The Myth of Mastery

Student gains, as if we are building robots ourselves out of our own posterity, missing the most important elements inherent in humanness: chaos and complexity.  So much in education rests upon the pillars of The Enlightenment, to the extent that it's cliche to say.  With the hard science, along with our great industrialized heritage, students are measured, tracked for progress, and never understood.  Understanding them doesn't register as high on the list of importance as tracking.

Data collection has replaced the need, also the incentive, to get to know students face to face--their backgrounds, home life, and complex mental makeup.  Some of our students are terrifyingly misaligned and unprepared to face the challenges waiting.  Science grants us a Pyrrhic victory: teachers feel proud to have taught a student to bubble the correct response on a test, but does this demonstrate education--let alone mastery?  As technology replaces philosophy, the quest for truth, justice, and authentic love, we make a trade off.

Students who gain "knowledge" by semester's end, will have proudly stated he/she learned something.  But how quickly is the content forgotten?  The data make it seem as though students have learned, when really this cannot be proven by assessment.  It becomes a Russian doll complex--exactly, who is collecting data on the data?  Who assesses our assessments?  Who judges the judge?  These questions are not raised because science, in all its promised objective splendor, sees to it that no meddling is involved in the process of measurement.  The complexity of human interaction, the sheer misunderstandings of a growing, expanding, maturing mind, is given into the hands of first, science--and sooner than later, autobots.  In our solution-oriented status, we gladly give over the cognitive load of complex thinking to a system with its inherent flaws.  To a system that isn't measuring a child, but a shadow.      

One of the more humorous, and not readily discussed, aspects of data collection is when a student actually performs worse on a test than he/she did from a few weeks ago.  Do you mean the student actually got worse by sitting in my classroom, listening to my instruction that I worked year after year perfecting?  How could this be?  As teachers, we quickly search comfort in other students' scores.  "Ah, yes," we say with analytic glee, "here's a couple who I taught well."

Compressed Time

The idea of compressed time in the book present Present Shock is relevant in today's age, more than ever.  We live in a time in which more is expected to be accomplished in shorter periods.  The metaphor of the accordion hits the mark, illustrating this idea of a collapsing motion, an elasticity which has swung closed and perhaps will never fully swing back open.  However, moments of a time wide-open is ill-concieved in our cultural milieu, so much that it invites incredulity and often reproach.  In Americans' endorsement for a cradle-to-grave work ethic, we miss out on opportunities of self-examination and self-cultivation.  As Aristotle stated, "the unexamined life is a wasted one."  And hardly in our time is it known that the the more unlived life reflects back upon by one's old age, the more despair one feels.  In the swim, the torrent, the tsunami--in whatever horrendous metaphor one wishes to employ to characterizes, contextualize, and/ or ironize these feelings of doing little else than treading water, we must begin to find better ways of processing this wave.  It is incumbent on us to educate the youth, teaching them how to find solace in a rapidly changing environment without so much feeling like a survivor in the midst of something horrific.

Today, we lament the fact that students have the slightest notions of historical events like D-day, Pearl Harbor, the New Deal, The Great Depression, The Cold War, or even more recently, the dot.com bust or the housing bubble of 2008.  What we fail to recognize in today's world is the sheer explosive nature of the internet and what it has done to the requirements of a student in high school.  One could literally teach a class on history and begin with the Millenium, all in its anti-climactic splendor, and I guarantee you wouldn't finish a semester in history and do it much justice--such is the nature of a compressed time in which historical events are numerous, culturally-relevant, and key to understanding the where, when, why, and how of today's technologically, complex ecology.  I am not advocating to sweep the advancements of American civilization from the 17th-21st century under the rug; rather, I am highlighting the fact that in the rapid nature of change that has occurred, thanks to the internet age, has garnered massive compression in terms of time and space, the world within a snowflake metaphor.  And remember we are not just analyzing one single snowflake anymore; we're trying to shovel through the blizzard with a spoon.  Will the snowplow become synonomous with the rise of the machines?