SLA

When I was in graduate school I was told about the “factory model of education” in a tone of such derision that it is only used these days among my circle of friends for the current occupants of the White House. Today it seems to me that as a society we are moving inextricably in the direction where schools are factories, administrators are managers, teachers are line workers, and students are merely units of production.

Centralized curriculums, standardized tests, and NCLB have all come under a great deal of criticism among progressive teachers. What may be missing from our voice is a way of explaining what the long-term implications are for taking education out of the hands of teachers and, more ideally, students. Somehow we need to break the noble process of educating free and autonomous individuals away from our dominant culture’s determination to turn everything into a commodity.

To begin to fix it, let us call this trend a name that describes what it is really happening: the rebirth of the factory model. Our quest for measurable results and our insistence on using those results for the wrong purposes has led us to the point where our best intentions of improving high school education have gone terribly awry. To raise test scores school districts standardize curriculums to an even greater extent than previously. Principals are held accountable for results on tests in which the teachers themselves place little value. Teachers are forced to gut real learning in favor of the “basics” (as if the two were mutually exclusive). Students, finally feast on a diet of test preparation while their souls go unnourished. We may not be moving students along the assembly line as we used to, but the end result is that learning is being standardized to a uniform model and individual potential is being crushed as a result. We have not really gone that far away from the changes that the 1970’s promised.

Well that is enough ranting for today. This topic is so complicated that it will take a while to tie up the loose ends. For example, I count Wiggins as one of my heroes but believe his ideas have been misappropriated and misunderstood. I actually teach a place, Science Leadership Academy, which is trying to do its best to go against the trend that is described here. In fact, I may have more freedom in my classroom than any fellow teacher who reads this blog. (Thanks Chris!) It is important, however, that I am not one of the few who are empowered to try to show the world a different way of doing things. We are never going to get a new generation of educators who are passionate, creative, knowledgeable, and empowering (I can only hope to be all of these) if we treat schools like factories, teachers like line-workers, and students like widgets.