As an age-old joke goes, it is difficult to know what fish talk about, but you can be sure
it is not water.
            – Peter Senge

Senge’s reflections about goldfish are metaphorical for us today, as 21st-century educators who usually are unaware of the uncanny similarities our daily activities and surroundings and the greatest invention of the industrial era — the assembly line. As Senge argues in Schools that Learn (2000), the water to the goldfish represent the assumptions that we all render invisible — the things around us that are embedded so deeply within us that they have become part of how we process and form an understanding of the world around us. When we can awaken ourselves to see — to become consciously aware of and critical of these patterns in which we are immersed every day — we are one step closer to becoming active learners who can inquire, reflect, and engage in problem solving. Once we see the invisible, we can unlearn everything that we have learned.
 

The Assembly Line

Institutions tend to preserve the problems they were designed to solve.
            – Clay Shirky

Our schools today preserve their dedication to solving the problem of the industrial age: How do we train young people to transition effectively from the farming to the industrial world? Today, even though our society has transformed into a global, digital, information age, our children still are funneled into organized groups of similar ages, managed into straight lines as they lug hefty backpacks filled with books, take a seat at their tiny desk in a row with the rest, and sit for hours at a time while a teacher delivers information to them. They sit, receive, digest, recite, and, if it’s repeated within the standards of acceptance, they move on to the next task. These tasks are scheduled to change too on a predetermined schedule that is signaled by the ringing of a bell — a sound that notifies the teacher the products should now have mastered the tasks for the day and it’s time to move on to the next one on the list.
 

Learning Differences or Disabilities?

Our assembly-line thinking forces us to treat the natural variety of human beings as somehow
aberrant because they do not fit the needs of the machine.
            – Peter Senge

This industrial model may have made sense in an industrial age but, really, it has never supported the way the human brain really works or, more importantly, the way people really learn. Our assembly-line approach to learning has the objective to present learning as a conformable process — that is, regardless of who you are, you should be able to learn in the way we decide is best and learn at the speed we decide is best and learn the things we decide are best for you to know.

But standardizing the process of learning model goes completely against the grain of what we know about the human brain. Learning is simply not a standardized process. It never has been and it never will be. Learning is only standardized because we, as a society, have constructed it to be that way.
And when we, as a society, view the process of learning as a fixed, standardized “product” rather than a complex, fluid, multidimensional process, the learning differences that make us humans become big problems. And what does an assembly line do with problems? Well, it pushes them to the side because anything that interferes with the task at hand is an obstruction, a nuisance, an interference.

Think about this for a moment, before the industrial era, there was no such thing as dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, and the list goes on. People simply learned in different ways. They figured out how get tasks done in their own manner without realizing that it took longer than another person or even caring for that matter, without pausing to think that the way “he” was doing it was better or the right way. Those things just didn’t matter.

The brain is a complex, fascinating instrument and, like a musician, each of us plays our own unique song. Our formalized educational systems deny our students of their natural desire to sing their song because learning differences are messy and difficult to measure. Instead, learning that falls outside of our standardized box is labeled as a disability and/or students are deemed “slow” or “special.” Regardless, our students quickly get the message that they aren’t good enough. And to have this message instilled in you for six hours a day, ten months a year, for twelve years is enough to convince anyone that it’s true. Is it more appropriate to argue that our process, rather than our students is disabled?
 

Teaching Multitasking Skills?

Cathy Davidson, a professor at Duke who is dyslexic, has written a compelling book, Now You See It, which puts forth a compelling argument about how Internet technologies have revolutionized our modes of communication and interaction so deeply that we are now amidst a new information age. Multitasking is one particular “skill” that Davidson writes about in depth, putting it in a rather refreshing context, encouraging her reader to understand it as an avenue through which we, as individuals, may reach a more interconnected, deeply rewarding sense of our contexts that may yield more efficiencies and self-rewards. I get this. While so many people write Twitter off as an annoying “pest” (and I did too at one time; see my earlier GETinsight post), today it is an additional layer built into my day from which I take and to which I give consistently. It’s not constant but it is consistent. And I learn tremendously from my Twitter network — I gain resources, get answers to questions, get referrals to people and products, and more. I even reach out and get responses from brilliant people who I otherwise would not have access to.

Davidson peels the multitasking discussion back one more layer though by examining the types of brains that are best wired to deal with our digital, mobile world. As she points out, individuals who have ADHD manage multiple tasks simultaneously quite well, yet it’s the assembly-line learning model that has contributed to them being medicated to “treat” their cognitive “disorders.” In the 21st century, it seems the ADHD brain may have the edge on the “normal” brain. Hmm. That’s something to chew on.

How do we begin to make changes in education today? We start by becoming aware of the outdated traditions around us that no longer correlate with the needs and skills of our society. And as these invisible patterns begin to emerge, we point them out to others so they too can see. Together, we begin to engage in a process of unlearning that allows us to identify the problems and issues around us more clearly.

Sources


Davidson, Cathy. (2011). Now You See It. Viking Press.

Senge, Peter. (2000). Schools That Learn. Crown Publishing Group.