It’s not a revolution unless something changes

Image by takomabibelot via Flickr

My daugh­ter begins high school next week.

And as she does, the Fed­eral gov­ern­ment and the var­i­ous state gov­ern­ments con­tinue to trum­pet their tri­umphs in their so-​​called Build­ing the Edu­ca­tion Rev­o­lu­tion plan. As yet, I’ve seen no rev­o­lu­tion from this pro­gram, and lit­tle evo­lu­tion. Mostly just reac­tionary, fright­ened imple­men­ta­tion of the lap­tops for high school­ers pro­gram and the build­ing of so many Julia Gillard Memo­r­ial Halls.

Once my daugh­ter gains access to this pro­gram, I will be ask­ing her school directly whether the hard­ware, soft­ware and data access they are pro­vid­ing stu­dents are open and uncen­sored, giv­ing kids access to all the infor­ma­tion and con­text their rich 21^st Cen­tury edu­ca­tion requires. If not, why not? What’s stop­ping them? Who’s stop­ping them? What’s the evi­dence they’re being given to restrict kids’ access to the sin­gle most impor­tant tool for col­lab­o­ra­tion and the find­ing and shar­ing of knowl­edge since the print­ing press? I don’t blame the schools. They too have masters.

If the tools she has access to are restricted and locked down, I’d rather refuse to take them and pro­vide her the open, unre­stricted access to tools and infor­ma­tion she deserves and needs. Or show her myself how to hack (though I’d not sug­gest she actu­ally did) what­ever she’s given so she does have open access to infor­ma­tion and tools.

I’ll also be ask­ing directly whether their edu­ca­tors and cur­ricu­lum encour­age open ques­tion­ing of teach­ers and of the sub­ject mat­ter at hand. Whether dogma of any sort is openly chal­lenged. Whether the right to be wrong is encour­aged and used as a learn­ing oppor­tu­nity — both for teach­ers and stu­dents. Whether teach­ing is cus­tomised to each student’s strengths and weak­nesses so the dancers and the lib­eral arts kids and the math­e­mati­cians are afforded the best oppor­tu­nity to shine. And again, if not, why not?

Fur­ther­more, tomor­row, the MySchool site goes live with what is osten­si­bly use­ful com­par­a­tive data about school qual­ity across the coun­try. The feed­back I’ve received from a num­ber of senior edu­ca­tors I know is not com­ple­men­tary. As I sus­pected, data is decon­tex­tu­alised and badly open to mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion. And mis­in­ter­preted it will be.

Many par­ents will not take the time to under­stand the data nor engage in deep ana­lyt­ics with it. They will glance at it askance and make pro­found edu­ca­tional deci­sions about their chil­dren, the future of this nation, on a few sec­onds look at some table that sug­gests School A (well funded with good NAPLAN results and in a strong socio-​​economic sub­urb) is infi­nitely bet­ter than School B (maybe not so well-​​funded or with great test results but ideal for their child because of a par­tic­u­lar teacher, or pro­gram that isn’t addressed in the data). Con­se­quently, under­stand­ing of the data and likely media cov­er­age of it risks cast­ing some schools in a light they likely don’t deserve.

This too is not rev­o­lu­tion­ary, but sim­ply poor pol­i­tics pan­der­ing to a lowest-​​common-​​denominator demand for some­thing that will assure votes at the next election.

If we want a real edu­ca­tion rev­o­lu­tion in this coun­try, we need to teach to the needs of the 21^st Cen­tury.

The 21^st Cen­tury requires a new kind of edu­ca­tion and a new approach to under­stand­ing it. Edu­ca­tion must be empow­ered by tech­nol­ogy not restricted by it or restrict­ing of it.

It must be rich, con­tex­tu­alised, open, ques­tion­ing, multi-​​disciplinary and rel­e­vant to the world.

The class­room itself must change as it cur­rently remains solidly in the 19^th Century.

This new edu­ca­tion must encour­age stu­dents to be cre­ative over pro­duc­ing the expected, inno­v­a­tive and expan­sive in their pre­sen­ta­tion and think­ing, crit­i­cal thinkers who ques­tion rather than accept, solvers of prob­lems, com­mu­ni­ca­tors with their peers and teach­ers, col­lab­o­ra­tive in class and life, flu­ent in assess­ing the vari­able value of infor­ma­tion which they are pre­sented and highly lit­er­ate in all aspects of technology.

It requires that edu­ca­tors and par­tic­u­larly gov­ern­ment agen­cies man­ag­ing edu­ca­tion look at ped­a­gogy dif­fer­ently. Many teach­ers in my expe­ri­ence already do, even if they are hob­bled in their attempts to teach dif­fer­ently by bureau­crats fear­ing change and tightly con­trolled access to the best tools and information.

It requires a strong stance of pro­vid­ing open access to infor­ma­tion and an approach that teaches good dig­i­tal cit­i­zen­ship to our kids. Of course, not all of them will learn from such an oppor­tu­nity, but that is no rea­son to not pro­vide it.

We must have no more His­tory Wars nor any­thing like them in other fields. Nor locked-​​down sys­tems. Nor one-​​size-​​fits-​​all cur­ricu­lum. Nor stan­dard­ised tests that prove noth­ing beyond an abil­ity to pass on the day (as an exam­ple, one of the most inspir­ing and intel­li­gent peo­ple I know, can­not pass such tests).

I’m no expert on edu­ca­tion. But I under­stand tech­nol­ogy, col­lab­o­ra­tion and the ben­e­fits of open organ­i­sa­tions and I have a pretty good idea of what it’s going to take to be capa­ble as a par­tic­i­pant in the 21^st Cen­tury. I’ve had words to say about this sub­ject in the past, and while noth­ing sub­stan­tial changes, I’ll keep at it.

EDIT: Darcy Moore, an edu­ca­tor and high school admin­is­tra­tor explains why MySchool is a prob­lem, with some his­tory, and how inno­v­a­tive approaches else­where have been successful.