In this five-minute interview Ken Robinson discusses with Bonnie Hunt why standardized testing is harmful to the individual development of children. He includes a key thought that is part of network theory, though he does not talk of it in network terms: configuring a pattern around a center. Of course standardized testing does the opposite of letting a child center learning around an individual talent.
Robinson explains near the end of the video that “kids give you messages” about what they are drawn to, which in a network environment is a potential center around which their education could be shaped. Robinson says that “when you find your talent, your whole life changes. . . . If education is not about finding the life that’s purpose is meaningful fulfillment, then what is it about?”
Today the Common Core State Standards Initiative is releasing proposed standards for what students should learn in K-12 English and math. As Nick Anderson writes in the Washington Post article about the announcement: “Instituting new academic standards would reverberate in textbooks, curriculum, teacher training and student learning from coast to coast.” Eventually, we can suppose, it will get to the kids — most certainly not in anything close to equal opportunities to learn. The Exeter faculty will make sure their students master the concepts; at Dunbar not so much.
There is a wonderful new way to have a common core for what students learn: use the global knowledge commons emerging online. For example, let’s hope all of the books are put openly online that the governors and state school superintendents have proposed in the standards they are announcing today. Otherwise students at Dunbar may have more trouble locating a hardcopy of them all than youngsters in Evanston and Peoria.
The Washington Post gives this example of a math common core standard: “Eighth-graders would be expected to use linear equations to solve for an unknown and explain a proof of the Pythagorean theorem on properties of a right triangle — cornerstones of algebra and geometry.” Happily there are many places in the online commons to learn about Pythagorean proofs. Click the image for an example.
Until age 21, the circuitry of a child’s brain is being completed. Bronson and Merryman report research on grade schoolers showing that “the performance gap caused by an hour’s difference in sleep was bigger than the gap between a normal fourth-grader and a normal sixth-grader.” In high school, there is a steep decline in sleep hours, and a striking correlation of sleep and grades.
Tired children have trouble retaining learning “because neurons lose their plasticity, becoming incapable of forming the new synaptic connections necessary to encode a memory. . . . The more you learned during the day, the more you need to sleep that night.”
An hour of the drill baby drill approach to teaching sets of standards may not a lot leave for connecting synapses to deal with while encoding memory in sleep. The idea of standards in itself delimits an individual youngster’s pursuit of her curiosity: The class all learns what is in the standard box in the class hour.
Compare what a student will experience spending the same hour following connections in the USGS Earthquake Hazards webpages that interconnect complex knowledge with interactive paths to follow active curiosity. Surely synapses purr into action as she clicks through the map to individual real-time earthquakes, and then to the three-dimensional global regional information when her eye catches the slab models for subduction zones.
George Will’s column is headlined: “How to ruin a child.” Another important way current child-rearing does this ruination should be added to the several in the NurtureShock book. We are ruining their potential to grasp knowledge by chopping it into standard pieces. We need to cut children’s minds free of lock-step, standardized learning that settles for a minimum and ignores the long tails of subjects. This can only be done by letting each child think individually.
Except for wandering and turned off minds, during a class hour all students are regimented to be thinking about the same knowledge at the same time. In contrast, an individual youngster clicking through earthquake knowledge on his own mobile internet browser is sending patterns of connections encountered among webpages through the circuitry of his brain. Such patterns can be complex, and are meaningful to him because they follow his focused attention and curiosity. In this example, a boy is moving beyond a few standard facts of earth science. He is exploring his way down through the long tail of authoritative, fresh, and interconnected knowledge about earthquakes.
We can suppose that if he gets a good night’s sleep interconnected understanding of earthquake knowledge will encode into memory. If he had spend the same time drilling a few earth science standards, the encoding would be not so much.
Back in the 1980s, Wendy’s ran its famous “Where’s the beef?” ads. At some point the abundance of internet knowledge is going to force the same question to be asked out loud about the beef in school standards. To get the idea, here is a comparison you can make:
Click around a bit in the Wolfram network of mathematical explanations and demonstrations — all linked together by their cognitive relationships. You will find Sirloin, flank steak, hamburger — and every math beef cut and preparation imaginable.
The strong echo continues in schools and across the world of what Jonathan Kozol indelibly named savage inequalities. The mobile window opens a global commons that is the same for each and oblivious to who is visiting it to learn.
