Boxing Day is past, but every day is a good day for some out-of-the-box thinking.
This evening, via a daisy chain of tweets, I landed on Seth Godin’s blog and this post.
It’s not the rats you need to worry about.
If you want to know if a ship is going to sink, watch what the richest passengers do.
iTunes and file sharing killed Tower Records. The key symptom: the best customers switched.
Of course people who were buying 200 records a year would switch. They had the most incentive. The alternatives were cheaper and faster mostly for the heavy users.
Amazon and the Kindle have killed the bookstore. Why? Because people who buy 100 or 300 books a year are gone forever. The typical American buys just one book a year for pleasure. Those people are meaningless to a bookstore. It’s the heavy users that matter, and now officially, as 2009 ends, they have abandoned the bookstore. It’s over.
When law firms started switching to fax machines, Fedex realized that the cash cow part of their business (100 or 1000 or more envelopes per firm per day) was over and switched fast to packages. Good for them.
If your ship is sinking, get out now. By the time the rats start packing, it’s way too late.
My friends, meet gifted homeschoolers.
It’s been my hunch for some time that people who are choosing to homeschool their gifted kids for academic reasons are the leading edge of a deeper shift. It’s why we have the pushback from folks like Ms. West on the one hand, and Dr. Grasmick on the other. The homeschoolers I know might not necessarily be rich, but by and large they are pretty smart. And they’ve voted with their feet.
Godin’s post rocked me back because it comes on the heels of a series of recent posts at Teach Paperless that I’ve been mulling over. R. Richard Wojewodzki/Shelly Blake-Plock started off with a riff on those predictable end-of-the-decade pieces, with his titled “21 Things that will be Obsolete in Education by 2010.” On the list (and you can see expanded explanations on his blog):
- Desks
- Language Labs
- Computers
- Homework
- The Role of Standardized Tests in College Admissions
- Differentiated Instruction as the Sign of a Distinguished Teacher
- Fear of Wikipedia
- Paperbacks
- Attendance Offices
- Lockers.
- IT Departments
- Centralized Institutions
- Organization of Educational Services by Grade
- Education School Classes that Fail to Integrate Social Technology
- Paid/Outsourced Professional Development
- Current Curricular Norms
- Parent-Teacher Conference Night
- Typical Cafeteria Food
- Outsourced Graphic Design and Webmastering
- High School Algebra I
- Paper
…none of which is news to homeschoolers. (Well, maybe the paperbacks and the bio scans.) He followed up with this post, and then this one. I recommend all of them.
And then there is this thought-provoking post by another late evening Twitter find, Gregory S. Thompson at Constructing Meaning.com
What is needed is change. Not just painting a new color over the old, but a drastic overhaul. I regularly use the phrase reimagining or rethinking school. The globalization of economies, the disappearance of barriers to global communication, and the rapid expansion of knowledge make Vanessa’s statement a rather obvious reality.
However, not so in education. Education is a hot-bed of status-quo, and the institutional creep that describes the method of change in our educational institutions, from kindergarten to our Universities, will insure a continuing free-fall in innovative thinking in this country.
What is needed? We need to “rethink” school. We need to begin with our long-held belief that schools, and education, is one of our greatest accomplishments of thought. From there we need to remove everything from the table and begin to answer the question, “What should be the purpose of schooling?” Put another way, answering the age-old question, “When are we ever going to need to know this?” Students have been asking this from the beginning of school. More often than not, the question is ignored or answered with a flippant, “You just will, I promise you.” If, as educators, we can’t answer that question definitively we have stop immediately and ask ourselves a core question of educational rethinking, “Why, ARE, we teaching this?”
“Education is a hotbed of status quo.” I love that.
Learning–not education–is where it’s at.
Thanks for the “shout out” . . . what is needed in education is “unconstrained learning.” We need to learning spaces (whether at home, in specific schools, or online environments) where learning happens organically – the way it naturally does.
Keep shouting from the hill tops and we will one day achieve the goal of schools that are relevant.
- Greg
I just had chillls reading this. My kids have thrived at their Montessori school, but even with that, I’m starting to think about homeschooling. Thanks for the provocative post.
Thanks for this post. So nice to read about other people who actually care about education…especially educators. Very thought provoking stuff from Greg on his blog post.
I am a bit confused on whether you support going paperless and the learning of essential facts or not. I understand and agree that technology is a great thing. However, I also strongly believe that children should be taught to read well, write well, and compute well. I think they should have to read the classics as well as be exposed to foreign languages. Moreover, children should have an arsenal of basic facts in grammar, math, history, science, etc. at their disposal.
I am very interested in having a kindle and other technologies. I can see using the kindle and technology for many things. On the other hand, I believe that there will always be some value to paper and pencil instead of just technology alone. Utilizing paper and pencil helps to cement important facts in our minds. I think technology is useful for this as well, but it does not use our other senses so to speak. Therefore, I think a combination of paper and technology is best.
Pris, I’m not going Kindle any time soon, nor am I ditching my books, for a million reasons. But there are positives to new technologies that we –and schools–should be open to.
I love this — though I am one of those going kicking and screaming myself. Your daughter is a bit too old, but we have loved OnlineG3. The proprietor/teacher is a mom of a PG girl herself, but also very tuned in (switched on?) to techno-learning. (I think you may have heard of it (-; )
I follow OnlineG3 on Facebook, and Jaime is always posting great articles on new learning technologies, using cellphones, texts, twitter, etc., and new learning modes in general. I am very old-school in my thinking — might have something to do with working in academic publishing focused on 15th-18th centuries! — but my daughter is thriving with new ways, so I keep challenging myself by reading stuff like what you’re posting.
But please, don’t take my paperbacks away! I already have 1000s, and the pile is growing!
Shaun, I’ve heard great things about Online3 and only wish it had been around when my girls were younger/when I was homeschooling. And I love real paper books too! Picture books…how in any way can a screen/Kindle/Nook replace a wonderful picture book?
I’d like to see schools morph into a la carte learning centers. No more pre-set curriculum or rigid age grouping. Dual-income or single parent families could enroll their kids full-time, everyone else could do as many or as few classes as they wish. Kids who want a diploma would need to earn enough credits either through taking a class at the center or by demonstrating mastery of the material by passing an exam. There would be a supervised computer lab where students could go to take online classes. Families could reserve time in science labs and have access to lab equipment while there.
Wouldn’t it be great?
It *would* be great. But what is is going to take to get there? I look at our behemoth school system and I get pessimistic change can ever happen. It’s like trying to change the course of an ocean liner X 10. Would trying to get at it from homeschooling laws be the way to do it? Thoughts?
Here in Maryland, I strongly suspect that changing the homeschooling regs would mean making homeschooling more like schools, not schools more like homeschooling!
Look at it this way: my state senator, who happens to be the vice-chair of the education committee in Annapolis (the “honorable”Richard Madaleno), would not even *forward my letter* to the office of the attorney general in which I ask for clarification of the homeschooling regs. I just want to make it clear that “provide instruction” means “provide access to instruction” and that “taught at home” means that parents assume responsiibilty for their children’s education, and not necessarily that parents keep their kids inside the house most of the time!!!
I hand-delivered my letter to him at a community meeting. I emailed his assistant. I called and I called. I was finally told, “Well, I thought we had solved this issue.” I must have missed the meeting, because nobody had told me about it! The staff assistant said he would call me right back after checking his file. Well, I guess his file said “case closed!” because I never heard from him again.
I figure that if his office thought I was way off base in my interpretation of the regs, they would have eagerly passed on my request to the OAG, to shut me up once and for all:-)
My husband, the ear surgeon, surprised me today when he mentioned that one of his fellow Columbia U. residents, now a highly respected head & neck surgeon & researcher, just pulled out his kids this year to homeschool.
I haven’t spoken to the family this year, but we’d had several conversations in the past about concerns over Gifted Ed, and my decision to homeschool the younger child.
I’d say that those of us who have the resources are definitely voting with our feet!
But, I hope Godin is wrong about book stores, and that there are enough paper-based book lovers in my tribe to keep them going strong into the future!
My kids are in French Immersion (the benefits of which are many, so it’s worth doing) but I wonder if I could provide them with that opportunity if I homeschooled. Then again, public school takes up so many hours of their day with otherwise watered down content… I think this is where overscheduling arises from: parents are trying to provide their kids with extra exposure and education that’s lacking in the public school system, and there simply aren’t enough hours in the day.
What I think might work for us is a half-day system: my two could go in the mornings and participate in their languange immersion, and then come home and homeschool with work that is enriched and more in concert with their level.
Better Learning- my oldest took a Mandarin immersion class with a group of other homeschoolers this fall. If you live in an area with a high enough concentration of homeschoolers, you can usually find just about any type of group learning experience to rival what’s offered through the schools. Foreign language, science labs, visual & performing arts, sports, etc.