Don’t Worry About the Problem

My contribution is related to Minsky’s essay, Effects of Grade-Based Segregation. The following is an unabridged version of the chapter that appears in Inventive Minds: Marvin Minsky on Education. I attempted to bring a K-12 perspective to the discussion. Thankfully, I rarely hear the loathesome term, “platooning,” in discussions of educational praxis, although the deleterious practice is more widespread than ever.

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Introductory Remarks to Essay 3 by Gary Stager

Education author and researcher, Alfie Kohn, is fond of saying, “In education parody is obsolete.” School systems frequently take practices like age segregation and invent new worse strains of the idea than any rational person might imagine. Education Week recently featured an article of a practice with the vulgar name of “platooning.” 

Platooning is the process of taking the self-contained, interdisciplinary, project-based, and nurturing environment of the primary classroom and making children as young as five years old go from classroom to classroom for instruction is isolated subjects, often in homogeneous ability groups. In other words, little kids now have multiple teachers and receive formal instruction in isolated disciplines. The logic behind this is of course to raise test scores and remind educators that they are first and foremost subject matter experts (to the extent this is possible with first grade content) and teachers of children second. Long ago, clever teachers, usually in grades 4-6, figured out that they could prepare one lesson and present it to several groups of children per day and sold this laborsaving idea as preparation for secondary school. The urgency for platooning results from the Common Core State Standards, a morbidly obese unofficial national curriculum written by publishers and think tanks, sponsored by Washington, but theoretically “adopted” by states seeking federal funds.

“Now, as the Common Core State Standards require new kinds of skills from younger children, some schools are expanding the model by asking teachers to drop their traditional roles as generalists and serve instead as experts in one or two content areas. Most commonly, they’re trying it in grades 3-5, but some are doing it with pupils as early as kindergarten.

Some schools provide one teacher for math and science instruction, and another for literacy and social studies, so students work with only two teachers a day. Others split the subjects even further, rotating students among four instructors.

Schools that have embraced this shift are betting on a double yield: Students will learn more from teachers steeped in a given subject, school leaders hope, and teachers will be renewed and excited by diving more deeply into the subjects they love.

But the approach has trade-offs. Chief among them is the risk that the youngest children lose the close teacher bonds and developmentally appropriate kinds of learning they need. Elementary teachers, accustomed to spending many hours daily with the same den of children, might have as little as an hour with them, and take on two or three times as many students in exchange.” (Gewertz 2014)

Aside from wasting precious time moving from classroom to classroom, teachers failing to know each student, and straining the social bonds of classmates, platooning makes interdisciplinary projects impossible. It also denies children sufficient time to become immersed in thinking or project work long enough to gain insights or develop expertise. If you are capable of sustaining disbelief long enough to understand platooning, you’ll really hate its sibling, “data walls,” the process of littering classroom walls with data about each students’ achievement and progress data in a form of public shaming masquerading as a way of managing too many students lost in the process of platooning. 

School served Marvin, his children, and grandchildren quite well. They all glided to become part of the intellectual and creative elite without any friction imposed by formal schooling. However, like Papert, Marvin Minsky possessed the empathy necessary to recognize that everyone in the world was not like him. At its core, the OLPC essay on grade-based segregation is a respectful acknowledgement of diversity.

The long-standing tradition of organizing education by grade-level segregation is obviously preposterous. While its roots may be found in a yearning for a simplistic notion of industrial age efficiency, its continuing practice may only be viewed as naiveté born of superstition and ideological certainty. The practice defies common sense. Heterogeneous and multiage learning is the norm everywhere outside of school and is less than one hundred fifty years old in Western schools. There are contemporary examples of effective multiage learning found in schools, not only in multiage primary classrooms, but also instrumental music, choir, drama, and sports. I once heard Papert refer to age-based segregation as grouping kids by similar levels of incompetence.

The self-evident folly of grade level segregation belongs to the pile of other things we know about teaching and learning, but choose to ignore, including the value of art, music, and chess, as well as the research that indicates that adolescents should go to school later in the day. Tales of the MIT AI and later Logo Labs, led or co-led by Marvin Minsky, are replete with tales of children interacting with MIT students and faculty. Four decades of MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), in which undergraduate students engage in real research with graduate students and faculty scientists, may also have influenced Minsky’s opposition to age/grade-based segregation.

Mechanistic aspects of schooling, including age-based segregation, subject departmentalization, and the 42-minute period are rooted in our culture’s unwillingness to recognize that learning is natural. Such recognition would result in much more school flexibility and what Seymour Sarason called “productive contexts for learning.” (Sarason 1990, Sarason 1996, Sarason 2001, Sarason 2003, Sarason 2004)

“More generally, children develop at different rates, and each one learns in different ways—so when you put many students in the same room and try to teach the same things to all of them, some will flourish while others get stressed, and some forge ahead while others get lost. Whatever it is that we want to teach, it is hard to design an age-based curriculum that suits the needs of pupils with different abilities. “ (Minsky 2008)

Minsky’s common sense recognition that people learn differently and at different rates is at odds with apologists for schooling like cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham who dispute learning styles and Gardner’s multiple intelligence theory by viewing learning as the direct result of having been taught (in school). Achievement test results are the coin of the realm. Carol Dweck (Dweck 2006, Dweck 2010, Dweck 2012) and Angela Duckworth (Duckworth and Seligman 2006, Duckworth, Peterson et al. 2007, Duckworth, Kirby et al. 2011, Duckworth, Quinn et al. 2012) blame a student’s lack of standardized achievement on a poor mindset or lack of grit. Marvin Minsky would have been unamused by those who view learning through school-colored glasses.

Another consequence of one-size-fits-all schooling is the degradation of student experiences. I am often startled by the extent to which schools will go to deprive kids of real experiences. In fact, it would seem that the default for curriculum design is creating fake simulacrum as a substitute for authentic experiences. Problem solving skills are taught by playing escape room games or climbing a rock wall. New subjects such as “advisory” are invented as a mechanism for teachers to connect with students as if that would be impossible if teachers and students collaborated on real projects. The implication is that math teachers can’t really know their students by engaging in mathematics. Instrumental music programs are replaced with recorders or karaoke. Computer programming is taught, “unplugged,” without actual computers. 

When asked, “What do you think about virtual reality in schools?” I respond with the question, “Isn’t that redundant?” The same impulse behind age segregation creates a host of disempowered classroom practices.

Students not only have much to learn with and from peers of different ages, but also from adults. Piaget teaches us that knowledge is a consequence of experience. Vygotsky (Vygotsky 1980, Vygotsky 1986), Lave, and Wenger (Lave and Wenger 1991) remind us that much knowledge is socially constructed. Having access to diverse expertise enriches the learning process. One way in which schools may make use of adult expertise is by introducing children to things they don’t yet know they love.

For eight consecutive years, Marvin Minsky generously hosted “fireside chats,” with the K-12 educators attending my Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute. Marvin would spend an hour or two speaking with the educators about any topic. He never disappointed. Each year, one of the greatest scientists of the past century treated classroom teachers like colleagues and shared the full range of his intellect, humor, empathy, mischief, playfulness, and wonder. Each year, I attempted to run the event and film Minsky’s fireside chats, yet his aura seemingly caused innumerable cameras and recorders to fail. However, I do remember a number of profound points Marvin made during these events that add to the Drawbacks of Age-Based Segregation essay. (These are not verbatim.)

Hobbies seem to be a good model of optimum learning

Although during one fireside chat, Marvin argued against joy, fun, religion, sport, and music as frivolous (or worse) pursuits, he did an express admiration for the sorts of learning that emerge through hobbies. Hobbies feature continuous increases in complexity, may be social or solitary, and engage multiple skills and disciplines. I suspect that Marvin would have shared Sperry and Seymour Papert’s notion that the richest learning emerges when a person is engaged in “hard fun.” (Papert 1993, Papert 2002) Hobbies do not abide by the strictures of the school calendar or grade levels.

Problem solving

One educator asked, “Marvin, what do you to when confronting a really hard problem?” Marvin thought for a moment and said, “Don’t worry about the problem. Find the right person.” Then in the world’s greatest humble brag, Minsky continued, “I never worried about solving a difficult problem. I always knew I could call Oppenheimer, Von Neumann, or Claude Shannon.” Later in the conversation, Marvin was asked a question along the lines of, “What should we do about schools?” He paused briefly and wistfully replied, “I never worried about those sorts of questions. I knew I could always just ask Seymour (Papert).”

School structure as a curricular impediment

Marvin once told our group that a major problem plaguing education is that there is no structure allowing for the teaching and learning of topics that may only require ten days to learn. School days are divided into short periods and the academic calendar is divided into semesters, trimesters, or marking periods. The result is that students miss out on experiencing powerful ideas that could be learned in a matter of a couple weeks. Marvin offered Information theory as such a domain.

Learning by making

Although considered the father of artificial intelligence and a computer science pioneer, I understand that Marvin did not enjoy programming, at least in comparison to inventing things, playing the piano, or tinkering. While I do not have research to support this intuition, I suspect that accomplished people share a formative experience learning with their hands. A ninety-nine year old Jerome Bruner told me how building and racing boats on the Hudson as a boy was critical to his intellectual development. Seymour Papert had his gears. Marvin told us that it was a shame that today’s kids don’t have access to junkyards like his generation did. He expressed a belief that the leaders of post-war science benefitted from access to abundant military surplus “junk” as children.

Marvin Minsky supercharged any classroom, lab, or living room into the greatest context for learning. He was interested in anything anyone else found interesting, even if only to wonder why you had such interest or belief. Knowing him just a little bit is one of the highlights of my life. Sharing his genius and spirit with educators brought me indescribable joy. Although he was never my teacher, I will continue to learn from Marvin for the rest of my days and he was thirty-six years older than me.

References

Duckworth, A. L., et al. (2011). “Deliberate practice spells success: Why grittier competitors triumph at the National Spelling Bee.” Social psychological and personality science 2(2): 174-181.

Duckworth, A. L., et al. (2007). “Grit: perseverance and passion for long-term goals.” Journal of personality and social psychology 92(6): 1087.

Duckworth, A. L., et al. (2012). “What No Child Left Behind leaves behind: The roles of IQ and self-control in predicting standardized achievement test scores and report card grades.” Journal of educational psychology 104(2): 439.

Duckworth, A. L. and M. E. Seligman (2006). “Self-discipline gives girls the edge: Gender in self-discipline, grades, and achievement test scores.” Journal of educational psychology 98(1): 198.

Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success, Random House Incorporated.

Dweck, C. S. (2010). “Even geniuses work hard.” Educational Leadership 68(1): 16-20.

Dweck, C. S. (2012). “Mindsets and human nature: Promoting change in the Middle East, the schoolyard, the racial divide, and willpower.” American Psychologist 67(8): 614.

Gewertz, C. (2014). “Platooning on the rise in early grades.” Education Week 33(21): 1.

Lave, J. and E. Wenger (1991). Situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. NY, Cambridge University Press.

Minsky, M. (2008). “Essays on Education (for OLPC).” Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Available online 3: 53.

Papert, S. (1993). The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer. NY, Basic Books.

Papert, S. (2002). Hard Fun. Bangor Daily News. Bangor, ME.

Sarason, S. (2001). American Psychology and Schools – A Critique. NY, Teachers College Press.

Sarason, S. B. (1990). The predictable failure of educational reform: can we change course before it’s too late? San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.

Sarason, S. B. (1996). Revisiting “The culture of the school and the problem of change”. New York, Teachers College Press.

Sarason, S. B. (2003). The skeptical visionary: A Seymour Sarason education reader, Temple University Press.

Sarason, S. B. (2004). And what do you mean by learning? Portsmouth, NH, Heinemann.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1980). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes, Harvard university press.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). “Thought and language-Revised edition.”

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