Applying Scientific Methodology to Educational Technique

In a recent discussion of the No Child Left Behind Act, it was suggested that busting the "educational cartel" would be a step forward in public education. It was also suggested that to question the efficacy of charter schools or whether present voucher proposals are sensible is tantamount to "scrapping the whole idea" behind such projects. But the real problem goes much deeper than proponents of competition realize. Or perhaps they recognize the problems but aren't willing to adequately address them, or have other motives (such as obtaining public money for parochial school tuition) that they deem more important than actual improvement in our nation's system of education.

What is most striking about K-12 education is that, save for a constant parade of gimmicks, it remains pretty much what it has always been. Put kids into a building, shuffle them off to a classroom, sit them behind desks, lecture, and test. Granted, schools have added labs and hands-on components to many classes to provide something beyond the lecture, but if you remember your school days you probably remember some horrible, ineffective laboratory work. I recall chemistry labs which may as well have been cooking classes - follow the recipe and get graded on how well it turns out, whether or not you learn anything. And, as much as Canada was trying to encourage bilingualism, the language "lab" component that was grafted on to the ineffective classroom instruction was a waste of time.

Language instruction fascinates me, because it is typically done badly in classrooms, with the only alternative people seem willing to recognize being language immersion courses. Yet for decades there have been alternative programs, including high-cost programs offered to business clients and government programs offered to diplomats, which promise a working vocabulary and functional conversational proficiency through short-term training. That is, they promise to deliver in the short-term a result that most schools, public and private, can't deliver despite forcing children to suffer through year after year of classroom instruction.

And no small part of the problem is that languages are typically taught in about as unnatural a manner as teachers can concoct - memorize vocabulary lists and verb conjugations, delay teaching complicated verb forms, provide a unduly limited vocabulary, stage stilted 'conversations' based on that limited vocabulary, and otherwise work to ensure that even after several years of study a diligent student will still need a dictionary to struggle through a children's story in the foreign language under study.

It isn't that it would be hard to come up with a better way to teach language. As previously suggested, alternative methods already exist. They simply aren't being used in most classrooms, whether because teachers (and teaching schools) are too used to existing methods, because it would be "too expensive" to switch to new methods, or possibly because nobody even thinks to attempt it.

And don't get me started on history instruction - the rote memorization of names, dates, places and events. It is easy to find children who "hate history" - but for the most part, they haven't had any opportunity to learn history. As those who love history and absorb history books know, history is full of wonderful and fascinating stories and narratives. Unfortunately, it is hard to fit in those stories - which might give rise to an actual learning experience - because those darn kids have such a hard time absorbing the dry, sterilized list of names, dates, places and events that most school teachers believe constitute "history", and which are going to be the central focus of "the test".

How about something as basic as reading? There are countless products pitched at schools to help children "learn to read". There are noisome battles between "whole language" advocates and "phonics" proponents, each of whom have their own gimmicks, products, and ideologies. But why is the focus more on the marketing of ideas and products than on the scientific basis for those ideas and products? It is possible to test products and teaching techniques, and to get quantifiable results in relatively short order. But, even when people try to apply scientific methodology to reading and language instruction, who is listening?

Most private schools follow teaching models very similar to those offered in public school. Those schools and school models which come up with innovative teaching or classroom technique rarely see their techniques picked up by other schools, public or private. Even when a good idea is adopted, it is often simplified, modified, or misinterpreted from the outset - without respect to how the original idea worked - and its remains may be subject to further misapplication by a classroom teacher.

It seemed like charter schools would offer an opportunity for true innovation. Freed from the public school bureaucracy, a charter school should be able to innovate, and should be able to test and apply educational models and techniques which offer more than the status quo. But to date, even when charter schools are attached to universities or teachers' colleges, that doesn't seem to happen. Gifted education? Across the board the response seems to be "enrichment" - which is a nice-sounding word but usually translates into "give the smart kid some busy work" - or accelerating the curriculum.

You would almost think that, as long as their kids are scoring reasonably well on "standardized tests" and bring home acceptable "grades", most parents, even when they are paying for their kids' school tuition, are sufficiently happy to regard their school as a convenient babysitting service. Because most parents express satisfaction with their child's school, yet that's largely what they get.