Participants: Shelley Quinn (Host), Randy J. Siebold
Series Code: IAA
Program Code: IAA000425
|
00:01 In 1983, then President Ronald Reagan commissioned a group of
00:06 people to do a report on the assessment of basically what is 00:11 going on in the American educational system. 00:14 I want to read an excerpt from the National Commission On 00:17 Excellence in Education. How did they hand the report to him? 00:22 I'm sure he was shocked. It says If an unfriendly foreign power 00:27 had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational 00:31 performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as 00:36 an act of war. Stay tuned. We're going to be talking about some 00:41 changes that need to be made in our educational system. 00:45 Music being played. 01:09 Hello, I'm Shelley Quinn and welcome to Issues and Answers. 01:12 I'm so glad that you tuned in. No matter where you're watching 01:15 from around the world. We're going to be talking about a very 01:19 serious problem and probing some answers to the issue of the 01:22 direction of public education. Although we will be focusing on 01:26 what's going on in the United States, much will overlap and 01:30 apply to the school systems in your areas as well I'm sure. 01:33 Let me introduce to you our returning guest 01:37 Dr. Randy Siebold and Randy you have a Ph. D. in education and 01:41 you are the Vice-president of Education for Weimar Center of 01:46 Health and Education. Tell us just a little bit about Weimar. 01:51 Weimar Center for Health and Education is now working with a 01:55 partnership with Amazing Facts Ministry, another media ministry 02:00 and the three big entities on campus are an academy, a high 02:06 school, boarding high school, a college, a small college of 02:10 which I am overseeing those. Then we also have a Lifestyle 02:15 Center on Campus where residents come in and learn to eat in a 02:19 vegan kitchen and learn all sorts of different approaches 02:23 about health and how to live life better and longer and 02:27 happier. So it's good 02:29 Well it's kind of exciting to see what you're doing in the 02:33 development of your college. We know that our focus today is 02:37 not going to be on Weimar, but I just wanted to bring that up. 02:41 You have been in education for nearly 20 years now and today 02:46 let's go back and look at a little bit of the history of the 02:51 school system, if you will. When did common education come 02:56 onto the scene. In other words, when did people just quit 03:00 just teaching their children at home and decide to send them to 03:04 a common school room? 03:06 Well, I think it's an important question because the history of 03:09 education is one that most people don't think about. 03:12 They just go to school and it's always been this way. 03:16 But as you think back in history it has not really been that way 03:21 for very long. We go back to the mid 1800's, we start to look 03:27 back at when the most common method of education was the one 03:33 room school house. So they were in school and... 03:36 And that began about when? 03:38 Well that was up until the mid 1800's when what's called the 03:42 common school movement in the United States developed. 03:45 We had people coming from all different nations and coming 03:52 together in America. The idea of the leaders was to bring 03:55 together what we call this melting pot bringing people all 04:00 together and we want them to be Americans. 04:05 So the idea of a common school then was a lot about 04:10 socialization then, is that what you're saying? 04:12 Yes, yes, bringing that commonality and making sure 04:15 everyone had a basic education. That was the big focus in the 04:20 mid 1800's is when it got started heavily. 04:23 When you think about this then the old school system of the 04:28 blackboards and chalk and the teachers there, what happened 04:34 that began to distinguish one school from another? Explain to 04:40 us just a little bit about the whole history. 04:42 What's interesting is when the idea of public school became 04:48 more common and more popular, the focus was on whatever the 04:53 educators in the area felt was important. So some who were 04:58 trained classically would focus on the classics. Those with a 05:02 more basic manual training would do manual labor and they would 05:06 show them how to do manual labor So the schools were all over the 05:11 place. They were doing all kinds of different things and it 05:14 wasn't until a group got together called the Committee 05:18 of Ten and when this group got together it was led by the chair 05:25 of Harvard University and they brought all these people 05:29 together and their big study was what do we need to be doing 05:33 in high schools to prepare them to come to colleges because 05:37 think about this. Think about everyone doing their own thing 05:42 right, and then all of these colleges getting incoming 05:44 freshmen, one coming from a classically trained school, one 05:48 coming from a manual labor school, so the students were all 05:53 over the place. It was a challenge. 05:55 Yes. Their big goal was let's get a standard. 05:58 So now this is already into the industrial age then because 06:02 you've gone from an agrarian society of farmers and now with 06:07 the industrial age Harvard was the first college in the United 06:11 States and they're saying, Hey where do we even begin to teach 06:15 these children a college education when they don't have 06:18 an equivalent of basically your academics from school to school. 06:25 Is that right? Well and they didn't even know 06:27 what academics was. We take it now that term is just every 06:31 one knows math, science, English you know. But 150 years ago that 06:36 wasn't such a common knowledge. Well, what does that mean? 06:40 What does academics mean? That we're doing math but is that 06:43 taught just in grade school or do we teach it in high school as 06:48 well? Or do we teach it? So the Committee of Ten really tried to 06:54 establish what the curriculum is. That was the group primarily 07:00 responsible for taking that task and really making it real. 07:04 For coming up with out 3R's, reading, writing and 'rithmetic. 07:09 Well, you mentioned also the industrial age. We have a slide 07:14 that I'd like to show on this time line of what happens here. 07:18 Take a look at this. You see the agrarian age and this common 07:23 school movement comes in just about the same time that the 07:27 industrial age is coming. 07:28 Now, Randy, before you go forward, let's define what the 07:33 agrarian society was because I'm not sure everyone is catching 07:36 that. Yes, good point. It comes from 07:38 the word agriculture; so the idea of farming or tending sheep 07:43 or livestock. This is where most people earned their living and 07:47 it's what made the commerce go round. 07:50 So the agrarian age and the switch from the agrarian society 07:54 to the industrial society took place in the early 1800's? 07:57 Yes, early/mid 1800's. So what we had in America, this 08:01 industrial age was characterized by these large industries coming 08:07 in and obviously because of the name. 08:09 So essentially what was going on during the agrarian society is 08:12 that folks taught their young ones at home and that was 08:18 basically... That was the most common. 08:19 That was it, you learned with daddy on the farm. 08:22 Okay, and then at the beginning of the industrial age some years 08:26 into this... When was Harvard founded? 08:29 Well it was in the 1600's. Actually it was before we ever 08:32 became a nation that Harvard was over here. 08:35 I had no idea. I though it came up during the industrial age. 08:39 But Harvard then comes out with this Committee of Ten to... 08:42 Well, yes, it was actually the National Education Association 08:46 that was a commission. It was chaired by the president of 08:50 Harvard and so this group... and that's right in the 08:54 beginning of this industrial age if we can look at the time line 08:58 again really quick you can see how the Committee of Ten... 09:00 This common school movement, remember we talked about all 09:04 disparate school and they were looking for this common group 09:10 here and so the industrial age then really characterized this 09:15 whole approach. So then during the industrial 09:17 age is when the common school system really became important. 09:21 Now the quote that I opened the program with from the report 09:26 from the commission in 1983, that would still be considered 09:31 the industrial age wouldn't it? 09:32 Yes, that was right around the transition depending on who you 09:36 are, where you were at, whether you were in the information age 09:39 yet but that report was essentially measuring and 09:44 assessing education up to that point. 09:46 All right, so let's look at that quote again because what strikes 09:49 me is that this quote made during the information age was 09:53 basically the school system that the Committee of Ten had put in 09:57 place for the common bringing together of students and let's 10:01 look at that and see what that... 10:03 Yes, check this out. If an unfriendly foreign power had 10:07 attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational 10:11 performance that exists today we might well have viewed it as an 10:15 act of war. And this is the National 10:17 Commission on the Excellence in Education. When they gave Reagan 10:22 this report, were there any major school reforms? We've 10:27 gone from agrarian to industrial age. Here comes this report 10:32 that says, Hey this is a really bad situation. Were there major 10:37 reforms made? Well let's put it this way, the 10:40 repercussions were huge. It was a big splash in the educational 10:46 market. I mean, it was a big shock essentially. What they had 10:52 done in this report was taken a look at education in America as 10:57 well as in other countries and did comparisons. They were 11:03 thinking that things were not being done well. It was a shock 11:08 to a lot of people and the different reforms that have come 11:13 out of that, well not directly as a result of that, but just 11:18 in effect the whole reform idea has happened since the Committee 11:23 of Ten met. When they met, there were groups saying we need to 11:28 change it; this isn't right. School reform isn't anything new 11:34 it just changes and molds shape at least in the last 150 years. 11:39 So then if we look at the graphic from before where we 11:45 had the agrarian into the industrial age, now coming into 11:52 the early information age schools basically we're saying 11:58 there just hasn't been a whole lot that has changed yet, is 12:01 that correct? Correct. You can see in here 12:04 where the Nation at Risk falls. It's fascinating and very timely 12:09 and we have another graphic I'd like to put up also talking 12:14 about these three waves of commerce or these three areas 12:19 of society. You can see the transportation and 12:23 I hope this is large enough 12:24 so people can read it, transportation and how the 12:27 agrarian, industrial and information ages show how 12:31 transportation has changed, how families have changed through 12:35 these different times. Let me do this because we will 12:38 have a lot of people listening to this by radio so 12:41 transportation during the agrarian age was horse and buggy 12:45 and then it went to the industrial age the train and now 12:49 we have planes and cars during the information age. 12:51 Now the family once in the agrarian it was extended family. 12:55 Everyone living together. You got married and you built onto 12:59 the house and everyone was living together, it was all the 13:02 extended family. Then in the industrial age it 13:04 became more the nuclear family because people began to... 13:08 Mom and dad and the kids. When the kids grew up they went and 13:11 got a house of their own. 13:12 All right and now in the information age sadly it is... 13:16 Yes, well single parent, blended families are more common than 13:20 what we might call traditional, the husband/wife being married 13:24 with their children. So business during the agrarian 13:27 age was mostly family business, then it went to bureaucracies 13:30 and then information we're working with teams. 13:33 Now let's fill in the blank on education. 13:38 This is what's fascinating. You look at the agrarian age and the 13:42 one room school house idea or learning at the farm and in the 13:47 industrial age really, our current system of education was 13:51 built during the industrial age and so a lot of public educators 13:56 are saying, Wait a minute. We're in a new category, we're in a 14:01 new life. What does education look like in the 21st century? 14:05 What should it look like in an information age? We have this 14:11 school system designed and very clearly much of it was very much 14:16 designed to help produce what they needed. They needed a lot 14:20 of factory workers; people who would take directions, who would 14:24 do what they were told, who had a basic skill set, but they 14:28 didn't need a lot of problem solvers. That's not what they 14:31 really needed. They didn't need a lot of creative thinkers. 14:35 That's not what they needed. 14:36 So where is public education heading today. You hear a lot of 14:42 conversation about choice of schools. Do you think we are 14:47 going to do what like Germany and some other countries have 14:50 done where we are tracking students either to go into 14:55 vocational school or college. I mean, what do you see? 14:59 I guess I don't see America heading that way although 15:03 testing is absolutely huge. You know, we have in America No 15:09 Child Left Behind and that is and accountability movement to 15:14 try to help each child. The intent is that each child will 15:18 be held accountable for some test score growth. That's the 15:22 way they're going to measure whether teachers are doing a 15:25 good job. So they hold teachers and schools accountable for that 15:28 growth. That's the plan. 15:32 I personally believe part of the problem with that is that then 15:37 people begin to teach how to take tests. 15:40 To the test, yes. And that's not something 15:43 necessarily that's going to have any lasting effect on the mind. 15:47 Well and as teachers know there's some students... 15:50 What's interesting, as a teacher you work with the young person 15:53 every day and you're seeing they're starting to get it and 15:57 they ask questions in class and Oh, they're starting to get it, 16:00 Oh yeah, it's coming. Oh this is great and you give them a test 16:04 and they bomb, you know, what is the problem? Then you have 16:07 someone else who doesn't show up and they come and take a 16:10 test and they get it and you're like how do they do this? 16:16 There is actually a thing called test-taking skills that can be 16:22 taught that allows you to do better on tests. 16:27 So what do you see today that makes you even think that there 16:31 is going to be educational reform? What's going on? 16:35 Well, we talked in our last episode or segment about the 16:44 broadening of what it is we're trying to educate. There was a 16:49 book that came out called Emotional Intelligence 16:54 Daniel Goldman was the author. It wasn't written directly for 16:59 education, but his point, and we have a slide with a quote here, 17:04 centrally emotional intelligence has a higher correlation with 17:14 success than with IQ has with success. In other words we're 17:21 spending so much time trying to help our young people be 17:24 successful and we're trying to help them build their intellect 17:27 but we're not helping them build their EQ, their emotional 17:31 quotient. Okay, so explain emotional 17:32 quotient. Well, it's separated in some 17:36 fields into interpersonal relationships,... 17:40 We call them people skills. 17:42 People skills between you and me and how do we relate to each 17:45 other and then there is the intrapersonal skills, how you 17:47 relate to yourself when it's all quiet; what you're thinking, you 17:51 know, how you relate to yourself. That's the emotional 17:55 intelligence. You know, since we used Ronald 17:57 Reagan I will make this comment because I remember hearing 18:00 someone talk about him on the television. It was a historian 18:08 who said that Ronald Reagan had the highest EQ, emotional 18:12 quotient, of any president that we've ever had. He knew how 18:15 to get people to work together. He certainly didn't have the 18:18 highest IQ. I think they say President Nixon had a very high 18:22 IQ, but Nixon had a very low EQ. So I can see where the quote 18:27 that was just on the screen, EQ or emotional quotient, that 18:32 ability to have those interpersonal skills really 18:36 is probably, that was just right on. It is closely related to 18:44 success. Well, and so what this does for 18:46 me is... Think about this. So now, emotional quotient, 18:49 think about this, emotional intelligence, how is that being 18:54 taught in our schools? So the quick reaction of many educators 19:00 is to do this: Well let's have a class in emotional 19:04 intelligence. So we add another class. To think about this, I 19:08 was talking with an elderly gentleman recently and he said, 19:12 Oh, the school system is so different. And I thought to 19:15 myself, what. I mean, it's basically the same thing. 19:18 Well what he did was shared with me about all of these added 19:22 things that have been added on since he was in school. It was 19:27 the basics and then they went and worked. But now we just 19:32 seem to be adding another class. We find a problem, we 19:35 add another class, we find a problem, we add another class. 19:37 And then you have a quote I believe about that kind of 19:42 coverage, don't you? Yes, absolutely. That's what I 19:44 was thinking. This is from Howard Gardner. 19:48 The greatest enemy of understanding is coverage. 19:53 This is the difficulty of the teacher. Now think about this... 19:58 No Child Left Behind... Okay you're a teacher and so you're 20:03 being held accountable for student learning and how well 20:07 they score on the test. What are you trying to do? You have to 20:12 cover things, you have to cover that. 20:15 And you can ruin understanding. I see this. 20:19 You see, this so intertwined and... Howard Gardner, by the 20:26 way, the one who wrote that quote, a professor at Harvard, 20:30 was in a group called Project Zero and they developed a 20:35 strategy or a way of thinking about intelligence that actually 20:41 divided it up into many different facets rather than 20:45 just... so rather than saying intelligence and thinking about 20:50 something that, you ask anyone about intelligence, oh they 20:53 know what that is, that's the mind. Well what he did in their 20:57 group was they studied different brain functions of different 21:01 areas of the brain and said what is the intelligence that's 21:05 brought to the human experience from this portion of the brain? 21:09 So they studied people who were brain damaged with different 21:13 areas and what were the functions they were losing and 21:16 it was really fascinating. So we had logical mathematical, okay, 21:22 linguistic; those were two that we all knew and in fact if you 21:26 do well in those you do typically well in school and 21:30 that's what our schools are primarily focused on. Musical 21:33 intelligence, spacial and we now people like that who get 21:39 directions, they just know where they're at, you know. So there's 21:42 all of these different intelligences that we don't 21:46 recognize in school. You know I've talked before about the 21:49 curriculum cloud. What is it that we're trying to learn, 21:53 what's the goal? But what we've done is we've focused on just 21:59 logic, logical mathematical, the linguistic and getting it 22:03 covered. Focusing on the content rather than watching the 22:07 understanding of the children being developed. It's difficult. 22:09 So essentially what you're saying is that our high schools 22:13 we've got a lot of good people out here who are trying their 22:17 best to make certain the teens get a good education, but what 22:24 they're doing is falling back into that system of, well you 22:28 don't understand emotional quotient then we will give you 22:32 a class to cover emotional quotient. You had a quote from 22:37 Bill Gates and I'd love to put that on the screen right now. 22:41 It's right along this same line. This is an amazing quote. 22:45 Now you'll notice at the top of the screen it says Change in 22:50 Outcomes. The point of that is there are business leaders who 22:56 are saying we can't keep doing things the way we are doing them 23:01 now. We've got to change. Our high schools, he says, were 23:06 designed to meet the needs of another age. He's talking this 23:10 same conversation. Bill Gates understands what's happening 23:15 with our education system in the sense of this is an industrial 23:19 age design coming to an information age. 23:22 And if anybody understands the information age, Bill Gates 23:27 does, because he has become a multibillionaire. I'm sure where 23:31 his great understanding of this is coming in is just to see how 23:34 do we find workers who are coming out of this high school 23:40 curriculum system that was meant to train factory workers, 23:45 how do we find workers that are qualified for the 23:49 information age? Exactly. I was looking recently 23:52 at a report from an eastern state, New Hampshire, I believe. 23:59 They've taken a whole systemic relook at their high school 24:04 process saying that rather than just covering content in their 24:10 classes, they wanted their students to develop 24:13 competencies. Do you see the difference? 24:16 Yes I do. So now you're held accountable 24:19 not for the teacher covering it, but for the students actually 24:23 being able to develop the skills and the competencies. So they're 24:27 talking about a redesign in that report. That's interesting in 24:31 and of itself. In that report, there was a little graph, I 24:34 thought about oh maybe I should bring it here. What it did was 24:40 it showed in 1900 the percentage of manual labor jobs versus the 24:46 percentage of brain worker jobs. Then in 1950 it more equaled out 24:52 but still there were more manual labor jobs. Then in 2000 now 24:57 it's the other way around. So we have an educational system that 25:02 was actually designed for this group... 25:04 Now that's all being outsourced. All those type of jobs are being 25:09 outsourced. Yes that's part of the challenge 25:12 So is this a true statement? I'm think I'm seeing why reform 25:17 might be so difficult because we've got 100s of years of 25:22 education, a couple hundred years of education anyway, of 25:27 going with a certain system and it is an academic system, the 25:32 reading, writing, 'rithmetic and all of a sudden now if my 25:36 children are in school and you're telling me you're going 25:39 to change the whole way, I'm going to look at it and say 25:43 I don't like this system. That's not what I grew up with. So is 25:46 that... Sure absolutely. 25:48 And even from an educator's viewpoint was it hard for you 25:50 to make a mind shift? 25:51 Well in my Ph. D. program we studied how people learn and 25:57 then we took a look at how the education system ran and that's 26:02 when it because crystal apparent to me. It's not designed to 26:06 optimize learning; that's not what it's designed for. 26:09 Now wait a minute. Are you talking about the four different 26:12 learning preferences like auditory learning styles. 26:16 You did once tell me though that those are really preferences; 26:21 that we all learn in every way. Is that correct? 26:23 Yes, yes. In fact, learning styles, the research on learning 26:25 styles, the last time I looked at the literature about five 26:29 years ago, and there's been a lot of stuff done on learning 26:32 styles. What happens in learning styles is that people have 26:37 preferences of the way they like to learn, but the problem is 26:42 when we try to design a class that's specifically for auditory 26:47 learners and give them a lot of auditory everyone needs every 26:51 kind and so the best way is to make sure that we have lots of 26:56 variety. For teachers, learning styles is a nice way to help us 26:59 understand something, but the best thing that learning styles 27:04 tells is that we need lots of variety. We have one more quote 27:09 that I'd like to come to before we're getting close here. 27:13 Schools are Damaging. Look at this: 27:16 The present day educational system... look at the words he 27:19 uses... is damaging to young people. Evidence of this harm 27:22 is being presented from psychological, neurological, 27:25 sociological, statistical and common-sense perspectives. 27:28 That's amazing. So we can see there is a great need for reform 27:31 and reform is beginning, but we're not going to have time 27:35 to talk about it in this program so we're going to just invite 27:38 you to come back and we'll talk about that reform when you do. 27:42 Thank you so much for joining us. You know we are so glad that 27:47 you joined us today and I hope that this is... we're not trying 27:51 to be critical in the sense that we're pointing fingers or being 27:55 judgmental. What we are trying to do is do critical thinking 27:59 and get everyone to thinking about what can we do to have 28:03 the kind of educational reform we need. 28:05 May God bless abundantly. Join us next time. |
Revised 2014-12-17