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Student-directed teaching

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Student-directed teaching is a product of research done by Don and Anne Green, who work in the Canadian education system. Their research, done for the University of Calgary, developed the foundational philosophy for student-directed teaching. Student-directed teaching evolves the pedagogical practices set forth by technologies such as the Montessori method.

Problem with mass schooling

The larger aim of student-directed teaching is to revolutionize education. Nascent in the progressive philosophy is a feeling that education has remained unchanged for far too long: since its inception, in fact, a century and a half ago. The global climate today differs vastly from that of 1850. The largest change in the last century has been the acceleration of the proliferation of information. The 20th century has seen several advances in technology, including the invention of the transistor, the radio, the television, and the Internet. Each of these inventions has accelerated the commonly understood notion of culture. And with each progressive acceleration, the strain on individuals, not just students, to make sense of the world increases. Although it affects everyone, it is most noticeable in children: ultimately, the institution of mass schooling has been unable to keep up with the changes dictated by the intense proliferation of knowledge. Students, thus is the claim of Student-Directed Teaching, are failed by the system, leaving them bored, apathetic and mundane.

The first law pertaining to compulsory education was passed in 1642 by the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Even then, it was evident that schooling had a "hidden" agenda: to ensure that "youth readily accept the developing religious, political and social patterns and become good citizens of the state and of the newly established church" (Kotin & Aikman, qtd in Grant 166). By 1648, the state had "assumed a clear responsibility for the education and training of all children" (ibid). At this point, however, compulsory schooling was not in place.

In 1787, the United States Constitution was signed with nary a mention of public education, suggesting that the Founding Fathers of the United States would not have approved of state intervention in their children's schooling. Support for public schooling rose throughout the end of the 18th century and beginning of the 19th century, and by 1852, Massachusetts had passed the first general compulsory attendance law in the United States.

The compulsory schooling movement in the 1850s was led by Horace Mann and by Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and by Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College. These men were industrialists and proponents of the newly emerged wealth created by the Industrial Revolution. Their views on public schooling mirrored their economic philosophies. Because of the newfound freedom and wealth promoted in the United States, the middle of the 19th century was a period of great immigration:

[Horace Mann] lived at a time of tremendous social change when immigrants were pouring into the Northeastern states, farmers were leaving rural areas to work in factories, and cities were growing rapidly with crime and poverty on the rise... Mann and other reformers were alarmed by the upheaval, and promoted state regulated public education as a way to bring order and discipline to the working class in this rapidly changing society. Threatened by the growing population of urban poor, Mann and his fellow reformers placed a major emphasis on "moral training," standardization and classroom drill.

Mann and company were all products of the Industrial Revolution. They saw the burgeoning population as little more than factory workers to be trained to work on the line. While the Industrial Revolution did indeed speed up many production cycles, it also created a vacuum within the warehouses, which necessarily had to be filled by trained human activity: the machines still needed people behind them to direct the work. As such, "schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled."

The basis for modern mass schooling was conceived in the 1850s and has remained virtually unchanged since then. In the 1850s, Mann and his fellow reformers began the standardization and systematization of public education: "(a) All children received the same social and political ideology, (b) schools were an instrument of public policy that aimed at fixing society's problems, and (c) state agencies were created to control local schools." Thus, it becomes evident, all the more strikingly so a century and a half later, that compulsory schooling was not aimed at distributing knowledge.

Why, then, was compulsory schooling created?

Howley et al. (1995) in their important critique of American schools and gifted education, echo J.S. Mill (1859/1978) in their claim that "schooling aims, as it has for a very long time, to inculcate just those habits, attitudes, and skills that legitimate it in the eyes of powerful economic interests" (p. 6). Spring (1974) agrees: "Schooling means... shaping the total character of the individual to meet the political and economic demands of the state" (p. 139). Gatto (1993) argues that compulsory schooling was not instituted in order to make people more literate, thoughtful, knowledgeable, or intellectually skillful, but to make them more manageable. Curti (1959) sees the history of American education as the history of conflict between those who want to use education to maintain power and those who want to use it to improve life for everyone. Reitman (1992) also sees American education as the result of struggle between incompatible goals: promoting democracy, supporting economic competitiveness, and teaching moral values.

Mass schooling was devised to be ''one general, and uniform system of education, which will render the mass of the people more homogeneous and thereby fit them more easily for uniform and peaceable government" (Rush, qtd in Grant 169). The creation of pliable people erased, then, the acute morality of the populace, replacing it instead with mindless automation. Mass schooling teaches people how to do what they are told when they are told to do so.

The problem that appears with using compulsory schooling is that the massive education system cannot account for differences between its subjects, from different learning preferences to different teaching styles to different paces. Student-Directed Teaching asks, "why do students all have to do the same thing, at the same time, in the same manner?" It is because of this, according to the Student-Directed Teaching philosophy, that students lose faith in school: gifted students are not challenged enough while students that fall behind have little support. The public education system rewards those who remain in the middle: these are the students who receive praise because they never challenge the teacher, give textbook answers on homework and spit back cute phrases the teacher said yesterday. These are students who understand that challenging the status quo and being different carries a penalty.

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