal more. Learning is, it seems, central to what education is supposed to provide. Yet try to find a coherent and comprehensive definition of what “learning” is or should be. Good luck!

And now we continue to expect better results from systems that have been unchanged for centuries. Education, as it is popularly denoted as schooling, is focused on a small slice of life; roughly individuals age 5-25. This cohort is expected to untangle the messes that have been made across time spans that are completely borderless; the beginning is fuzzy and the goals are nearly invisible.

So what should be done is never going to be clear until and unless we gather some useful insights as to the societal conditions and the states of education. Naming the problem can be a simple as “school.”

This schooling insanity is reflected in the range of problems in our schools. Removing these problems will require looking with a new vision on what education should be in the absence of schools. This happens to be my perhaps biased but unrepentant view. I have grown old, cranky and am not particularly concerned that some may react to what I have to say and declare that I am insane. I'll take that as a good start toward a conversation that could provide a new vision for education. An emerging vision will only happen as we talk about what it may be.

If we don't start talking now, there will certainly be a future time with no new change in neither education nor in our socially conscienceless pursuits of education. We will keep doing the same thing and expecting better results. Change is, I will submit, essential to what we will deliver under a rubric of education; conditions for sparing the further destruction of our only home in the universe—planet earth.

Chapter One identified more than a few problems with our schools. Chapter Two recognized the status of schools, schooling and schoolists. In Chapter Three, an attempt was made to recognize the ambiguities inherent in reaching agreements on society and forming a coherent “contract” to guide all of us collectively into the future. The remainder of this chapter will enlarge or expand on a few roadblocks to progress. … education science (v. medical science)… diversity and the variables of complex systems …

Education Science.

Science & Education are very likely in different spheres or, as Steven Jay Gould would say as he did for science and religion; magisteria. Knowledge (as justified true belief) is formed by vastly different means in science and religion. Religion invokes the supernatural to justify its beliefs; science eschews the supernatural and looks elsewhere for justification. The arguments regarding the distinction between the natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, geology, physical anthropology) and the social sciences (psychology, cultural anthropology, economics, political science) is not at all irrelevant when considering a science of education or application of the foundations of science—conjecture and refutation, paradigm shifting—to education and schooling. A cadre of educators may be steeped in science-like disciplines and with all good intentions including faith in their aspirations, acting professionally to formulate educational principles resting on scientific foundations.

At some level the problems of schools may resemble engineering problems. Indeed, education’s problems may, taken selectively, be reduced to engineering-like testing and products that are of economic, commercial and social value. There is activity aplenty to provide education and its schoolists with products and services that have been tested and, ostensibly, found safe and efficacious for classroom applications.

It is an important task of an engineer to test limits. The engineering tests often push a material or a process until it breaks. When something breaks you acquire knowledge of limits. Some materials are highly resilient and others are quite brittle. That is discovered by testing under controlled conditions. An important objective of any engineering test is to make the test conditions conform to conditions that may be as consistent as possible with the actual conditions of a materials use. Obviously test design requires a good deal of technical expertise. Designing is often as much an art as it is a science. Choices are involved.

Education rarely affords conditions like that of the engineering laboratory. The classroom is not a laboratory in any sense related to science or engineering. Teachers may push students collectively or individually to discover their limits. But students are not inanimate materials that can be easily quantified. It is, in fact, more than slightly reprehensible to think of students as objects to be tested in a lab. Attempting to apply anything resembling controlled conditions is so nearly impossible that what emerges is often artful or art-like rather than anything resembling science.

Yet Education Science is now a label on buildings at many major universities. The science inside those buildings bears some resemblance to psychology but there is often a considerable gap requiring modification and interpretation between the laboratories of behavioral psychologists and educators. Of course there is a legacy of behavioral psychology that still pervades the corridors of education science buildings. The work of classical behaviorism pioneered by Watson, Skinner and others still holds some suasion among a select set of contemporary workers in education. Students are not (ever) pigeons or rats. Scanners like fMRI should be damned in more ways that I care to enumerate or list, although I will argue in later chapters that neuroscience should be an expanded ground for understanding human development and its population variants.

A very basic challenge is the individual differences of the subjects (aka students) that are studied in education science. They are highly variable. Attempting to match the characteristics within an experimental cohort is fraught. Age and gender are usually a starting point. But it is also recognized that even within an age group a range of characteristics may be represented. Assuming that these differences are minor is also troublesome. Similar considerations may apply to age, gender, ethnicity, race, disability, living conditions, and on and on. Socioeconomic backgrounds as well as a multitude of matters may be, and should be, considered. It is often much easier for a university research investigator to seek out volunteers from among the student body rather than rummage through the community for a cohort to study. Again biases creep into the selection process. When a cohort is obtained decisions are needed to select experimental and control subjects. That may be simply random choice or criteria may be applied.

One consequence of all these potential variables is that results will require statistical analysis. Statistics will reveal similarities when appropriate formulas are applied to the data. Large data sets are most reliable. The classroom teacher may have some knowledge of statistics in her or his background. But reading the papers describing the research methods as well as the results and conclusions may leave more questions than can be confidently answered. Few classroom teachers will be able to do their own testing when they are inspired by a published result.

The path from the education science building to the domain of the classroom is rarely comfortable.This is especially true when the classroom teacher has to first focus on the management of those 25 people assigned to the class. We’ll deal with this impediment in the next chapter.

When it comes to the US Department of Education, I’m not sure whether to agree with those who want to dismantle it or those who want to expand its reach across and above state and local governments. The Education Department’s own Institute for Education Science may be both steps in the right and the wrong directions.

Grand Challenges.

Grand challenges facing society include transparency, explain -ability, accountability, inclusivity, potential adverse bias and effects, mitigation strategies, algorithmic advances, fairness objectives, validation of fairness, participatory design, broad access and utility. Anyone could pick out one and turn it into a lifelong passion. With much help from technology, particularly on the information side of technology, progress could be made. The needed technology is rapidly arriving in the form of Artificial Intelligence. In the next decades, Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds promise for increased decision support systems that may find broad societal application and implication. That education can remain outside of the future changes wrought by AI is farcical at an extreme.

Complexity & AIML.

If you pause to think about the complexity of education it is easy to feel overwhelmed. Yet we pack 25 kids in a classroom with a teacher and expect good results. And, it must be conceded that the results of classroom teaching are actually pretty good when all 25 kids come from the more affluent neighborhoods of a school district. Speculate as we might, and as we definitely should, about why we say results are “pretty good,” it is for many more reasons that the teacher has brought to the classroom. But when a five-year-old arrives for the first day of kindergarten and tells a first year teacher at the school to “go fuck yourself” you know that what follows is not likely to be the result of a teacher's best efforts. By the way, that teacher didn't return for a second year. Surprised? The kid's surname was not Carlin.

Dealing with complexity anywhere now demands help from computers. But before anything useful can come out of computation, the right information must be fed into the machines. Machines are now being programed to continuously adjust their algorithms to find patterns from incoming information—that is to say the machines are in some sense “learning.” The result is that computers are increasingly able to deal with big data. A foundation for AI is natural language and Large Language Modeling (LLM) Yet, we say “computers” as though some single machine is doing the computational work, when in actuality it is not a single machine but clustered devices that, running with a coordinated set of instructions and memory, can be anywhere in The Cloud. These clusters and clouds of computing crunch massive amounts of data per second. Searching for stored records is only a first, but necessary step.

Big data is here. Storage is cheap and is getting cheaper by the month. New tools for storage are being invented and tested. The human genome project was once thought to be beyond possible. Today a relatively compact laptop computer with an Internet connection can reach out into the cloud and retrieve matching data for anyones genetic data and do so in a matter of just a few minutes. The complete analysis of an individual's genome is also relatively inexpensive—typically well under a grand. As yet there is no known application for handling this massive amount of data for education. We are not even contemplating the development of tools for generation and analysis of an individual first grader's data-set. If we could get by the moral and legal prohibitions, we wouldn't know what to look for. But before we run off the mouth about some future utopia for education it may be well to pause and think about all that we don't yet know.

AI programs providing for facial recognition, speech recognition and creating speech appropriate to an inquiry, as well as prediction are already well developed. Mechano-electrical devices are in use in both ordinary and unusual situations as robots. What will humans do when there is nothing that robots cannot do? When robots have access to massive data sets, the condition of the world will be at the mercy of professors at Carnegie-Mellon University, MIT, Stanford and, perhaps universities in Beijing. Google Home, Alex or Miss Apple will just turn off the lights at your appointed bedtime. Truth be known, you were in the dark well before bedtime. That is the ubiquity of our ignorance.

Ignorance.

A favorite comment in support of education and funding of teachers is If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. This is egregiously stupid—and one form of ignorance.

It is time for educators including all of the schoolists to come to grips with ignorance. What we don't know is massive. Ann Kerwin1 wrote about a “taxonomy of ignorance.” She identified six categories including: all the things we think we know; all the things we don't know; all the things we should know but don't want to know; all the things we know we don't know; all the tings that we are prohibited from knowing (taboo); and, all the things that cannot be known.

Yet so much of life proceeds and perhaps has to proceed with all the confidence that goes with ignorance. If we wait until we are certain about knowing it is entirely possible that we would simply never be able to get anything done. We often have to proceed in the face of uncertainty. Planning is often engaged and not infrequently planning is belittled because of the inevitability of uncertainty. (Men plan; God laughs.) It is just not possible to be certain. What we can do is reduce uncertainty to some acceptable level.

In the preface I alluded to a change in my own system of thinking when I said that thanks to the self-publishing revolution I don't have to be concerned whether you or anyone agree with me. I can avoid the gatekeepers and publish when my spirit moves me to publish. I don't have to adhere any longer to moral dogmas that have tipped the scales toward uniformity, authority and some consensus interpretation of what is right. George Packer2, who alerted me to the notion of moral dogmas, said, speaking with his own version of nearly pure dogma, learning in a classroom with a teacher and peers is better for all children. With first cablecasting of programs, then Internet with streaming and the blog-o-sphere for anyone, followed by every more wacky versions of social media, gatekeepers began to disappear. The disappearing act was spread across media and then began to enter education. George Carlin challenged the gatekeepers of the airwaves when he used his comic show stage to repeat the “seven words you can't say on television.” I won't repeat the banned words here but nearly everyone uses some of them daily.Back then (1960s) these seven words couldn't be used on radio or television. The Federal Communications Commission was the gatekeeper preventing profanity. It worked a little like prohibition and was about that successful. Not long after the comedy club shows, video tapes began to appear regularly on cable shows not subject to the ban and now can be seen by anyone on YouTube.

In later chapters I will argue for a different arrangement based on recognizing potentially new structures and relationships within education, and medicine, which I will argue holds potential for better results. Which is certainly not to say that medicine has everything right; it definitely does not. But there are promising steps within medicine, which are invisible for me within education.

What we have for education are systems that serve enough of our human population to carry forward, sometimes with spectacular success, the aspirations of a few. It is hard to ignore the incredible accomplishment of sending humans to the moon and bringing them safely back to earth . And, we humans did this not once but several times. We are really damn good! We, of course, is not all of us; in fact just a few of us. Dreamers who were persuasive and sufficiently powerful politically and intellectually to persuade a government to commit massive resources. The result was spectacular on many levels. The view of earth from space enabled a vision of spaceship earth, our little blue orb, isolated in the blackness our universe. That was my level of involvement; just call it awe. My closest friends at the time were at a different level and went beyond their awe. They pursued their degrees in engineering, physics and the business of building rocket engines in order to be more actively and directly involved. But we all benefited in different ways as we found our paths on earth. Our educations were stimulated and supported by a massive national effort to reach the moon.

But conquering space travel managed to do this incredible feat while leaving our planet and its atmosphere in a greater mess. We did it collectively while remaining almost totally ignorant of the range of poverty and human disaster across too many continents. Our “educational” systems left us without any real skepticism or doubt about going to the moon. Postponing the moon shot for a few decades or even a few centuries would have been OK if we needed the time and resources to adjust our draining of irreplaceable resources while we protected our atmosphere from accumulation of devastating warming gases. But our visionary leaders said Go to the Moon. The brain-power of aerospace engineers could as well been turned to finding solutions to massive human reproductive overruns and management of limited nonrenewable natural resources. We went to the moon for the reason to simply be first. What a shame. Shame on us.

We could have been driving electric vehicles and living in more energy efficient buildings three or four decades ago.

We can be better!

There are a few specifics that come to mind as we look across the broad spectrum of education. And, we will highlight some of these specifics. However, what is needed now more than ever is broad brush-strokes to begin a vision to carry education forward. The Epilogue will deliver my specifics. ANSWERS of sorts.

Future chapters will highlight alternatives to schools as we have known them for too many centuries. None of these alternatives are proved to be better, but what we need most now (today) is something we can believe will be better because is is different—not the same things we have always done. Education needs its own moon shot, delivered with a hot, square needle right in the gluteus maximus.