Breaking the Ruler

Education at the primary and secondary levels has always been rules-based: raise your hand, get a hall pass, obey the dress code, show your work, double-space, check your chewing gum at the door. As much as we hated them (and who didn't grow up hating all those rules?), schools have good reason to employ them. Understanding how rules work in society -- how to comply and function well within them -- is one of the basic socialization lessons of the education system.

We grew up learning to play by the rules while hating them all the while. It's no wonder we feel so ambiguous toward them.

The current trend is toward additional rules, not fewer. The current U.S. Federal emphasis on testing, standardized curricula, and accountability exerts a profound push towards a rules-based approach to learning and running a classroom. More rules seems to be the thinly veiled war cry underlying much of what these initiatives seek. Throughout the educational establishment, though, educators seem to be pushing back, as teachers decry more strict, standardized curriculums that hamper their ability to employ the full range of teaching tools to fulfill their students' specific needs.

I'm not expert enough to comment on whether or not these approaches to curriculum are better or worse for our students, but Rob Jacobs is writing a thoughtful series of posts on his blog, Education Innovation, where he explores HOW in the classroom. A recent installment on the influence of rules really inspired me:

We know that rules fail. Students find all sorts of clever ways around them. We adults use whatever gray area we can when the situation calls for it.

Like Rob, I wonder if the changes underway in society don't call for a new approach, whether our over-reliance on rules is truly preparing our students for the world to come.

Today's technology provides each of us with access, choice, and reach unimaginable just a few years ago and young people are early adopters. Think about the resources available to small-town middle school students in Iowa or Utah (or for that matter, Bangalore, India) as compared to a few years ago. Not only do they have the same information as their big-city peers but they have it right in their bedrooms. The technologies of tomorrow will only further these trends.As they can see out into their world, their world can see in. Social networking technologies allow young people unprecedented access to each other and unrestrained ability to share themselves. How, in the quiet dark of their bedrooms, do our kids know what information to share and what to spare? What is safe? What reveals too much? What is in their best interest over the long-term?

Rules put in place by teachers, parents, or mentors stand little change of restraining these kidsŐ behaviors and, as our kids grow up, they will encounter a world of choices that multiply faster than there will be rules to govern them. Yet we pile on more rules, seeking erroneously to counter permissiveness in the classroom. This just makes matters worse.

The more rules kids encounter, the more governance lives outside of them. These environments breed an over-reliance on rules at exactly the time when, to thrive in the world, they need to increasingly rely on themselves, their own decisions, and their own values to navigate the waters ahead.

That's why we need to help young people become more self-governing in everything they do. In a world that is more open than ever, is evolving faster than ever, and contains more choices and possibilities for more people than ever, every one of us starting at ever younger ages must get better at making decisions for ourselves, decisions that uphold our deepest values and that steer us with certainty, even in uncertain waters. It strikes me that this should begin in the classroom.

There's been a lot of interest in HOW from the education community, a trend I find both exciting and fascinating, and I think it reveals a deep vein of similar feeling. Though HOW is shelved in the Business Section, it's really a book about how we work together as groups and individuals to achieve our goals. Isn't that the real goal of our schools, too?

Let's talk more about how we can build self-governing cultures in the classroom as well as the workplace. I want to develop "10 Steps Toward a More Self-Governing Classroom," and make it available for any educator who wants it. To contribute, either offer a comment here or send a private email to our editors using this form.

Help me explore the ways in which we can we begin to help our children take on more of life's challenges. Lets not leave the real work to rules.

Comments

[The Collinbrandt]

You can never be a great leader if you only follow the rules set out by our dynastic rulers (The Bush Family). With all the problems our world has today future generations need to think "outside the box". My generation had great authors to teach us the difference between right and wrong. We had shows like "Gunsmoke" and "Star Trek" to reinforce these values. Good luck to the future.

[mrcontinental]

And what good is intellect without purpose? Left to their own devices kids will always chose what they want to do over what needs to be done.

Rules are the glue that hold any team together and learning to work within the rules are the only way to be successful. Without rules you have anarchy where the strongest will impose their wills on the weakest. Without rules we have no society.

You have to teach kids to follow rules because it demonstrates that they are in place to benefit the group as a whole. If anything we already have enough of the "Rules don't apply to me" in this culture already. Lack of respect for rules can be traced to all of the ills in our society and is pervasive from the white house all the way to the local kindergarden.

Simply put, the kids who don't follow the rules generally grow up to not follow laws either or selectively chose the ones that they want to follow which is just as bad in my opinion.

[dadw5boys]

In the 1980’s Colleges graduates a huge number of people with Masters Degree of in Business and Marketing, One of the first niche markets they discovered was Early Childhood Education. The Learning Centers and Lesson Plans were supposed to give the Teacher more free time to help each student. What it did though was take the need for in-depth thought by the Teacher about each lesson plan and how to apply it to each student in the current class. Teachers were marginalized by these products and gave School Boards all over the country the IDEA that anyone could to teach and School Boards could do it on the cheap because anyone who can follow instruction can teach from learning center.
Assumption is the mother of all screw ups is a saying from the military. I choose this because military service use to be thought of as what any dummy could be ask to do. Today extensive training is needed just to be a member of a squad that is expected to do the same work as a company of soldiers in a military action. Workers today in the USA face competition from around the world and from people where the students are taught by real teachers not some product a business has been successful in selling to School Boards.
Those real Teachers are respected and treated with respect mostly because the Teachers respect themselves and earn every penny they are paid. Using these Teaching Systems and Learning Centers prepared by some Corporation denies a Classroom Teacher the ability to grow in skill levels not only in thinking and planning but for their own self respect. These Teachers went to college to become a professional and learned how to create, plan, prepare and implement lesson plans. Now they are judged on how well the can translate prepared plans to the students. No Testing of these plans has been done no changes are allowed. What the school system seem to be aiming for are robots in the Classroom and I assume a repairman for a Principle.