In the Start Trek universe, the Kobayashi Maru was a training exercise to test how Starfleet cadets handle a no-win scenario. The character, Captain Kirk, was the only cadet ever to beat the test. He did so by secretly reprogramming the simulator.
I wonder if we are facing our own no-win situation in education and perhaps we need to think of rewriting the simulation, or in our case, the social contract between the public and the state. Here’s the short version of what I mean:
One way of looking at education is to see it as the outcome of a social contract between the public and the state. The public pays taxes, the state provides the schooling. Students get an education and the state gets a capable citizenry. The thing we call schooling is the instrument that makes that possible. Win-win.
In this view, the various education reform movements, however well-intended, can be seen as attempts of one party to rewrite unilaterally the terms of the contract. Changing education without fully consulting the other party (even to see if they really want the change in the first place, see point #9 below) is seen as a breach of contract. The objection might not be to the proposed change as such, but to making the change unilaterally. Lose-lose.
In the longer version..
Changing terms is fine, but if you are going to do that in any substantial way, all parties need to be involved in the negotiation from the beginning. It would be fair to expect some resistance to anything else. This might be flat out rejection or, as I think we are experiencing, a legitimate hesitancy, sometimes active, sometimes unconscious, that comes from not fully understanding what’s being proposed...as you would be if someone got very excited about rewriting your mortgage and changing your payments to Bitcoin without bringing you into the process.
Note this contract metaphor doesn’t take into account that any proposed transformation of a system is an act of imposition—you’re asking people to change what they do just because you say it’s better. The psychology of change is far more powerful that the rationalizing and contracting of it.
It also doesn’t account for what might appear as a bait and switch trick. In the last 50 years or so, the contract has become more complex in that school, originally the mechanism described in the social contract through which the contract was fulfilled, has itself become a party to the contract. Unions and professional organizations in are now part of any negotiations. (Canada is an interesting study in the political power of teacher associations and their influence on the public narrative on education.) Now the public finds itself dealing with education when it originally bargained only with the state. Again, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does make the situation more complex.
Granted, at the local scale, individual schools generally do a good job informing the communities they serve when they are undertaking a new intitative. This seems especially true in small towns, faith-based school systems and independent schools. The state also generally does its job of informing the public of changes to the contract, as when it launches an updated curriculum, for example.
But these changes are incremental, not transformative, and probably within the scope of the original contract, so to speak.
As well, we should consider there is a natural and proper conservative sentiment built into the existing contract that comes from working with a vulnerable sector of our communities—children. Think of it as a clause that says amendments to the contract should always be made in a way that preserves the well-being of students. This doesn’t necessarily mean reforms don’t have a chance, but it does create considerable inhibitions to testing new ideas that are unproven at the scale at which public education systems operate. The argument parents sometimes make that “schools was good enough for me” is valid: consider that all the great human achievements we’ve seen, from quantum mechanics to a backyard BBQs with the neighbours, were made by people who went through the system we are saying is wanting reform. (Indeed, many went through no system at all.)
However, if you’re an educational reformist, thought leader, consultant etc. advocating more profound change I wonder if the vision you promote isn’t tantamount to a new contract.
So rather than thinking we are reforming education, we should maybe think we are re-negotiating the social contract: how do we, as communities, go about educating people? And while we are answering that, let’s not make schooling as we have it now an assumption. That might change our conversations and would be genuinely disruptive, radical, reformational, re-etc.
And it might give us a chance at winning.
Renegotiating the social contract would have three possible outcomes: 1.) we no longer have schools and create some other mechanism for educating people, 2.) we have schools as one part of some larger system, or 3.) we keep schools as the exclusive provider, albeit in some changed form.
My money and my thinking right now is on 2.
Share this post