Profiles in Futility - They're

Profiles in Futility - They're about to repeal the Profiles of Learning.

It's been a Republican goal ever since the Profiles were passed, in '98. It's been a constant topic among "Garage Logicians" all along. It's being treated as a major triumph by the GOP, which has always favored a "back to basics" approach.

I'm not so sure it's a good thing.

Bear with me, here. I have as little tolerance for the arrogance of the professional, academic educational establishment as anyone. And the original Profiles in Learning system reeked of "professional educators" cutting loose with a big budget and a blank sheet of paper.

But the basic idea was sound; children learn differently. Some learn by reading, others by writing or watching or doing or hearing how to do something. Profiles' great strength was that it focused on the outputs of education - can a student put together things he/she's learned to actually do something meaningful?

The Profiles were project-based; the students were to be assessed based on projects that tied together all different areas of learning. It made perfect sense to me. I must have been one of the few.

For years, I've followed the workings of the Sudbury Valley School, in Sudbury, Massachussetts. The website (and the profile on the school on "60 Minutes" two years ago) is full of hippiedippy sounding platitudes - but don't let that throw you off. The school has no formal structure - kids literally study anything they want, even if that means (as the school literature points out) fishing every day for four years. The school's staff is there mainly to hook the kids up with the resources they need to study whatever they're looking for. The goal is the exact opposite of the "Back to Basics" movement.

And, say at least two friends of mine who are committed to the system, so are the results. Kids come out of Sudbury-type schools with something public schools frequently extinguish - a genuine love of learning, and a self-confidence about it that (to most accounts) dwarfs that of most public or private school kids.

Here's an example that Sudbury proponents talk about a lot - nobody tells the kids to learn to read. They learn when they're ready. Then, they work with staff, or other kids, or even teach themselves. Although nobody tells the kids to learn reading, they all do - and apparently at a very good level. Here's where the Sudbury people make a great point; nobody tells children when they have to learn to talk - they just do it. They learn it from their parents, from other kids, everywhere. Barring physical or mental impairment, it's very rare to find "speaking-disabled" kids. But if there were a cultural norm that said "Kids must speak by 22 months", and an entire caste of professional "toddler speech professionals" cramming kids through "speaking programs" and declaring "Speaking Is Fundamental!", it wouldn't be long before you'd see kids in "Remedial Speaking" programs, and developing a life-long disdain for talking...

...the same way so many American adults have a disdain for books, math and science.

But I didn't come here to praise the Sudbury School. I came here to bury the Profiles In Learning.

The Profiles may have been an educationese boondoggle, a bureaucratic mess (I know teachers who detested the immense paperwork involved - which would normally draw a chorus of "boo hoos", but teachers DO have an insane amount of it these days) and a triumph of the (liberal) academic educational establishment - but it did make at least a cursory nod to something our educational system direly lacks - a means of mapping the things they learn in school to their own styles of learning, so that they can apply what they're learning to their lives in ways that'll benefit them long after they're done with school

But proponents of "Back to Basics" standards tend to be two types of people:

• the people who thrive under one style of learning - reading and taking tests. Since this was the system in place for most of recent memory, the people who throve at this style of learning did well in the traditional academic settings - including law schools and universities. Hence, they tend to be the teachers who teach the next generation - and the lawyers who make the laws.
• Those who think that reading and taking tests were good enough for them, so dammit, it's good enough for the kids. "Boo Freakin' Hoo", the Garage Logicians will say. "I learned by sitting in a desk and reading my damn assignment, and look how I turned out!". And perhaps they turned out well. But I'd like to ask them, in all honesty - "what was the last book you read? When was the last time you went out and learned something completely new, not because your boss told you to (important as that is), but because you just love learning stuff? When was the last time you willingly applied something you learned in Algebra, or American Literature, or Biology, to your life?" And, GLers -how did you learn to fix cars? Did you read a book on the subject and take a test before you started tinkering? Really? How do you suppose that connects with your own style of learning? Think about that for a while.

I love learning - and I learn best by doing. Always have. And it infuriates me sometimes; when I sit down to do a project, I gleefully apply everything I know from a zillion different fields to the problem, including bits and pieces of stuff I remember from eighth-grade science classes - and I can remember exactly when the "Read, Regurgitate, Repeat" process of learning science and math finally turned me off to the whole process. I'm a natural engineer in many ways - an inveterate tinkerer, as anal-retentive about laboratory procedure as I am sloppy about everything else in my life - but the "read, regurgitate, repeat" system of "learning" pretty well extinguished any thought of that from my life by about ninth grade.

So Minnesota's going back to the old system. As the Strib says:

The new standards, completed so far only for language arts and math, would be substantially different from Profile standards. There are many more of them, and they are more specific about what students should know.

We're back to writing recipes for the students and citizens.

Add four units of English, three units of Social Studies, two units of Math and one unit of Art. Shake vigorously, examine after four years. If the student doesn't respond, discard and start over

More to come; education is major screed-fodder for me.

Posted by Mitch at May 20, 2003 07:28 AM