Over the past two weeks I learned that three teens in three different leading independent schools on the East Coast took their own lives. Two of them committed suicide on campus. While we can never fully know the reasons young people make such tragic choices, the evidence is clear that an education system that does not put young people first plays a major role, and the broken system is not confined to our public schools or the underprivileged. For even the most successful teens, high school has become an anxiety-producing machine--and we don't seem able to reprogram it.
With the U.S. House of Representatives' stimulus package committing more than $100 billion for education programs in the K-12 environment, it is clear that education is crucial to business. Maybe it's time to think of it as one and focus our attention on the consumers of that business: the students.
The current win-lose, right-wrong model of education is entirely a model of scarcity. Most all of our recent decisions regarding education are predicated on the idea that if we simply remediate the weaknesses in the system that we will in effect fix the problems. But the problems are not as simple as we contend. What we are dealing with is an outdated model.
The current paradigm has everyone from the most academically talented to the most challenged believing that there is one road to success--and that all the on-ramps to that road are backed up for miles. This is all wrong. You can feel in your gut that is wrong, but more importantly, teens, a consumer representing a major demographic of the education business know it is wrong and while we stand around debating what to do or not do in a system that is fundamentally wrong, they are deciding they are not going to take it any longer. They are not buying into it.
See, it doesn't matter if you agree with me or not--when kids start dropping out in record numbers, and mental health departments at the Ivies are the fastest growing department on campus, and children are taking their own lives, it doesn't matter what the adults are debating. The evidence is clear--the high school as we know it is no longer relevant. And no amount of advanced technology or higher standards is going to create the change we seek. Our education system needs transcendence, not fixing.
The secondary school environment in the United States and throughout the world is flawed because it is focused on achievement over relevant and meaningful learning. Having a 4.0 grade point average or perfect scores on standardized tests doesn't define who a child is or who he is able to become. Children yearn to be more than a list of achievements and scores; they desire relevance. Unfortunately, our schools do not provide them with the things they truly need to discover success in their lives.
The reality is that teens today are able to learn more outside of school than in it. Students no longer need teachers to deliver content to them. Today, students can watch lectures at home if that is what is needed. Sitting in a school, listening to a teacher talk to them all day is, in a word, boring.
The 1992 study The Silent Epidemic, conducted by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, uncovered that many drop-outs are motivated and above average academically. The study cited that the number one reason they are dropping out is boredom. For those who do stay in school, boredom is still a factor. They are simply more adept at playing the game until they get through. But is "getting through" enough?
Our educational system will not deliver results until we meet the consumers where they are and give them what they want; they want to make the world a better place--they want to do this with rich technology that connects them in meaningful ways to work that plays to their strengths. This is the desire of all teens, no matter what their economic or racial background.
Refocusing education will take more than money. It will take a fundamental shift in what we believe to be true about high school. Until this shift is realized, the stimulus package for education will only serve the adults, not the children. The real question the education community should be asking at this time in history is "What do schools do that can't be done by anyone else, anywhere?" When high school teachers and administrators can answer this question, they will take a giant leap toward relevancy for teens.
All the money in the world will not fix a system that is outmoded. The longer we continue to merely discuss our schools as broken and in need of rescue, the more we will see teens rebel. The longer we continue to approach education from a scarcity model the weaker it will get, and young people will continue to leave to pursue other interests. The fact is most teachers still teach like they are in the 20th Century--and teens have transcended this pedagogy. Young people that desire true stimulus don't just want to be bailed out.
Many high school students today want to change the world and they are doing just that in spite of what they spend the day at school learning. You don't believe me? Check out MTV's Think, an online community unconnected with any school where teens are involved in self-initiated nonprofit organizations and activism dealing with a wide range of topics including health, human rights, politics, education, faith and the environment. The tag line of this online community is "Your Cause, Your Effect."
Have a look at idealist.org, a website devoted to getting people involved in causes all around the world. Much of the content on this page is geared toward proving teens with meaningful opportunities to change the world. Young people can focus in on their strengths, pick activities and causes that truly energize them and learn how to make meaningful contributions, all online. Thousands of teens participate in these communities and that is just the tip of the iceberg.
To young people, these places are relevant. Here they are able to choose activities based on their strengths and passions, they can make meaningful contributions that help them learn and build their expertise based on real life. These sites and the dozens like them are not initiated in schools--they are flowing from and funded by corporate America.
While we race toward new solutions to fix a broken machine, young people are transcending our system and creating new ways to learn and feel fulfilled--ways that have nothing to do with school. Until we can figure out how to use the stimulus package to stimulate meaningful learning that young people want to remain a part of, we will not improve our system.
Jenifer Fox is the Author of Your Childs Strengths (Penguin, 2009) and a leader in the Strengths Movement in Schools, a non-profit devoted to joining corporate America with youth in discovering ways to build on strengths for a more prosperous future.
You can contact Jennifer at jeniferfx@gmail.com.
Follow Jenifer Fox on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jeniferfox
I also spent a lot of time learning grammar rules. I think I know what a gerund is, but the fact is-- I can write well without knowing that information. These points aside, I am intrigued by your comment that you "believe in the factory model of learning the essentials in life". What is essential for young people to learn? If you determine what is essential for a young person to learn, then surely it will speak a relevancy for today's youth if you can also demonstrate for them why it is essential.
I am pleased to let you and your readers know that I -- along with a team of like-minded, passionate people from within and outside the world of education -- have been working for years to create a new, transcendent secondary school model fit for today’s (and tomorrow’s) world. And this coming September we will be opening School for Tomorrow (SFT) in Rockville, MD (a suburb of our nation’s capital) with the specific intent of serving as a model for others and a motivator of transformational change in American education.
SFT will close the huge gap that exists between today’s outdated secondary schools and the realities, challenges, and opportunities of today’s world. SFT will truly be unlike any school you’ve ever seen -- one which will enable all students to reach their potentials and prepare themselves for the life ahead of them.
I invite you to visit our website (www.schoolfortomorrow.net) and, even better, our physical site. If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact me at AShusterman.SFT@gmail.com.
Thanks!
Alan
Alan Shusterman, J.D., C.S.C.
Founder
School for Tomorrow
www.schoolfortomorrow.net
4511 Bestor Drive, Rockville, MD 20853
240-476-6041
I would definately have done much better if allowed to study what I wanted to... instead I stopped paying attention and put minimal effort... I didn't see a future... After school ended I learned far more on my own learning things that interested me.
Find ways to accomodate them..it's no surprise that the current system isn't working. There's too much variability in children to have one system that operates so mechanistically according to one path..
I find that a lot of teachers and parents are afraid of the intelligence of the children. until we get past our own insecurities, it will be difficult to support a system meant to bring out the best in us all.
We have been hearing for 30 years that our public schools are broken. Would you want to be forced to go everyday to a defective institution? It has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. "Japan's (or Germany's, or India's, or China's) school children are more prepared for college or work." We are comparing apples and oranges. These countries all track students from an early age. American public schools don't believe in tracking anymore. Any child, prepared or not, can now take an AP class in high school, thanks to US News and World Report's ratings.
Some bright students have always dropped out from boredom. Dropout prevention should matter, but our national graduation rate has only been higher than now during the Vietnam war draft.
Things are not as bad as some would have us believe.
In that connection, we need a greater emphasis on using vocational education to prepare children who aren't into academics for future jobs. So we should create an academic track and a vocational track (and which track is chosen should be left up to the child and his/her parents). Basic education should be finished by ninth grade and then high school should be about preparing kids to be adults, be it for college or for work. Let's be pragmatic here and end all the idealistic garbage (and also do away with turning schools into extensions of local social service agencies), be it from the right or the left, that has made schools such political footballs.
That is gone now, but you have a very valid point.
The other thing I will say, as a MS math teacher, teachers in the main do NOT teach. From what I have seen in several schools, they make sure to cover ALL the "stuff" on the NCLB or state tests, and to hell with what I would define as REAL learning. I tutored my kids AFTER SCHOOL (voluntarily not for money), and it was up to them to come to the tutoring. I was constantly amazed at what 7th and 8th graders DID NOT KNOW or understand about mathematics. I actually had many kids in 7th grade who could not do simple multiplications (5x8; 11x11; etc.) without working the problem on the board or on paper. Almost NONE OF THEM knew the answer in their head. Without this FUNDAMENTAL underpinning, most of these kids will never do good in math.
Sad, but it can be fixed. The first thing is fire the district and state superintendents and the unions.
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In theme schools, students can pursue their personal and intellectual interests. They can take courses they are passionate about. And the teachers can actually teach an array of courses in their field.
The school system should also move from a test based curriculum to a project based curriculum. That accomplishes two things: It teaches students how to conduct research and it allows and encourages students to take ownership of their learning.
Fortunately, my family moved and my new high school had a character right up my alley and, as a result, I actually ended up enjoying my high school years and it put me in a good frame of mind for college.
So failure to heed the school personality aspect of education is, I think, one component of why some students choose to commit suicide. Every day as a teenager tends to be a navel gazing festival of insecurity anyway. Let's not shoehorn kinds into environments that make them hate education and themselves.
It depends. If you are interested in the subject and the teacher isn't giving you a lot of emptyheaded happy talk that often passes for history, for example, in elementary and secondary schools, then that format can be great.
I would also remind Fox that she isn't a teenager. Her and I are probably around the same age and she has no more idea of how teenagers today think than I do.
Look, the first thing we need to do is get rid of schoolboards, whose gross incompetence, corruption and small minded, self-seeking agendas are the primary culprits in destroying our education system. The schoolboard is a 19th century form of control that is no longer useful because, more often than not, they block innovation and impede needed change because too may of their members are fossils from an era long past.
We tend to teach the way we were taught or in the way that worked best for us when we were in school. Today most of us are digital natives, teaching kids who are digital immigrants. Either we work our asses off to keep up and see things through contemporary kids eyes, or we are all fossils. School boards are just citizens and they vary widely. Not sure it's particularly useful to see them as some monolithic problem. But school as a rule tends to be conservative, not in the political sense but as in concerned with preserving a set of values and institutional and community goals. The question is "What should the values and goals be?"
My idea is to have teachers own the results of their school by being allowed to form a committee to run it. In other words, I am for the pros being allowed to do their jobs unimpeded by outsiders with wacked out political or religious agendas or political ambitions. Plus my idea removes a big layer of bureaucracy.
I spent years talking to teachers, principals, newspapers, and other parents. Nothing ever seemed to change.
There are so many things wrong with this model, I do not even know where to begin, but working within the system we have, my main and constant observation is that our kids are never taught HOW to study. They are gradually taught more academics, but not how to take what is taught in class, and independently digest the information and transform it into knowledge.
Large high schools are just teenage warehouses.
Yet in my heart of hearts, I know that we will all learn in an area that interests us. We all have a yearning to grow and express ourselves to the world around us and it's abusive to tell an active young person to sit still and shut up when the desire to sing, dance, shout and climb is bound up in their heart. I pray for the day when a teacher will be defined as an adult who is skilled at nurturing, expanding and unleashing the unique genius contained in each young soul and not in producing the most 4.0 GPAers.
It is time for the field of education to rededicate itself to following established educational research and not political rhetoric and business as usual educational policies.
And those textbooks are usually decades out of date.