What are we to do in Education?

What are we to do in education?

In the recent Conference Board of Canada report on education and skills, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland and Labrador all earn “D’s” overall, while P.E.I. earns a “D–,” scoring worse than the lowest-ranked international peer country. British Columbia, Ontario, and Alberta are the top performers among all the provinces, earning “B” grades on the Education and Skills report card. The largest provincial differences occur on student reading, science, and math skills—with provinces earning anywhere from an “A+” to a “D–” grade. The PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) Scores produced by OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) rates Canada as #2 in achievement among the 15 countries tested, second only to Finland. We are graduating almost everybody, but many are not learning. In fact if we go back 40 years, the CBC reports were similar. The only difference then was that there were a lot less high school graduates.

There are many who believe that the problem lies in the behavior of the students.

Student who do not conform to the system fail because they are not behaving appropriately. They link a lack of progress in school to the behavior of the student. But is this a legitimate rationalization?

I do not think that we will find any evidence, statistical or otherwise, to support this assertion. In fact, the evidence is to the contrary. Many students do get through the education system on behavior alone, but the evidence shows that they have not learned much.

Behavior problems are actually a symptom of the real problem in education. The only factor that legitimately contributes to a lack of progress in learning is the quality of the learning experience. Poor quality learning is caused by poor quality learning experiences.

Schools, colleges and universities are mills that are largely run on the fuel of psychology.

Granted teachers are well qualified in their specialties, but they are not well qualified in learning. So psychology is used to rationalize the incompetence of the mill – a force to rationalize negativity. Education is forced, it’s mundane, it’s constantly tested, and it’s boring. When students resist this unnatural environment, we blame them. Education is supposed to be difficult. It requires hard work, dedication and commitment. If we make it interesting and engaging, somehow we have made ourselves believe that we can’t learn anything valuable that way. If you make it easy, it is not learning. But if you stop and think about the subjects that we liked and our children like, they are the ones that the teacher made easy for us to learn. They went outside the scope of operating the mill and they did it on their own initiative, always working above and beyond what was required. Those are the good teachers. They see psychology as a positive force.

In the late 1960s, Dr. John Evans, chair of the new medical school of Macmaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, inspired an innovation that has revolutionized medical education in Canada. He was concerned about the deterioration of student interest after the first year of study. They became bored with the endless rote memorization which was characteristic of the traditional approach to medical training. Under his direction, the curriculum of the school was restructured from a passive information base to an active experiential base. Problem solving based on real medical cases was used to focus learning experiences and information was introduced in relation to those problems. There was tremendous scepticism in the medical community in regard to those new ideas because it was felt that students would not have the knowledge required to be effective practitioners. In fact, it soon became evident that the exact opposite was true. The first students who graduated in 1972 were as good as any of their colleagues in Canada as far as knowledge was concerned, and many exceeded their colleagues in practical ability. Since 1972, all of Canada's medical schools as well as medical schools around the world have successfully adopted this approach to the most vital training in our society.

An interesting footnote to Dr. Evans' experiment concerns educational prerequisites. He conducted a study where half the students admitted to the medical program in a particular year had the traditional 95% academic standing, and the other half were selected through interviews. He found that when the experiential learning approach was used, academic prerequisites has no significant effect on the number of student graduates in either group.

There are thousands of examples like the Macmaster experiment in every profession, occupation and discipline. Maybe they are not all so dramatic, but they are all significant. So why haven’t we adopted a positive psychological approach to all education. I think the obvious answer is that it will disrupt academia. The experiential approach will bring real accountability to everyone in education. But who in the establishment wants to change the utopia of unaccountable education where we can fight over it, play politics with it, belittle the real solutions, apply band aids, and make ourselves believe we are actually doing something?

What action do we need? We have to get past blaming the victims and rationalizing it by calling people smart and stupid. Everyone can learn if the learning experience is rich and engaging.

How can we get people to do it? We need to create frameworks that give teachers the autonomy to do their jobs. Everything else will fall in place.

How can we adapt the solution to our needs? The answer is simple - strategically designed projects and an organizational system which allows us to design complete project-based curriculums.

Do we need to pilot or are there things already in place that we can build on? There is lots of experiential learning going on in the schools and colleges and universities and outside the schools. We need to identify it, enhance it and classify it. And we need to eventually bring all curriculums on stream. Everyone will benefit, even the ones who currently excel in the academic system. We need some advocates to bring it about. We need some politicians who are willing to do what needs to be done.

Can we get accountability in education? Can we improve the statistics? We can, and we can do it dramatically.