Being in public education today has something of a Nero-like feel to it. Rome is burning to a crisp while our inimitable leadership is perched aloft in the Tower of Maecenas watching the enchanting inferno below and belting out their edu-speak version of the Fall of Ilium. It all looks so glorious and heroic from on high, but get down in the streets, where the twisted smoldering wreckage of their deeds have crippled the empire, and it is only then shockingly apparent how misbegotten has been their steerage.
Melodrama is always risky business when making a grave argument that seeks a momentous solution, but so titanic is the need for systemic education reform that it demands the use of every rhetorical tool in the arsenal. We must persuade people to action. Actually, “titanic” is an apt double entendre to describe the current state of the problems facing institutional secondary education in the United States. For all the time, effort, and intellectual and monetary capital expended over a century on defining and shaping a public education system, from the days of Dewey to the largely discredited No Child Left Behind initiative, collectively our schools are a pastiche of dissonant and often competing-purposed entities, lacking any coherent unifying principles, and worse, little relevance to the constituents they purport to serve. By and large, our students are disinterested in what we want them to learn, and in the ways we want them to learn it.
Melodrama is always risky business when making a grave argument that seeks a momentous solution, but so titanic is the need for systemic education reform that it demands the use of every rhetorical tool in the arsenal. We must persuade people to action. Actually, “titanic” is an apt double entendre to describe the current state of the problems facing institutional secondary education in the United States. For all the time, effort, and intellectual and monetary capital expended over a century on defining and shaping a public education system, from the days of Dewey to the largely discredited No Child Left Behind initiative, collectively our schools are a pastiche of dissonant and often competing-purposed entities, lacking any coherent unifying principles, and worse, little relevance to the constituents they purport to serve. By and large, our students are disinterested in what we want them to learn, and in the ways we want them to learn it.
A review of much of the scholarly and lay literature from the past decade unearthed some kernels of hope that there are kindred spirits who see the conflagration for what it is – a social catastrophe that requires a complete re-imagining of the concept of “education” and the nature of a “school” – but the bulk of it is otherwise dismaying. It isn’t that many in the field aren’t trying. But after decades of unheeded clarion calls for “paradigm shifts” and bottom-up retooling, rehashing and reworking the same arguments and proposals, the fact is that we do no better than apply band-aids to a system that is crumbling under the weight of its own anachronism.
Our national approach to meet the dire challenges of squeezing a 21st century reality into a 19th century educational model is to rely on high stakes testing, uniformize teaching and content standards, and link funding to objective test performances. State and local responses to such inflexibility are often just as extreme and problematic, as those with the responsibility to make schools work are forced to experiment with untried programs, or haphazardly adopt piecemeal strategies without the time or money to consider how or even whether these efforts are reconcilable with anything else the schools may be doing. The story of school reform at the grass-roots level is, essentially, to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.
There is an old saw with which we who have worked in large public school districts are distressingly familiar, to wit: administrations always add responsibilities and programs; they never subtract. The result is that, like modern Europe built upon the foundations of ancient Rome, we continue to legitimize and layer on to an already tenuous structure without fully examining whether there is any defense for shoring it up in the first place. And in the estimation of this writer, propping up the existing education structure is indefensible.
The sadly ironic truth mostly overlooked in the public and academic discourse concerning education, is that we generally know what works, and why. This may come as a surprise to (and elicit some dubious skepticism from) many who are otherwise invested in the industry of education reform. The literature is largely in agreement that “youth do their best work when engaged in activities that are personally meaningful to them” (Jenkins), though one could rightly anticipate that many outside the profession might arrive at the same conclusion ipso facto. If the issue of student ‘motivation’ is the common thread throughout the literature, it is the failure to adequately address or account for the phenomenon of motivation that is so glaring when one reads the scholarly works. Rather, most of the research tends to first acknowledge the widespread ‘macro’ problem, followed by a ‘micro’ analysis and/ or proposal. It is disappointing to say the least when researchers who appear to understand the severity of the problem, who empathize with the aspirations of those who would seek to tear down the old model and revolutionize our approach to education, make a sharp detour and instead focus their precious time and resources on something comparatively ‘small’ in scope. Studying the impact of, say, a “Project Look Sharp” (Scheibe) or the “CityWorks” curriculum of the Constitutional Rights Foundation (Kahne) in an effort to make some generalizations about how we might activate student engagement in civics and service, has merit as far as it goes, but such de minimis explorations do nothing to reinforce the scale of the problem, and in fact undermine the efforts of those who are calling us to arms by unintentionally suggesting that it is possible to arrive at a solution by continuing to apply first aid to a terminal patient; reading many of these studies feels akin to a bucket brigade trying to put out the fire while Rome is consumed by flames.
The goals of most of the recent research are ambitious, while the results are unapologetically modest; for example, rethinking what constitutes ‘citizenship’ in the 21st century, and arriving at a conclusion that “engagement and information-seeking begins with motivation,” without a satisfactory explanation of the latter (Bennett). Lyman, in a comprehensive literature review of his own, describes MIT as “home to a movement called constructionism in opposition to instructionism,” where students appear to be ‘motivated’ to learn by designing and building using various computer technologies, yet concedes the evidence and documentation on what exactly constitutes ‘motivation’ is sparse: “How and when do kids realize they are not consumers of culture or learning, but develop a sense of agency to create their own cultures?”
Perhaps the most extensive investigation of the literature was conducted by Zaff and Michelsen, in which they surveyed 60 studies on civic engagement. Like others, they identified examples of promising practice but observed that methodological defects and limited samples require caution and circumspection about making any broad inferences: research has not yet uncovered a reason for why motivation and civic engagement are linked, and there is an almost complete absence of longitudinal evidence of whether adolescent civic engagement persists following school participation in such programs.
Pearce and Larson also consider the elusive nature of motivation, and argue that teenagers who do engage in service and civic activism programs do so when they experience enjoyment, satisfaction, and/ or idealism, but, again, leave unanswered how these responses become activated.
We’ll return momentarily to ‘motivation,’ but first a digression. Much of the literature dealing with education reform concerning motivation generally and civic engagement specifically, tends to use the language of sociology and psychology: ‘affinity spaces’ with respect to informal and formal learning environments; ‘agency’ and ‘empowerment’; ‘social capital’ and the relationship between its abundant presence and communities being more likely to achieve their goals. These concepts are all brought to bear on understanding just what it is that differentiates passive from proactive teens when it comes to school engagement (e.g., Kahane, Putnam, and others who claim that students who develop trust in and knowledge about their institutions will enter the broader society with greater social capital, resulting in civic and political engagement). But for all of these assertions and tiresome reliance on jargon, there is still no conclusive finding that definitively explains why some students are interested in history and civics, and why others could not care less. The closest we have to a ‘rule’ is that “personal relevance” is the “strongest predictor of civic outcomes,” and this emblematic observation from Kahane: “[O]bviously more work is needed to test the staying power of these shifts and their consequences once students graduate . . . Our data . . . do not permit more than speculation on the underlying causes of these relationships.”
Virtually every expert agrees that ‘motivation’ is the missing link in school and civic engagement, yet they are also almost universally loathe to declare victory without more empirical evidence from whence this mysterious phenomenon derives. This is not at all surprising given that, with few exceptions, most of the investigatory work on establishing these connections is framed with the same narrow perspective, asking the same limiting, circular questions of old, rooted in a world-view that bears little relationship to the one in which their subjects reside. Our academic institutions, as well as those who study them, are using outmoded benchmarks and frames of reference, the methodological equivalents of using the quality of one’s penmanship to judge the efficacy of education in the Information Age.
The basic problem with most of the data and the proposed solutions that arise from it, is twofold: proposals that are too numerous, disconnected, ad hoc, and haphazard at best, can find no purchase in any systematic approach to overhauling a failed institution so central to the health of our society; this is not camel-building. But the far greater problem with our approach to date is that we are asking the wrong questions at the outset. By far, the largest governmental initiatives to support, encourage, and foster the development of civic engagement emphasize community service, character education, and ‘traditional’ American history teaching. Thus we ask, ‘What can we do to stimulate interest in these activities? How and why does a young person become a political actor? What motivates one to act?’, or as Buckingham puts it, how do we move students from viewing “politics as a spectator sport?”
It would seem to be self-evident that for a society to sustain itself and prosper it must have a fairly clear and articulable notion of what its goals are with respect to civic education policy and programs. This is not so in the United States, nor has there ever been a consensus about the purpose of an education. And while we have been wringing our hands for a century over whether an appropriate educational experience is about inculcating ‘good’ citizenship among the elite or training factory workers or pacifying the middle and working classes, technology has eclipsed our imagination and hijacked the conversation. It is no longer relevant to simply ask what and why we should teach our children, a debate that can never be resolved. The real question we should be posing as we come to grips with our brave new world: what do students themselves want out of their education, and what makes us think we can make them learn what we want them to learn?
Which brings me back to ‘motivation,’ but in the context of what we do know about adolescent behavior, and a fossilized education model that harbors perilous consequences for our democracy.
We do know that technology has reshaped the human landscape in ways that were unimaginable, and only the futurists among us can speculate what else is in store, or how quickly it will manifest. We know from the scant but growing literature that our children are so much further progressed than adults in the understanding and use of this technology, and it is nearly impossible for creaky monolithic institutions like our mainstream schools to keep up. In this regard, let us employ some common sense even if the empirical data is lagging. Media of every sort is inextricably bound up and interwoven into our children’s lives – there is no retreat possible – and we would do well as a maturing society to recognize and acknowledge the fact of new media’s intrinsically motivating effect on young people. It is naïve at best, ignorant and dangerous at the opposing end of the spectrum, to believe we can ‘quarantine’ from or ‘immunize’ against exposure, and equally fruitless to insist that schools can realistically serve their students by stubbornly resisting the technological tsunami whose crest only rises with hyper-speed. Schools as they exist today are inherently second-class, shadowy ‘Bizarro’ worlds that cling to a distant past but that bear little resemblance to the world actually inhabited by teenagers.
Some scholars and commentators have embraced youth culture as it is, rather than what they believe it ought to be, and understand the urgency for re-envisioning schooling from the foundation up. Henry Jenkins, at the forefront of the movement to persuade educators and government that the very nature of American society is morphing before our eyes, towards a predominantly “participatory culture,” rightly argues for the need to shift our focus in academia to the “new media literacies” as a new paradigm for education, though he, too, qualifies and mutes his enthusiasm by agreeing that “more discipline-specific research is needed.” There are also those who write forcefully about the need to incorporate media and media literacy as a “pedagogical approach” rather than a “separate content or skill area” (Scheibe), or adopting “transdisciplinarity” as a way to integrate media across the curriculum (Galician). Steps in the right direction, but they do not go far enough. Others, like Michael Schudson and our own Liz Ellsworth, speak more to the necessity of radicalism when it comes to rethinking our educational institutions.
To be sure, there have been a number of high profile experiments in the redesign of traditional school curricula, such as Montgomery Blair High School’s Communication Arts program in Maryland, and the Communication Arts High School in San Antonio, where media study and production are embedded throughout the curriculum. But these remain notable exceptions, and highlight the unfathomable absence of similar programs nationally.
The position most reflective of my own is that expressed by Elliot Eisner in a presentation he gave to the Dewey Society at Stanford University in 2002. It is radical, it is profound, and it is one whose time has surely come:
“I am talking about a culture of schooling in which more importance is placed on exploration than on discovery, more value is assigned to surprise than to control, more attention is devoted to what is distinctive than to what is standard, more interest is related to what is metaphorical than to what is literal. It is an educational culture that has a greater focus on becoming than on being, places more value on the imaginative than on the factual, assigns greater priority to valuing than to measuring, and regards the quality of the journey as more educationally significant than the speed at which the destination is reached. I am talking about a new vision of what education might become and what schools are for . . . The public’s perception of the purpose of education supports the current paradigm. We need to sail against the tide. Our destination is to change the social vision of what schools can be. It will not be an easy journey but when the seas seem too treacherous to travel and the stars too distant to touch we should remember Robert Browning’s observation that “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for.” . . . And as Dewey said in the closing pages of Art as Experience, “Imagination is the chief instrument of the good.” . . . Imagination is no mere ornament, nor is art. Together they . . . might help us restore decent purpose to our efforts and help us create the kind of schools our children deserve and our culture needs. Those aspirations, my friends, are stars worth stretching for.”
In the final analysis, most of the literature skirts the most profound issues, or misses them entirely, choosing instead to focus on symptomology rather than pathology. In the meantime, our national education infrastructure teeters at the brink of irrelevance and disengaged students drift further and further, finding little meaning in the experience to sustain their interest. Occasionally events may interrupt the decline and precipitate a surge in civic engagement and participation – witness the unprecedented response to the 2008 presidential election – but unless our staid educational institutions respond in a similar, bold manner, their shriveling relevance will only accelerate, and the youth that has been so under-served will continue to discover alternate channels and pathways to learning, and ultimately cultivate new institutions that respond to their needs.
Perhaps the revolution in education is destined to unfold in this way, for the flames surround us even now and Nero can be heard clearly in the distance.
[Bibliography on request]
Our national approach to meet the dire challenges of squeezing a 21st century reality into a 19th century educational model is to rely on high stakes testing, uniformize teaching and content standards, and link funding to objective test performances. State and local responses to such inflexibility are often just as extreme and problematic, as those with the responsibility to make schools work are forced to experiment with untried programs, or haphazardly adopt piecemeal strategies without the time or money to consider how or even whether these efforts are reconcilable with anything else the schools may be doing. The story of school reform at the grass-roots level is, essentially, to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.
There is an old saw with which we who have worked in large public school districts are distressingly familiar, to wit: administrations always add responsibilities and programs; they never subtract. The result is that, like modern Europe built upon the foundations of ancient Rome, we continue to legitimize and layer on to an already tenuous structure without fully examining whether there is any defense for shoring it up in the first place. And in the estimation of this writer, propping up the existing education structure is indefensible.
The sadly ironic truth mostly overlooked in the public and academic discourse concerning education, is that we generally know what works, and why. This may come as a surprise to (and elicit some dubious skepticism from) many who are otherwise invested in the industry of education reform. The literature is largely in agreement that “youth do their best work when engaged in activities that are personally meaningful to them” (Jenkins), though one could rightly anticipate that many outside the profession might arrive at the same conclusion ipso facto. If the issue of student ‘motivation’ is the common thread throughout the literature, it is the failure to adequately address or account for the phenomenon of motivation that is so glaring when one reads the scholarly works. Rather, most of the research tends to first acknowledge the widespread ‘macro’ problem, followed by a ‘micro’ analysis and/ or proposal. It is disappointing to say the least when researchers who appear to understand the severity of the problem, who empathize with the aspirations of those who would seek to tear down the old model and revolutionize our approach to education, make a sharp detour and instead focus their precious time and resources on something comparatively ‘small’ in scope. Studying the impact of, say, a “Project Look Sharp” (Scheibe) or the “CityWorks” curriculum of the Constitutional Rights Foundation (Kahne) in an effort to make some generalizations about how we might activate student engagement in civics and service, has merit as far as it goes, but such de minimis explorations do nothing to reinforce the scale of the problem, and in fact undermine the efforts of those who are calling us to arms by unintentionally suggesting that it is possible to arrive at a solution by continuing to apply first aid to a terminal patient; reading many of these studies feels akin to a bucket brigade trying to put out the fire while Rome is consumed by flames.
The goals of most of the recent research are ambitious, while the results are unapologetically modest; for example, rethinking what constitutes ‘citizenship’ in the 21st century, and arriving at a conclusion that “engagement and information-seeking begins with motivation,” without a satisfactory explanation of the latter (Bennett). Lyman, in a comprehensive literature review of his own, describes MIT as “home to a movement called constructionism in opposition to instructionism,” where students appear to be ‘motivated’ to learn by designing and building using various computer technologies, yet concedes the evidence and documentation on what exactly constitutes ‘motivation’ is sparse: “How and when do kids realize they are not consumers of culture or learning, but develop a sense of agency to create their own cultures?”
Perhaps the most extensive investigation of the literature was conducted by Zaff and Michelsen, in which they surveyed 60 studies on civic engagement. Like others, they identified examples of promising practice but observed that methodological defects and limited samples require caution and circumspection about making any broad inferences: research has not yet uncovered a reason for why motivation and civic engagement are linked, and there is an almost complete absence of longitudinal evidence of whether adolescent civic engagement persists following school participation in such programs.
Pearce and Larson also consider the elusive nature of motivation, and argue that teenagers who do engage in service and civic activism programs do so when they experience enjoyment, satisfaction, and/ or idealism, but, again, leave unanswered how these responses become activated.
We’ll return momentarily to ‘motivation,’ but first a digression. Much of the literature dealing with education reform concerning motivation generally and civic engagement specifically, tends to use the language of sociology and psychology: ‘affinity spaces’ with respect to informal and formal learning environments; ‘agency’ and ‘empowerment’; ‘social capital’ and the relationship between its abundant presence and communities being more likely to achieve their goals. These concepts are all brought to bear on understanding just what it is that differentiates passive from proactive teens when it comes to school engagement (e.g., Kahane, Putnam, and others who claim that students who develop trust in and knowledge about their institutions will enter the broader society with greater social capital, resulting in civic and political engagement). But for all of these assertions and tiresome reliance on jargon, there is still no conclusive finding that definitively explains why some students are interested in history and civics, and why others could not care less. The closest we have to a ‘rule’ is that “personal relevance” is the “strongest predictor of civic outcomes,” and this emblematic observation from Kahane: “[O]bviously more work is needed to test the staying power of these shifts and their consequences once students graduate . . . Our data . . . do not permit more than speculation on the underlying causes of these relationships.”
Virtually every expert agrees that ‘motivation’ is the missing link in school and civic engagement, yet they are also almost universally loathe to declare victory without more empirical evidence from whence this mysterious phenomenon derives. This is not at all surprising given that, with few exceptions, most of the investigatory work on establishing these connections is framed with the same narrow perspective, asking the same limiting, circular questions of old, rooted in a world-view that bears little relationship to the one in which their subjects reside. Our academic institutions, as well as those who study them, are using outmoded benchmarks and frames of reference, the methodological equivalents of using the quality of one’s penmanship to judge the efficacy of education in the Information Age.
The basic problem with most of the data and the proposed solutions that arise from it, is twofold: proposals that are too numerous, disconnected, ad hoc, and haphazard at best, can find no purchase in any systematic approach to overhauling a failed institution so central to the health of our society; this is not camel-building. But the far greater problem with our approach to date is that we are asking the wrong questions at the outset. By far, the largest governmental initiatives to support, encourage, and foster the development of civic engagement emphasize community service, character education, and ‘traditional’ American history teaching. Thus we ask, ‘What can we do to stimulate interest in these activities? How and why does a young person become a political actor? What motivates one to act?’, or as Buckingham puts it, how do we move students from viewing “politics as a spectator sport?”
It would seem to be self-evident that for a society to sustain itself and prosper it must have a fairly clear and articulable notion of what its goals are with respect to civic education policy and programs. This is not so in the United States, nor has there ever been a consensus about the purpose of an education. And while we have been wringing our hands for a century over whether an appropriate educational experience is about inculcating ‘good’ citizenship among the elite or training factory workers or pacifying the middle and working classes, technology has eclipsed our imagination and hijacked the conversation. It is no longer relevant to simply ask what and why we should teach our children, a debate that can never be resolved. The real question we should be posing as we come to grips with our brave new world: what do students themselves want out of their education, and what makes us think we can make them learn what we want them to learn?
Which brings me back to ‘motivation,’ but in the context of what we do know about adolescent behavior, and a fossilized education model that harbors perilous consequences for our democracy.
We do know that technology has reshaped the human landscape in ways that were unimaginable, and only the futurists among us can speculate what else is in store, or how quickly it will manifest. We know from the scant but growing literature that our children are so much further progressed than adults in the understanding and use of this technology, and it is nearly impossible for creaky monolithic institutions like our mainstream schools to keep up. In this regard, let us employ some common sense even if the empirical data is lagging. Media of every sort is inextricably bound up and interwoven into our children’s lives – there is no retreat possible – and we would do well as a maturing society to recognize and acknowledge the fact of new media’s intrinsically motivating effect on young people. It is naïve at best, ignorant and dangerous at the opposing end of the spectrum, to believe we can ‘quarantine’ from or ‘immunize’ against exposure, and equally fruitless to insist that schools can realistically serve their students by stubbornly resisting the technological tsunami whose crest only rises with hyper-speed. Schools as they exist today are inherently second-class, shadowy ‘Bizarro’ worlds that cling to a distant past but that bear little resemblance to the world actually inhabited by teenagers.
Some scholars and commentators have embraced youth culture as it is, rather than what they believe it ought to be, and understand the urgency for re-envisioning schooling from the foundation up. Henry Jenkins, at the forefront of the movement to persuade educators and government that the very nature of American society is morphing before our eyes, towards a predominantly “participatory culture,” rightly argues for the need to shift our focus in academia to the “new media literacies” as a new paradigm for education, though he, too, qualifies and mutes his enthusiasm by agreeing that “more discipline-specific research is needed.” There are also those who write forcefully about the need to incorporate media and media literacy as a “pedagogical approach” rather than a “separate content or skill area” (Scheibe), or adopting “transdisciplinarity” as a way to integrate media across the curriculum (Galician). Steps in the right direction, but they do not go far enough. Others, like Michael Schudson and our own Liz Ellsworth, speak more to the necessity of radicalism when it comes to rethinking our educational institutions.
To be sure, there have been a number of high profile experiments in the redesign of traditional school curricula, such as Montgomery Blair High School’s Communication Arts program in Maryland, and the Communication Arts High School in San Antonio, where media study and production are embedded throughout the curriculum. But these remain notable exceptions, and highlight the unfathomable absence of similar programs nationally.
The position most reflective of my own is that expressed by Elliot Eisner in a presentation he gave to the Dewey Society at Stanford University in 2002. It is radical, it is profound, and it is one whose time has surely come:
“I am talking about a culture of schooling in which more importance is placed on exploration than on discovery, more value is assigned to surprise than to control, more attention is devoted to what is distinctive than to what is standard, more interest is related to what is metaphorical than to what is literal. It is an educational culture that has a greater focus on becoming than on being, places more value on the imaginative than on the factual, assigns greater priority to valuing than to measuring, and regards the quality of the journey as more educationally significant than the speed at which the destination is reached. I am talking about a new vision of what education might become and what schools are for . . . The public’s perception of the purpose of education supports the current paradigm. We need to sail against the tide. Our destination is to change the social vision of what schools can be. It will not be an easy journey but when the seas seem too treacherous to travel and the stars too distant to touch we should remember Robert Browning’s observation that “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for.” . . . And as Dewey said in the closing pages of Art as Experience, “Imagination is the chief instrument of the good.” . . . Imagination is no mere ornament, nor is art. Together they . . . might help us restore decent purpose to our efforts and help us create the kind of schools our children deserve and our culture needs. Those aspirations, my friends, are stars worth stretching for.”
In the final analysis, most of the literature skirts the most profound issues, or misses them entirely, choosing instead to focus on symptomology rather than pathology. In the meantime, our national education infrastructure teeters at the brink of irrelevance and disengaged students drift further and further, finding little meaning in the experience to sustain their interest. Occasionally events may interrupt the decline and precipitate a surge in civic engagement and participation – witness the unprecedented response to the 2008 presidential election – but unless our staid educational institutions respond in a similar, bold manner, their shriveling relevance will only accelerate, and the youth that has been so under-served will continue to discover alternate channels and pathways to learning, and ultimately cultivate new institutions that respond to their needs.
Perhaps the revolution in education is destined to unfold in this way, for the flames surround us even now and Nero can be heard clearly in the distance.
[Bibliography on request]
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