“Back in January I actually moderated quite a similar event in Davos with a group of CEOs and general luminaries very much not just the 1% but probably the 0.1% and I asked them the same question. And what they came back with was education, education, and a bit of digital inclusion.”

They thought that schooling should be both more differentiated and more standardized: differentiated in curriculum to fit the backgrounds and future destinies of students; and standardized with respect to buildings and equipment, professional qualifications of staff, administrative procedures, social and health services and regulations, and other educational practices.

“Apart from light on such specific questions, I am regretfully forced to the conclusion that the difference between us is not so much narrowly educational as it is profoundly political and social. The kind of vocational education in which I am interested is not one which will ‘adapt’ workers to the existing industrial regime; I am not sufficiently in love with the regime for that. It seems to me that the business of all who would not be educational time-servers is to resist every move in this direction, and to strive for a kind of vocational education which will first alter the existing industrial regime, and ultimately transform it.” (38-9)

The ideas sounded authoritative and gave the impression that they were building into arguments, but they were largely a collection of numbered lists and bullet points. He was a man who would have warmly embraced PowerPoint. In his work, portentousness abounded; it was all about riding the wave of the future and avoiding the undertow of the past. However, Snedden’s ideas lacked substance:

He was a self-styled scientist who never did anything that remotely resembled scientific study, an educational sociologist who drew on the cliches of the field – social Darwinism and social control – without ever making an original contribution. In his written work, he never used data, and he never cited sources, which made sense, since he rarely drew on sources anyway. His books and journal articles took the form of proclamations, scientific pronouncements without the science; they all read like speeches, and that was likely the source of most of them.

And lacked subtlety:

But one of the lessons of social change in general and educational reform in particular is that every doctrine needs its doctrinaire. Nuance is dysfunctional for the cause of educational reform, especially early in the process, when the main task is to clear the field of the accumulated institutional underbrush and make the case for a radical new order. Every reformer needs to slash and burn the remnants of the old way of doing things, portraying the past as all weeds and decay, and clearing space tor the new institutions to take root. This is something that a literal minded, hyperkinetic, and monomaniacal figure like Snedden could do superbly. As Diane Ravitch {2000) noted, “Snedden’s caricature of the traditional school became a staple of progressive attacks tor years to come: it was ‘repressive,’ ‘monarchical,’ ‘barren and repellent,’ founded entirely on classics and completely out of touch with American democracy” (p. 82).

I’ll let you do your own compare and contrast with current educational thought leaders. William Heard Kilpatrick – The Child-Centered Project-Method "David Snedden’s social efficiency agenda does not entail any particular pedagogy. Maybe schools need to have rigorous standards and teachers need to impose upon students a disposition to defer to authority to prepare them for factory and corporate jobs. We are witnessing a swing away from this pedagogy, and a return to child-centered classrooms (which constructivists have argued for since the 1980s). William Heard Kilpatrick’s ‘project method’, popular during the progressive era, is now re-born as Project-Based Learning, which casts teachers as ‘facilitators’ (again, much like constructivism). Gert Biesta has noted that ‘teaching’ and ‘education’ have virtually disappeared from our discourse that now raises ‘learning’ and ‘student-centered’ approaches above all else. The learnification of educational discourse makes it increasingly difficult to raise questions about the purpose of education, which has largely been settled in favor of preparing students for work. Our present obsession with being ‘student-centered’ owes its heritage not to John Dewey, but to William Heard Kilpatrick, the popularizer of ‘the project method’ Michael Knoll writes:

In his concept, there was no proper place for traditional educational features such as teacher, curriculum, and instruction. Project learning, Kilpatrick wrote, was always individual and situative, and could neither be planned nor fixed. “If the purpose dies and the teacher still requires the completion of what was begun, then it becomes a task” – merely wearisome and laborious (Kilpatrick 1925, 348). “Freedom for practice” and “practice with satisfaction” were the slogans with which he effectively staged his “revolt” against drill, discpline, and compulsion (ibd., 348, 311, 56ff.).

Kilpatrick’s emphasis on the interests of the students can easily slide into an embrace of one side of the curriculum / student dichotomy. After all, we don’t need kids completing more meaningless tasks, but embracing their passions. Will Richardson argues we should “let kids bring their kale to school,” in reference to his daughter’s passion, “and make that the focus of developing them as learners.” (15:00) Dewey abhorred the dichotomies that plague contemporary educational discourse. In The Child and the Curriculum (Chicago, 1902), Dewey writes:

“Just as, upon the whole, it was the weakness of the ‘old education’ that it made invidious comparisons between the immaturity of the child and the maturity of the adult, regarding the former as something to be got away from as soon as possible and as much as possible; so it is the danger of the ‘new education’ that it regard the child’s present powers and interests as something finally significant in themselves.”

It’s not that we should not nurture the interests of children, but to elevate the child and their present interests over the knowledge that adults have accumulated makes little sense. In his Experience and Education, Dewey argued for experiences as a “moving force”, and teachers are a wealth of such experience which they ought to use to structure, judge, and direct the experience of youth. As teachers, we need to put the right books in the hands of our students that will help them grow rather than work to satisfy their current urges and interests. We need to know how to structure the environment that children act in so that they encounter knowledge worth its name. As Biesta says, teachers matter because “at the end of the day judgements about what is educationally desirable can only be made in response to the concrete and always unique situations that emerge from the encounter between teachers and their students.” Education ought to be transformative. In “A Marriage on the Rocks”: An Unknown Letter by William H. Kilpatrick about his Project Method, Michael Knoll situates Kilpatrick’s work historically and in terms of Kilpatrick’s ambitions to have “power and influence” and be an “original thinker”. Kilpatrick’s obsession with being child-centered made his take on the ‘project-method’ stand out as a new pedagogy and, more importantly, brand. Again, I let you make your own comparisons with today’s thought leaders. I imagine Dewey perplexed by Most Likely to Succeed, which opens with a mis-attributed quotation, and ends with a student placing his gear in the empty slot left in the mechanism his class has constructed, just moments after Ken Robinson has told us we need to move beyond the ‘industrial metaphor’ for education. Dewey would be shocked at our narrow discourse and dichotomies, but most of all by our complete historical amnesia, and how little things change." ]]> benjamindoxtdator johndewey davidsnedden williamheardkilpatrick 2017 education sfsh economics work labor purpose progressive efficiency democracy projectbasedlearning michaelknoll pedagogy learning howwelearn policy constructivism gertbiesta student-centered schools davidlabaree history willrichardson davidtyack larrycuban billgates thomasfriedman tryggvithayer society capitalism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:fc362d89a21d/ 2013-07-28T23:31:22+00:00 http://blog.ourfuture.org/20130724/tom-friedman-a-new-ayn-rand-for-a-dark-digital-future robertogreco disruption economics punditry 2013 thomasfriedman corporatism class politics policy globalization aristocracy technosolutionism neoliberalism aynrand us https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:4102f75e9637/ 2012-11-24T19:52:54+00:00 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/nov/24/nassim-taleb-antifragile-finance-interview robertogreco math teaching fasting diet paleodiet living life seneca classics war thomasfriedman honor vindication deschooling autonomy unschooling anarchism chaos randomness principles honesty freedom academia banking money ethics socialmisfits cv independence blackswans failure probability antifragility antifragile small fragility autodidacts 2012 books nassimtaleb autodidactism https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:bb30e48858fa/ 2012-02-22T07:24:12+00:00 http://metalab.harvard.edu/2012/02/twitter-nprs-morning-edition-and-dreams-of-flatland/ robertogreco networks hyperlocal flatness connections place language nationality borders barrywellman shankarvidantam andycarvin tejucole communitites thomasfriedman worldisflat 2012 matthewbattles community twitter sociology socialmedia geography horizontality horizontalidad https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:3fef5de451aa/ 2012-02-22T06:01:40+00:00 http://speedchange.blogspot.com/2012/01/if-you-say-scale-up-you-dont-understand.html robertogreco heartofdarkness wine diversity differences norming norms standardization rttt nclb arneduncan benjamindistraeli williamgladstone cottonmather hybridization worldisflat universaldesign scalingup scalingacross germany france uk us americanization localism local teaching learning unschooling deschooling comparativeeducation blueprints society americanexceptionalism exceptionalism reform britisshemprire thomasfriedman assimiliation cooexistence frenchcolonialism terroir deborahfrieze margaretwheatley anglocentrism decolonization colonization humanscale human scaling scale education schools 2012 irasocol usexceptionalism https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:6a7c7a74468a/ 2011-09-11T16:45:20+00:00 http://www.underpaidgenius.com/post/10081509268 robertogreco stoweboyd thomasfriedman freetrade us economics policy corporatism 2011 southcarolina washingtonstate boeing samueljohnson andygrove startups jobs employment work globalization progressives politics manufacturing https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:7e6cb6240ba4/ 2011-09-11T03:40:45+00:00 http://www.underpaidgenius.com/post/9925176474 robertogreco stoweboyd us society socialism greatrecession austerity thomasfriedman 2011 economics policy politics individualism globalfinancialcrisis https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:12ab29575190/ 2010-10-31T18:21:57+00:00 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/opinion/31friedman.html robertogreco thomasfriedman india us culture confidence capitalism socialism imagination meritocracy global china values world https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:1d643593964e/ 2010-08-27T03:49:25+00:00 http://stevemiranda.wordpress.com/2010/08/26/the-story-of-sisyphus/ robertogreco thomasfriedman education pscs tcsnmy learning schools alternative change policy publicschools cv whywedowhatwedo community lcproject sisyphus moreofthesame waitingforsuperman pugetsoundcommunityschool https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:615d1c1732e4/ 2009-12-22T06:44:27+00:00 http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2009/12/the_builders_manifesto.html robertogreco constructivism innovation business economics future design productivity umairhaque leadership barackobama middlemanagement finance 2009 policy politics healthcare creativity motivation work management administration builders organizations value evanwilliams billgates wallstreet elinorostrom matttaibbi nicholaskristof maureendowd benbernake mohammadyunus statusquo sarahpalin nelsonmandela power thomasfriedman https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:9cc710e38d64/ 2009-04-24T02:23:39+00:00 http://www.tuttlesvc.org/2009/04/those-young-idealists.html robertogreco thomasfriedman tomhoffman teaching crisis idealists scary markets 2009 wallstreet education schools https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:18474147040c/ 2009-04-24T02:22:09+00:00 http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/04/23/tom-friedman-strikes-again/ robertogreco matttaibbi thomasfriedman pundits language writing metaphors analogies https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:afd80cb1cf7a/ 2008-04-24T12:55:16+00:00 http://www.nypress.com/18/16/news&columns/taibbi.cfm robertogreco thomasfriedman economics globalization humor globalism politics journalism books reviews us world criticism https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:d9f6a41bb320/ 2008-03-11T08:34:34+00:00 http://www.districtadministration.com/pulse/commentpost.aspx?news=no&postid=49501 robertogreco books education leadership learning danielpink malcolmgladwell thomasfriedman https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:349ea3a33380/ 2007-07-26T02:40:41+00:00 http://www.tuttlesvc.org/2007/07/please-read-illych-thank-you.html robertogreco education learning schools ivanillich technology deschooling reform change society policy e-learning school2.0 schooling lcproject schooldesign thomasfriedman https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:f306512a235c/ 2007-07-14T07:47:39+00:00 http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8280 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