G - There ARE Better Ways!.

It will be difficult for me to write about means of achieving
educational objectives more efficient and effective than traditional
standard practice without revealing two strong biases: (1) computer
and audio/visual technology are much more effective trainers than
traditional formal school and, in cooperation with the school, (2)
the home, with its attendant love and acceptance, provides an
environment much more conducive to learning than the traditional
school. There are many educational methods recognized by
psychologists and educational researchers; no one method fits all
people, but the inflexible traditional school environment and method
suggests that educators believe one method is enough. For example,
most babies walk by the age of two and talk by the age of three; but
all parents know that no two children accomplish the development of
these skills in the same way. Each child discovers his own best way
to learn, and the home is usually the most desirable environment.

The most effective teacher is one who cares, who provides what the
medical profession used to refer to as "TLC," tender loving care. A
few years ago a journalist was doing research for an article on
effective teaching and interviewed several successful adults in a
particular town who all remembered the same first grade teacher.
When the journalist interviewed that former first grade teacher and
asked what procedures and methods she used to make her teaching so
effective as to have had such an impact on so many successful
adults, she responded that she did not knowingly use any special
methods--she did not think she was that organized--but mentioned,
almost as an after-thought, "I sure did love those kids."

An atmosphere of tolerance, acceptance, love, reassurance and
respect is most conducive to learning. Perhaps it is unrealistic to
expect this in the public school. Although it doesn't exist in all
homes, it is more probably found there than in the school.

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      . . if you want bright kids, you should cuddle them a lot as
      babies because that increases the number of neural connections
      produced in the brain.

              Steven Rose, Open University -- England.

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       . . the typical developmental pattern [of genius] includes: .
       . a high degree of attention focused upon the child by
       parents and other adults, expressed in . . . usually abundant
       love;

                - - - - Harold McCurdy for SMITHSONIAN

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     A student does not care how much I know if he does not know how
     much I care.
                 - - - - - unknown source.

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The first example of a home school that I encountered was reported
in an issue of the Cosmopolitan Magazine during the school year of
1957-58, my first year of formal teaching. It was about a family who
had to move to a remote location in order to escape the harassment
of school administrators, concerned more about their own jobs than
viable education programs. The 20th century idea of do-it-yourself
education, which experienced authorities such as A. S. Neill and
Raymond Moore convincingly claim is the most effective form of
education, has not grown as it should for several possible reasons:
(1) parental lethargy, (2) archaic truancy and child labor laws and
(3) self-serving teacher organizations with lobbyists dedicated to
preserving an educational system that is inappropriate for the late
20th century and thereafter. School teachers' strikes succeed only
because parents who abdicate their responsibilities do not want
their youngsters remaining at home to interfere with the parents'
activities. The teachers' most valuable function is consequently
acknowledged as baby sitting.

I shall allow Alvin Toffler, a well-known and widely published
futurist, "run interference" for me in this excerpt from his book,
Future Shock:

     Mass education [of the 19th century] was the ingenious machine
     constructed by industrialism to produce the kind of adults it
     needed. . . How to pre-adapt children for a new world . . in
     which time was to be regulated . . by the factory whistle and
     the clock.

     The solution was an educational system that, in its very
     structure, simulated this new world. . . The whole
     administrative hierarchy of education, as it grew up, followed
     the model of industrial bureaucracy. . .

     . . . The most criticized features of education today--the
     regimentation, lack of individualization, the rigid systems of
     seating, grouping, grading and marking, the authoritarian role
     of the teacher--are precisely those that made mass public
     education so effective an instrument of adaptation for its
     place and time. . .

     In the technological systems of tomorrow . . . machines and men
     both, instead of being concentrated in gigantic factories and
     factory cities, will be scattered across the globe, linked
     together by amazingly sensitive, near- instantaneous
     communications. Human work will move out of the factory and
     mass office into the community and the home. . . The factory
     whistle will vanish . . In such a world, the most valued
     attributes of the industrial era become handicaps. . . Trapped
     in an education system intent on turning them into living
     anachronisms, today's students have every right to rebel. . .
     For generations, we have simply assumed that the proper place
     for education to occur is in a school. Yet, if the new
     education is to simulate the society of tomorrow, should it
     take place in school at all?

     As levels of education rise, more and more parents are
     intellectually equipped to assume some responsibilities now
     delegated to the schools. . . many parents are clearly more
     capable of teaching certain subjects to their children than are
     the teachers in the local school. With the move toward
     knowledge-based industry and the increase of leisure, we can
     anticipate . . highly educated parents to pull their children
     at least partway out of the public education system, offering
     them home instruction instead.

     This trend will be sharply encouraged by improvements in
     computer-assisted education, electronic video recording,
     holography and other technical fields. . . Pressures in this
     direction will mount as the schools grow more anachronistic,
     and the courts will find themselves deluged with cases
     attacking the present obsolete compulsory attendance laws. We
     may witness, in short, a limited dialectical swing back toward
     education in the home. . .

       . . The rapid obsolescence of knowledge and the extension of
       life span make it clear that the skills learned in youth are
       unlikely to remain relevant by the time old age arrives.
       Super- industrial education must therefore make provision for
       life-long education on a plug-in/plug-out basis. . . If
       learning is to be stretched over a lifetime, there is reduced
       justification for forcing kids to attend school full time. .
       .

Toffler is not alone in his recognition of the wisdom of life- long
learning. Society traditionally, for the past 100 years or so, has
expected children to attend formal school and adults to engage in
work. Consequently, adults consider themselves non-learners. There
is no reason adults cannot continue to learn. Recent research has
refuted the notion that one's intelligence peaks in his early 20's
and declines gradually throughout the remainder of his life.
[Malcolm Knowles. The Adult Learner: A Neglected Species pp.
165-169]. Knowles advocates life long learning by quoting several
perceptive observers, particularly Alfred North Whitehead:

     . . . it was appropriate to define education as a process of
     transmitting what is known only when the time-span of major
     cultural change was greater than the life-span of the
     individuals. Under this condition, what people learn in their
     youth will remain valid and useful for the rest of their lives.
     But, . . "We are living in the first period in human history
     for which this assumption is false . . . today this time-span
     is considerably shorter than that of human life, and
     accordingly our training must prepare individuals to face a
     novelty of conditions." Education must, therefore, be defined
     as a life long process of continuing inquiry. And so the most
     important learning of all -- for both children and adults - -
     is LEARNING HOW TO LEARN, acquiring the skills of SELF directed
     inquiry.

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     "The only constant in the late twentieth century is flux."

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     " . . for the first time in history, education is now engaged
     in preparing men for a type of society which does not yet
     exist."
                    - - - - Edgar Faure

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Toffler continues:

     . . Today lectures still dominate the classroom. This method
     symbolizes the old top-down, hierarchical structure of
     industry. . Lectures must inevitably give way to a whole
     battery of teaching techniques, ranging from role playing and
     gaming to computer-mediated seminars and the immersion of
     students in what we might call "contrived experiences" . . .

     Today children who enter school quickly find themselves part of
     a standard and basically unvarying organizational structure: a
     teacher-led class. One adult and a certain number of
     subordinate young people, usually seated in fixed rows facing
     front, is the standardized basic unit of the industrial-era
     school. They gain no experience with other forms of
     organization, or with the problems of shifting from one
     organizational form to another. They get no training for role
     versatility. . . . . . . As for curriculum, . . Anyone who
     thinks the present curriculum makes sense is invited to explain
     to an intelligent fourteen- year-old why . . any . . subject is
     essential for him. Adult answers are almost always evasive. The
     reason is simple: the present curriculum is a mindless holdover
     from the past. . . .

     The present curriculum and its division into air- tight
     compartments is not based on any well thought out conception of
     contemporary human needs. . [It] is nailed into place by the
     rigid entrance requirements of colleges, which, in turn,
     reflect the vocational and social requirements of a vanishing
     society.

Schools have been accused of designing curricula around the
employment needs of the salaried personnel. Why are physical
education and history, for example, required courses when computer
science, business and economics are electives in those high schools
which are fortunate enough to offer them? The possible reason is not
because students have a greater need for physical education and
history, but because there is an overabundance of instructors in
these subjects and a scarcity of instructors in fields in which
schools cannot pay instructors enough to attract them from business
and industry into education.

The continued dominance of the lecture form of dispensing
information suggests that school personnel have not been informed
that Gutenburg invented the printing press approximately five and
one-half centuries ago! Likewise, exclusive use of lecture and
written materials in the classroom suggests that educators are
apparently unaware of the many informational tools emerging in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries: radio, phonograph, motion
picture, television. The computer and its effective educational
potential is still relatively ignored by the educational
establishment.

Educators have resisted the computer for several reasons; here are a
few examples: (1) inability to adapt to a new technology, (2) fear
of diminishing their own importance in the eyes of their students,
(3) computer anxiety, (4) district and state funding formulas'
requiring students' physical presence in the classroom and (5)
outright irrational contempt. Such contempt is exemplified by an
English teacher who took offense at my suggestion that he could have
written an accreditation report in less than 25% of the time he took
if he had used a word processing computer. He adamantly revealed at
that time that he doesn't even want his students to use word
processors to prepare their essays and term papers.

With such educators' attitudes against computers, parents and
scholars have little choice than to provide their own. Any household
that can afford a color television set and an automobile can afford
a computer. Computer stores in any city distribute catalogues of
educational computer software and many progressive school districts
are stocking libraries with computer aided instruction materials.
Commercial computer software designing firms have prepared
educational materials in subjects from Accounting to Zoology
appropriate for pre-school to college and adult levels. There are
even packages available for those wishing the specific objective of
passing the high school G. E. D. exam.

And learning by computer has another distinct advantage: most
consider it much more pleasurable to gain an education by using
computers than by attending classes. The first attempts at creating
educational computer programs were monotonous repetition and drill,
too much like the expected monotony of the classroom. Since then,
however, designers have recognized the value of incorporating into
their packages the rationale behind educational games. I believe
that the true scholar finds all learning enjoyable. In my nearly 30
years as an educator, however, I have found too few students who fit
this category, who consider the primary valid educational motivation
to be desire and independent quest. The educational establishment's
answer is the extrinsic motivation provided by the punishment and
reward system of grading. Computer games with educational objectives
make learning fun without coercion or threat. They and other more
effective informational delivery systems will be discussed in the
next section.