To meet challenges of a new era, the animals created a school. To make it fair, and easier to oversee, all animals took the same subjects.
The duck was an ace swimmer, a good flier, but a hopeless runner. The rabbit was a fabulous runner, but fell behind in swimming. The squirrel climbed well, but struggled with the flying curriculum, which mandated starting from the bottom up, rather than from the treetop down. The eagle was a good climber, but insisted on his own way of doing it.
At year’s end a snake that could swim and climb well, and run and fly a bit, was the valedictorian.
This is one version of a story written in 1940 by educational administrator George Reavis. Its insight into the realities of education reminds me of the tension between administration and teaching. It’s a tug-of-war over aims and methods waged by dedicated professionals working against each other for the better education of youth.
A colleague once defined educational administration as "keeping all the frogs in the wheelbarrow." For me, it was about establishing consistency in workload, standards, and assessment; ensuring safety and security; and fostering a learning climate. But dealing with large numbers of students and teachers inevitably leads to some form of standardization. That may make the system work efficiently, but it doesn’t always serve students well.
In this instance I’m on the side of the frogs. Standardization is the enemy of learning.
Any teacher knows that students learn differently; at different speeds. Successful teaching requires knowing enough about how every student learns in order to present something – say a math problem – in a variety of different ways until each kid gets it.
Standardization works if you want to teach by rote and prepare students for a life of repetitive tasks - effective when the goal of American public education was training an industrial workforce. But recent studies show that only about a third of job growth in the US is in areas that require routine, step-by-step, mechanical thinking. Two-thirds occurs in areas requiring creativity, experimentation, and associative, rather than linear, thinking. That requires a different approach to teaching than the increasingly test-driven curricula now assuming primacy in American education.
We should be careful about trying to invent what historian David Tyack called “the one best system.” There’s no such thing. Trying to create one risks turning schools into a penal system imprisoning those who need them most.
