by On October 4, 2010, I had the great privilege of participating in a webinar sponsored by Edutopia and featuring a stunning panel of experts charged with addressing alternative visions of school reform.
It is this freedom of the teacher to decide and, indeed, the freedom of the children to decide, that is most horrifying to the bureaucrats who stand at the head of current education systems. They are worried about how to verify that the teachers are really doing their job properly, how to enforce accountability and maintain quality control. They prefer the kind of curriculum that will lay down, from day to day, from hour to hour, what the teacher should be doing, so that they can keep tabs on it. Of course, every teacher knows this is an illusion. It’s not an effective method of insuring quality. It is only a way to cover ass. Everybody can say, “I did my bit, I did my lesson plan today, I wrote it down in the book.” Nobody can be accused of not doing the job. But this really doesn’t work. What the bureaucrat can verify and measure for quality has nothing to do with getting educational results–those teachers who do good work, who get good results, do it by exercising judgment and doing things in a personal way, often undercover, sometimes even without acknowledging to themselves that they are violating the rules of the system. Of course one must grant that some people employed as teachers do not do a good job. But forcing everyone to teach by the rules does not improve the “bad teachers”–it only hobbles the good ones. (Seymour Papert – Perestroika & Epistemological Pluralism, 1990)
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Here are some resources related to my presentation:
- Constructing Modern Knowledge 2011
- School Wars – Politicians, billionaires, and mavericks all want to fix public schools. They won’t. Parents will. (from GOOD Magazine)
- Education Nation & Ideological Blindness
- A 13 year-old speaks out about how standardized testing is ruining his education
- Nostradamus and Arne Duncan
- Oprah shouts, “You Get a School District!”
- Oprah – Wrong On Education for Many Years
- Why Should I Work for You? (thoughts on schooling from brand new teachers)
- Chief Family Engagement Officer? (2008) an example of Klein/Duncan/Rhee lunacy
- Supporting Courageous Educators
- Deborah Meier’s “We All Know Why We’re Here” video
- Deborah Meier’s “Graduation by Portfolio” video
- Three articles on effective project-based learning (2009-2010) PDF file
- Progressive education bookstore
- Gary Stager’s blog, Stager-to-Go
- Gary Stager’s personal web site
- The Constructivist Consortium
Veteran educator Gary Stager, Ph.D. is the author of Twenty Things to Do with a Computer – Forward 50, co-author of Invent To Learn — Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, publisher at Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, and the founder of the Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute. He led professional development in the world’s first 1:1 laptop schools thirty years ago and designed one of the oldest online graduate school programs. Gary is also the curator of The Seymour Papert archives at DailyPapert.com. Learn more about Gary here.