Almost all of schooling is focused around warped uses of time. By “warped” I mean trying to squeeze a lot of material into a short period of time. “Efficiency” is the key word that marks this insidiously warped use of time.
When I talk about schools in this post, I am generalizing about the vast majority of schools. I’m talking about the institution of schooling in this country (the United States) and those in many other countries. This “institution” is the ephemeral, fuzzy bordered context of schooling that includes public, private, and charter schools. It’s a political, corporate hegemonic spider web of stuckness. There are, of course, exceptions. Courageous teachers who buck the system. And, odd schools that manage to do their own thing in the midst of their district’s craziness. Or, the occasional charter or private school that manages to break away from the hegemony of schooling, but then these schools bring up other problems of undermining the public system and serving elite populations. But, in general, when I talk about schools and schooling, I am talking about that big fuzzy institution of schooling and the schools that fall within this context.
The underlying push of schooling is “efficiency.” Schools and teachers have to be efficient. They have to cover the curriculum in the shortest possible time that will result in the highest student test scores. Time is the big issue in schooling. Time is marked by bells. Students’ lives are run by bells. Bells end classes. Bells begin classes. Bells tell when to go to lunch. Principals observe teachers with stopwatches. They go from one class to another to make sure all of the same grade level teachers are teaching the exact same thing at exactly the same time. Tests are timed. Some teachers set strict time-limits on activities, jumping from one activity to the next like grasshoppers going from one plant to the next… except that grasshoppers actually stop to take a nibble.
In life, most of us have jobs that require showing up at a specific time and leaving at a specific time. Some jobs are very much like schools with bells for starting and stopping and for coffee breaks and lunch. I worked in places like that. They were factories. In fact, the ways schools manifest now were designed to train people to work in factories. They haven’t changed much, even though the majority of jobs that children will eventually get have changed from factories to offices and other settings. But, the attitudes and characteristics of being obedient and compliant haven’t really changed. Corporations and politicians do not want people to question or challenge authority or to think critically about the issues they face in their everyday lives.
From the corporate and political perspectives, it is best to play this game that appears like they care about education by promoting higher standards, accountability, and measures of success. But, standards, accountability, and measures are all ruses. In fact, they are worse than ruses, they actually do the exact opposite of what one might think they are supposed to do. They prevent real learning, which is just what corporations and politicians want.
And, then on top of all of this, they put time constraints on learning in terms of efficiency. “Efficiency” in schooling may be the greatest misuse of time. Real, deep, meaningful, relevant learning takes time…. maybe lots of time. To speed through a curriculum is just another way of preventing real learning from taking place. Real learning is a way of…
Savoring
Considering
Reflecting
Pondering
Wondering
Exploring
Making mistakes
Playing
Fiddling
Meandering
Laughing
Screaming
With real learning there is no hurry…. The longer… the better.
Real learning gives us the tools to make difficult decisions. And, difficult decisions take time. We need to ponder possibilities and see things from different perspectives. Some real critically important decisions are going to be presenting themselves to our children in their lifetimes. Many of these issues and problems are already happening. They are only going to become more intense. And, our children have had no models of how to tackle such decision-making processes. Schools never take the time to model such processes. Schools pretend as if everything is going to be just fine in the future. They keep teaching the same old things as if life will just keep rolling along like it always has. When sea levels rise and parts of this country disappear, when food sources begin to disappear, when droughts become so bad that nothing will grow and people become desperate for jobs and water, when states are fighting over water rights, when diseases plague vast proportions of the population, and when energy resources can’t supply the demands – what tools have we given our children to cope with these problems?
The problem with schools and schooling isn’t the teachers. It isn’t the curriculum. It isn’t the children. It isn’t the parents. The problem is a systemic problem of faulty assumptions about what learning is, what schools should be, and what we want for our children. And, one of these assumptions is time. What about time?