For the last several months, I have been sitting with a comment made by one of my professors at Hopkins. She lamented that with the increasing focus on personalized learning and competency-based assessments, education is forsaking a shared domain of knowledge for the quest to acquire a perceived set of skills.
For centuries, education’s primary purpose was to build a shared domain of knowledge that would then support a community culture. Some of the earliest formal schools existed to help the general public develop enough literacy to read the Bible. Then, as society progressed, students studied the Classics, Math, and Science so that a shared set of understandings would provide a foundation for a shared culture. Even the original notion of the “Common School” here in the U.S. intended to prepare citizens for participation in a rapidly urbanizing society by instilling a common set of understandings and literacies.
However, in the 1900s, with the rise to prominence of the behavioral theorists such as Thorndike, Skinner, and Watson; the introduction of scientific management principles that valued efficiency and effectiveness; and the advent of formal school structures such as the Carnegie Unit the focus of schooling seemed to shift from the development of a shared domain of knowledge to the acquisition of a set of desired skills. By the publication of the A Nation at Risk report in 1983, education had become fundamentally linked to economic success [1], cementing the trajectory towards skills as evidenced by the proceeding No Child Left Behind legislation and the Common Core State Standards. Both address what students should be able to DO versus what they need to KNOW.
More recently, the surge of focus on personalized/competency/mastery models has further chipped away at this idea of a shared domain of knowledge bringing me back to the conversation with my professor: what happens to society when we no longer have common cultural references? I recognize that much of the current educational cannon perpetuates gross inequity and excludes the voices of diverse populations, so I am not advocating for a single-perspective or sole academic cannon. However, I do wonder how to respond to this need for shared understanding given advances in technology and media.
A Not-So-Quick Analogy
When I was five or six years old, my Grandpa taught me to fish (seriously). I have a hazy memory of our fist trip. We went to a tiny pond in someone’s backyard in Virginia. It was a sunny day. We had a styrofoam container of worms and cane poles (just a stick with a line and a hook). I remember watching Grandpa bait a hook and then swing it into the water before handing me the pole. I have no idea if we caught anything.
By the time I was eight, we had started fishing a larger pond. By then, I could bait my own hook and put my own line in the water. I knew that we had to walk around the perimeter of the pond to find the fish, that sometimes they liked one spot over another, and that it was important to release most of what you caught or there might not be enough fish for the next time.
As I got older, I learned to cast a spinning rod. We started fishing in Florida. I learned that Snapper and Grouper picked at barnacles. Catfish are bottom feeders, and Red Fish live under the mangroves. Cast in the shadows at night. Go to the grass beds for trout. Watch the weather. Pick the right lures. Grandpa taught me the fundamentals of navigation: tide charts, compass headings, plotting positions…
I have a point to this story. Learning to fish was as much about developing skills as building a domain of knowledge relevant to the context. Fishing is not just about the act of getting a hook into the water and back out with a fish on the end, but also about ecology, biology, geography, physics, and a little creative storytelling. My Grandpa and I fished together for over 30 years. On some of our last few trips, we were not quite as successful, but as he liked to say, “the fishing is always great! It’s the catching that’s sometimes lousy.”
What’s Worth Knowing?
Over the past few days, I have been reading tweets and posts from a number of conferences. There has been plenty of talk about what students should be able to do: analyze information, collaborate, communicate, engage in empathy, synthesize information, discern credibility, etc. However, as I reflect on the comment from my professor, I am starting to believe that in a society that possesses advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and ubiquitous, interconnected devices, that shared domain of knowledge may be even more critical.
When working with teachers, I have often heard concerns about focusing on creativity or collaboration instead of content. I believe that we need both. That domain of knowledge serves as the foundation on which to base inferences and analysis, to detect bias, and to make ethical decisions. And yet, a shared body of understanding is not something that can be adequately measured by a traditional assessment, which comes back to the balance of knowledge and skills.
It takes time to build understanding and the opportunity to engage in knowledge creation. Much of the current conversation around personalized learning and competencies seems to address the discrete skills and the content that the student finds of interest. While I agree with my professor in that it must also focus on developing a shared domain of content, I also believe that it just as important to make sure that students also learn to examine that domain from multiple perspectives.
To conclude, I am not making this statement absent an understanding of the changing nature of knowledge in an information-rich society. I realize that Harvard Professor David Perkins [2] has raised the question of what’s worth knowing when we have computational power – low-level mechanical process or high-level analysis? Further, in his most recent book, Ted Dintersmith [3] asks what’s worth knowing when it can quickly become obsolete or irrelevant?
But the scholar who I am really pondering in light of this push towards personalization is the famed Dr. Seuss. In his book, Green Eggs and Ham, he asks how someone might know whether they like something if they have never tried it. I worry about that with personalized learning, that students might never try something on a boat or in a moat or on a train or in the rain…
Which brings me to my final question inspired by John Paul Gee: how might we create the conditions so that students gain exposure to a broad domain of knowledge and yet also ensure that they notice the personal connections that might encourage deeper learning?
References
[1] Mehta, J. (2013). How paradigms create politics: The transformation of American educational policy, 1980-2001. American Educational Research Journal, 50(2), 285–324. http://doi.org/10.3102/0002831212471417
[2] Perkins, D. (2014). Future Wise: Educating our children for a changing world. John Wiley & Sons.
[3] Dintersmith, T. (2018). What School Could be: Insights and Inspiration from Teachers Across America. Princeton University Press.