In my last post I mentioned the idea of “assumption stacks” and hinted at how they might give us a clue as to why education reform doesn’t seem to stick and scale.
An assumption is something we take to be true without having proof that it is so. This is not to say it’s necessarily wrong, just that it is something we take as a given.
All that matters here is that we are aware when we are making assumptions. Unconscious assumptions can get us into a bind, as we will see in a moment.
An assumption stack is different from a single assumption or even a collection of assumptions in the way the elements of the stack are mutually reinforcing. An assumption stack is a group of assumptions that together form a large, internally consistent structure. Something like a software solution stack, it is a platform on which other ideas can operate without needing any further external validation.
Assumption stacks compound the problem of testing our assumptions. Normally, we can expose an assumption by stepping out of its frame of reference. For example, when I was head of THINK Global School we started our first year in operation with a rather typical bell schedule, running classes from something like 8:30a to 3:30p even though teachers and students lived together 24 hours a day. When we stepped back and took that bell schedule as assumption about how a school week should look, we were able to adopt a flexible schedule which included academics sometimes at night, sometimes on the weekend. This allowed us to take advantage of events running in the cities and countries were were visiting. But an assumption stack is so big that its is very difficult to get outside it. We can’t see the forest for the trees, so to speak, because the forest appears to go on forever. This makes them very difficulty to see, let alone test. For example, the school calendar is not set up for optimal learning; it’s set up for optimal delivery of education (From the state’s point of view. See the writings of Ellwood Cubberley and other pioneers of public education on this.) When we try to change it we run into the problem that that delivery model is contingent on the rhythm of other systems—the 9-to-5-Monday-to-Friday work week of the adult world, for example. Education, as a public insitution, has more functions than teaching and learning.
Over time, an assumption stack can take on the qualities of a natural fact. It becomes part of the landscape. Then we become paralyzed by what Stephen Duncombe calls the “tyranny of the possible,” the belief that the current conditions make it impossible to do anything about our situation. (Some people call this scarcity-thinking and contrast it with abundance-thinking. There’s been lots written on this idea, but my favourite illustration comes from Benjamin Zander’s 2008 TED Talk, The Transformative Power of Classical Music.)
When we accept such limits on possibility we are confusing social and physical limitations, as Erik Olin Wright explains in Envisioning Real Utopias. I’d like to quote from the book at length:
“...the actual limits of what is achievable depend in part on the beliefs people hold about what sorts of alternatives are viable. This is a crucial point and fundamental to sociological understandings of the very idea of their being “limits of possibility” for social change: social limits of possibility are not independent of beliefs about those limits. When a physicist argues that there is a limit to the maximum speed at which things can travel, this is meant as an objective constraint operating independently of our beliefs about speed. Similarly, when a biologist argues that in the absence of certain conditions, life is impossible, this is a claim about objective constraints. Of course both the physicist and the biologist could be wrong, but the claims themselves are about real, untransgressable limits of possibility. Claims about social limits of possibility are different from these claims about physical and biological limits, for in the social case the beliefs people hold about limits systematically affect what is possible.”
This is not a denial of real problems or that some of these problems might be extremely challenging. What I am trying to say is that we shouldn’t let these problems define how we think or imagine other possibilities. So, it seems to me it’s worth our time, that is, it’s more than an academic exercise, to challenge the stack of assumptions we’ve made about education. Reminding ourselves that they are arbitrary has a very practical effect on what we think we can build in the future.
As an aside, I think there is some more psychology at play here, too. In writing about the climate crisis in his seminal paper, Deep Adaption, Jem Bendell suggests, rather counterintuitively, that one reason why it’s so hard to imagine alternative futures, is that our identity can be caught up in the challenging of the point of view. If our self-worth is tied to fighting the good fight, then ending the fight becomes something of an existential issue. Bendell calls this “strategic denial.”
Nevertheless, we do need to find a perspective that allows us to see what we are taking as given so we can ask “Why is this so?” Here are a few assumptions keeping me up late that I think are worth interrogating:
We have to use the current structure/model of education to deliver any new models of education, whatever those may be. If you are calling for anything using the prefix “re-“ as in reform, rebuild, re-ignite, revolutionize, revive, etc., then this is what you are assuming. You’re saying that this is preferable to building something completely new.
The state (for the most part) should pay for education. Cubberley’s influential dissertation was all about stabilizing financing for public schools. That was a good thing. But there may be other models. The argument that state-funding provides (more) equality than private funding is based on another summation that the only way to achieve fairness is through the state.
Education should happen in schools. This contains two more assumptions: that schools have the competency to do all the things we ask them to do and that schools have the jurisdiction to do all the things we ask them to do. We may have offloaded onto the institution more than is fair or was designed for. In a 1959 report on education, TIME magazine was suggesting that (US) education may have already exceeded its design limits.
Teachers must be certified. I’ve known some gifted teachers who were not certified by any authority and conversely some certified teachers who were not good at teaching at all. I’m sure you do, too. Teacher certification, like school accreditation, is a proxy for trust, and we assume proxies are necessary for working at the scale of public education in modern societies. At smaller scales, the family or neighbourhood, for example, we use different ways to establish trust.
Education is best delivered at scale and at-scale eduction is best run by a central authority. This assumes that the state knows best and the things it produces, such as standard curricula, are necessary and sufficient. This is also tied to the idea that while it serves the person, eduction also serves the interests of the state (and the state has the last word.)
School should run more or less 8 - 4., M-F. As noted above, this is a contingent timetable, not one best suited to learning.
There are more—you might be thinking of some now. (That would be a good thing!) Again, I want to stress that I am not saying that any of these are necessarily wrong or bad. I am trying to understand how they are shaping our thinking about the future. Back to Wright. He says: “Developing systematic, compelling accounts of viable alternatives to existing social structures and institutions of power and privilege, therefore, is one component of the social process through which the social limits on achievable alternatives can themselves be changed.”
And, in particular, I’m curious to see if asking questions about the assumption stack sheds light on the nature of the social contract we have made with education.
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