Cities and Schools

In a piece having nothing to do with education, Guardian essayist Richard Sennett closes with this: "We want cities that work well enough, but are open to the shifts, uncertainties, and mess which are real life."

Let me appropriate and translate his point about 'smart cities' in relation to schools.  Planned, efficient and effective classrooms will no doubt produce the learnings sought out in the objectives, goals, outcomes aims specified in the plans.  They can work, efficiently and with stream-lined focus, to generate the learning gains predicated by the plans, and expected as part and parcel of various forms of standards-based accountability.

What they lack, however, is the human dimension that makes the learning meaningful.  What Sennett calls 'the shifts, uncertainties and mess which are real life' can be experienced in schools as the spontaneous and originality of student insight, the unpredictable sense and meaning a student makes out of the lesson, the divergency of high level critical thought that evaluates rather than the rote, basal level of knowledge repetition (which demonstrates not much).

Transformative, lasting learning depends on a fair bit of trial and waste, respect for the unknown and unknowable and a searching kind of personal reflection and group empathy that can not be predicative of the lesson beforehand.  Smart classrooms, or those planned to the second with stable metrics of the learning, are not science; they are technology, the application of discovery and inquiry.  But that technology quickly engulfs the science and inquiry; discovery suffers for the sake of replication; inquiry for the sake of explicit outcomes.

"Well enough" is the killer point.  The question of what is well enough has become the political one, rendered into the practical one by the failure of school leaders (both administration and teachers, and unions) to articulate the false promise of what Sennett rightfully calls "Fordist" - the belief that all parts of learning are products that respond to and are enhanced through completely systemization.  Learning, the personal meaning and significance that education has for an individual, can be neither routinized nor  manufactured the way consumables are.

David Warlick, at smartblog/education, connects to education: "Formal education is a system that is comfortably predictable, shaped by institutional rules and easily gamed by people who like predictability and the security of rules. Sadly, as success in this world depends increasingly on inventive resourcefulness and a lifestyle of active continual learning, formal education has become more reliant on rigid standards-based instruction and a punitive reward system."

He seems to distinguish the school-based 'formal education' from 'authentic real world learning.'  What students learn to do in schools, confirmed and reinforced by the one-dimensional data collection that counts for evaluation, is to do school. The learn to school.  As long as learning to school matters more than learning to live in a plural, uncertain world, our society will increasing lack the skills to navigate the 'shifts, uncertainties and mess which are real life.'