Seen, heard, and valued.
Read that again…and feel connection...humanity…
SEEN, HEARD and VALUED...
It’s just not the norm in our schools, is it?…Teachers and leaders these days tell me the norm is more like UNSEEN, UNHEARD and DEVALUED…disconnection…
This system was designed to DEHUMANIZE.
How did we get here… how did we get this system that makes us feel trapped and powerless…invisible….DEHUMANIZED?
American education has an interesting story… and this story can help us understand why we feel trapped and powerless….unseen, unheard and devalued.
….and it can also help us understand….it’s not us…we, the people––the humans, are not the problem…it’s this system that we’ve inherited that’s the problem….
And it can help us understand…..we’re the solution…and this system, it can be redesigned….
Let’s take a short journey… back to the 1800s where the story begins…
It’s 1837 and Horace Mann, the Secretary of Education in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts takes a trip to Prussia, part of the German empire at the time, where he’s inspired by a new kind of education…The Common School…
The Common School…where education is built on the lecture method…where instruction is divided into subjects… and students into age groups…
Sounding familiar? And all this began almost two centuries ago!
Mann brings the Common School back to the US...and for the first time, we have universal, free education...but only up to high school.
And this creates a problem…it creates a skills gap as students head off to the factory and the assembly line...maybe even college...but, at the time, that pathway was only for a select few.
Factories and assembly lines….it’s just after the Civil War, and history calls this time the Second Industrial Revolution...a time of incredible economic and industrial growth in our country.
The people most interested in the Common School model and its standardization are four of the wealthiest industrialists and economists of the era...Henry Ford, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, and JP Morgan…
They’re intrigued what this new standardized model of education can do for efficiency… and just a bit for the wealth in their pockets.
Let’s fast forward to 1892. Enter The Committee of 10...made up of MOSTLY white, male university presidents along with professors and private school headmasters.
They’re tasked by the NEA...yes, the National Education Association..one of today’s national teachers’ unions...with designing a standardized educational system..
And what do they come up with? A worldview for education that values linearity, sequence and a uniform pace….that devalues the individual… devalues humanity itself….
What do we get?
standardized curricula
standardized textbooks
standardized grade levels
standardized tests
standardized semesters
and even standardized diplomas
Notice these dehumanizing structures…they haven't evolved much over the past century....and it all began with a man’s trip to Europe almost 200 years ago….
Like you….Todd Rose…author of End of Average gets it…. He says…
First we standardized work. Then we standardized learning. Then we integrated our standardized workplace with our standardized educational system, establishing standardized careers. And once the full passage of our experience was standardized from our first day of kindergarten until the morning of our retirement, it marked the complete standardization of a human life.
This system of “standardized everything” that makes us feel trapped and powerless…the system that is crushing our dream of The Human School…It was designed that way…it was designed to dehumanize…to smother human capacity…through standardization.
It wasn’t designed to help us be seen, heard and valued.
It wasn’t designed to elevate our individual and collective humanity.
Instead, it was designed to prioritize standardization and efficiency…around work and the economy.
And we all know it hasn’t changed much in our own lifetimes!
Back in the 80s…. we had A Nation at Risk -- What did we do? We doubled down on standardization….expecting better and faster…
In the 90s we had America's Choice: High Skills or Low Wages -- Again, we doubled-down on the dehumanization of standardization….
Then came the standards movement…requiring all states to develop standards and tests in reading and math…. because, of course, standardization leads to high quality, right?!
Then in 2000 we had NCLB...No Child Left Behind - followed by the Common Core and Race to the Top.
With all of these changes, we continued blaming kids..the teachers and leaders…you… for all its shortcomings…. instead of calling out the standardization of the system….
We even took away play and the arts … because, of course, they aren’t tested and therefore, not important enough…
Along the way, our policymakers even added a little dehumanizing humiliation to the fire….
Ranking students and schools based on standardized test scores....
And after all these well-intentioned efforts since the 1980s…almost 50 years ago…
…the system seems to have become even more...dehumanizing….standardized...driven by compliance…
But, you know, despite all this bleak history, I think we’ve got hope…..
Our current system was designed to dehumanize….and that means it can be reversed.
What if instead of feeling POWERLESS we could feel POWERFUL?
What if instead of feeling TRAPPED we could free ourselves?
What if instead, we could design a different system….a better system...a human-centered system...The Human School!
When it comes to the education system, about what are you most hopeful?
