What Education Should Look Like: Master and Apprentice
25th January 2024
We education policy and pedagogy wonks love to spend hours poring over education policies and proposals that shape statewide approaches to everything from tax and financial frameworks to cultural edicts on social-emotional learning, critical race theory, and LGBTQ+ sexualization of children.
We spend far too little time with “boots on the ground” observing what does and doesn’t work in the day-to-day classroom, which often affects students far more than this year’s slate of state education policies.
I’ve spent the past few years visiting hundreds of different schools with dozens of different education styles. From charter schools that are public schools with a corporate coat of paint to Hasidic homeschool cooperatives that teach all subjects at once, and every other kind of school in between.
Current educational methods are modeled on the Henry Ford factory system: You take a set of raw materials and send it through the assembly line in a batch, and do Quality Assurance at various points to weed out the failures. Everything is set up to deal with the ‘average’ student … but the problem is that there is no ‘average student’; each student is an individual, and the system is geared toward forcing that individual into the Procrustean bed of The Method rather than treating each individual as an individual. We can do better. We Have The Technology.