New Ways That Work
by Peter Kline

 

One could argue correctly that there have been no significant innovations in public education this century.  This is despite several attempts to reform the schools at the cost of millions or billions of dollars.  Walter Annenberg tried it, but so did Bill Gates, George Lucas, RossPerot, Oprah Winfry and many others.  None saw any permanent results from their often huge investments.  In addition one could be rightfully contemptuous of fads in which school children are turned into guinea pigs.  And indeed, many things being tried are fads and unlikely to be successful, except in the hands of very experienced and creative teachers.

But that doesn't mean there isn't anything that works except traditional education.  For the past thirty years there have been a good many techniques that can individually or collectively work in the classroom many times better than almost anything that's going on there now.  It has been my repeated experience in virtually every conceivable educational setting that the average teacher, with only a modicum of training, can, using the right techniques, be about ten times as effective as the average teacher who doesn't use them.  So if we were to train all the teachers in America in a few simple techniques that really work, and that make difficult subjects easy and fun to learn, the educational crisis would go away in no time.  But if we just do more of what we've been doing for the last century and a half, the situation is likely to get so bad that it could eventually destroy our whole culture. Henry Ford long ago pointed out that if you want to solve a problem you should never hire an expert. 

In spite of that, the only thing the educational reformers have ever done is hire experts who can't do anything except reshuffle approaches that have repeatedly failed in the past.  Since 1972, I have been part of an international subculture of teachers who have been teaching other teachers how to do simple things that work wonders in the classroom, particularly for students who are otherwise unreachable.  In 1973, I founded a private school that specialized in such approaches, and it was soon identified by the Maryland State Board of Education as the best school of its kind in the state.  And in 1991, the New York State Board of Education approved my methods for elementary schools statewide.  In addition, when my techniques were used in corporate training at Kodak, they worked twenty-seven times as effectively as the courses in the same subjects that had preceded them.  

The same thing happened when I trained communications technologists at Bellcore TEC.  In fact that company had just announced in its catalogue that my methodology had been adopted as the standard for the whole company when Bellcore TEC was bought out and everything we had been doing there was dropped. For thirty years, I have worked with teachers at every level of public school instruction, mostly in the most difficult inner city situations.  I have worked with welfare recipients, college professors and even the Canadian Department of External Affairs.  In all of these places learning miracles have happened. But it hasn't made any difference.  As far as the experts are concerned, such things can't possibly exist. ."  If it did work best, there would never have been an educational crisis.  Unfortunately traditional education is no better than the medicine that was practiced several hundred years ago when the best thing to do with sick people was to bleed them.  Traditional education is every bit as naïve as that, and a teacher in front of a blackboard without a great many other ideas and resources is a victim of educational obsolescence. We have learned far too much about the human brain and nervous system over the last century to keep on doing most of the stupid things we were doing a century ago.  No field of knowledge other than education has completely failed to progress for the last thousand years. 

To give only one example, Harvard neurologist Howard Gardner discovered that
we have not one but eight different intelligences.  All of them need to be exercised in the classroom by every student and teacher in every subject.  Though this might sound impossibly complex, it is actually both easy and fun. The techniques that make this possible belong in any classroom, no matter how advanced.  When learning is accomplished this way, it can progress ten to fifty times as fast, particularly in the most advanced subjects with the most advanced students.  It is time we turned over the educational crisis to people who know how to bring all subjects to life in a way that appeals to many different learning styles and personalities at the same time.  So let's save our schools by getting the old system to move over and make room for some things that work marvelous well but are yet to be mainstreamed in public school classrooms.