Creating a New Metaphor in Education Reform

The Denver Post recently lamented the fact that far too many Colorado high school graduates need remedial classes when they attend college. The numbers are indeed abysmal. The blame, as usual, falls on teachers and schools. Parents, students, and government officials always seem to avoid taking any responsibility. That discussion is for another day, however. As an educator with 36 years teaching experience, I would like to focus on something else: the lack of a relevant metaphor in the debate. The current metaphor, the one that has driven the testing craze and has failed to fix education, is based on the banking concept of education. It is personified by Hirsch’s core knowledge books (“What every [fill in the blank] grader needs to know”). These types of curriculum and books see students as depositories for information. Students are piggy banks. They sit in class waiting to be filled with knowledge. Then we give them standardized tests to see what was deposited. This approach has failed miserably.

I am not suggesting that I have the answer for fixing education. However, I do know what we educators do not know, and I understand what we need to know before we can have an education system that works for all children. To figure these things out, we need a new metaphor. Freire, Silko, et al. have suggested a relationship metaphor, but this squishy concept doesn’t really encompass the neuroscience of learning. We need a new metaphor because human communication thrives on metaphors. These devices drive our thinking, debates, and understanding. I therefore propose an analogy for education reform that might give the discussion a useful direction - not a metaphor, per se, but rather, an analogy that might lead to the creation of a new metaphor that will drive successful education reform.

Here is my analogy: Education is in the same place that medicine was in the 1700s and 1800s.

Think about being a doctor at that time. Maybe you had heard of germ theory but your medical school trained you in the use of leeches, knives, and swift amputations. Your bag did not contain scientific instruments to scientifically measure your patient’s condition but rather jars, saws, and sharp instruments. You knew about the humors and the four elements. You knew little if anything about sterilization, antiseptics, or vaccination. Spontaneous generation, not evolution, ruled the thinking of the day. Epidemics of cholera, small pox, typhus, and diphtheria killed thousands on a regular basis. One of the great ironies of American history is that George Washington, who was the first general to vaccinate his army against disease, was killed by his own physicians who bled him to death in an attempt to cure his pneumonia. These were the best doctors of the day who were thoroughly trained in standard medical practice of the age and they killed their most important patient.

Even those doctors who knew about Lister’s, Jenner’s, and Pasteur’s work had trouble implementing the ideas. Political will had to be developed and inertia had to be overcome. Water sanitation systems had to be built. Indoor plumbing had to be installed. Food handling practices had to be developed and implemented. Mass inoculation programs had to be mandated and carried out. And even with these successes, it took the discovery of antibiotics, the immune system, and DNA to really give medicine the upper hand in the fight against disease.

Today, medicine is still in trouble, but now the problem is more political than anything else. Indiscriminate use of antibiotics and disinfectants has given us new, more virulent disease organisms (evolution rears its ugly head). Muslim fundamentalists oppose vaccination programs that could eradicate polio. Christian fundamentalists oppose the teaching of evolutionary science, which is the foundation of all biology, including microbiology. A former Playboy Playmate has convinced thousands of parents to forego vaccinating their children based on falsified and inaccurate data. These are all political and social problems that must be addressed accordingly. Science doesn’t have the answers. It has already taught us what causes diseases and how to stop them. All we have to do is act upon that knowledge.

So how does this analogy fit into education? Successful education reform requires both political will and the scientific knowledge of how kids learn. Now, here’s where it gets tricky and where the analogy is most useful. Many educators, politicians, and parents think they know how kids learn. Colleges have been teaching learning theories for decades. But the truth is this: We have no idea how some activity in the real world makes a change in the child’s brain called “learning.”

In the past, people didn’t know about bacteria or viruses and how to prevent their spread. Today we do not know how learning physically takes place. Just like most people thought that imbalance of the humors or sin led to disease, we have lots of useless ideas about how kids learn. Don’t get me wrong. Some best practices do exist, ones that have worked with many students. Montessori, Piaget, Skinner, Dewey, James, and others have proposed ideas that have shown utility and success. But we are just now beginning to understand how the human brain works and how it learns. Until we truly understand how learning occurs on the cellular and possibly even molecular level, we will not know how to set up schools and classrooms that work for all children.