Changing Schools for Changing Students

Across the nation schools are changing really fast. They are changing because the state and federal governments tell them they have to; they are changing because the parents in their communities want them to; they are changing because the world needs them to. But after absorbing student opinions and ideas about schools for several years now, I have a reason why schools need to change: Students have changed.

As so many school reformers have proposed, the world is a different place than when today's schools were invented more than 100 years ago. There is technology that was not imagined; there are issues that were not addressed. Today's schools have to face those realities - but they also have to face the reality that young people themselves have changed.

In our hyper-commercialized society youth have had to adapt. I have had a difficult time finding research identifying youth perspectives from pre-1965; however, if Dewey, Montesorri, and Piaget were telling the truth, students used to believe what teachers in schools taught them, and learned great lessons from their parents. Today students have different teachers that extend beyond and into the home and school. Corporate pedagogy, which is any business-driven learning such as advertisements, textbooks, and movies, has taught several generations of youth several anti-democratic lessons that I have heard repeatedly from young people today:

• The goal of life is to own stuff
• Sex sells anything
• The military is everywhere we are, and that is good
• Youth culture is different from adult culture
• Kids should be seen, not heard

I have not interpreted these lessons from what students have said: They say these things directly to me. Sometimes I have adults dispute that "their kids" could have said this, so I have to bring in the volunteer student facilitators to corraborate my report. I also share with them reports from Henry Giroux, Kathleen Cushman, Mike Males, and Allison Cook-Sather, all of whom have testified to young people taking those perspectives in some form. (Yes, the irony of having to refer to 'outsider' educational experts in order to convince adults of what the students in their school believe does not escape me.)

Its not just student perspective that has changed. Students' abilities have changed as well. Dennis Harper's Generation YES provides great examples of what students can do today as they use GenYES to teach teachers to use technology in their classrooms. More examples flow from What Kids Can Do, as well as our own Freechild Project and SoundOut. We have identified dozens of current examples of youth teaching, evaluating, researching, planning, making decisions, advocating, and doing other really powerful action around the world.

A United Nations publication put out in early 2005 easily illustrated this contention. The Evolving Capacities of the Child document from the United Nations contrasted historical research with current examples to illustrate an arch over which young peoples' abilities to change the world have become deeper, more sophisticated, more sustainable, and more impacting on themselves, their families, their schools, their communties, and our world.

Which brings me back to why schools have to change. Schools have to change because students have changed. The perspectives of young people have changed and the abilities of young people have changed. Schools are still huge players in the life of every 'first world' child and youth, and it is not "too late" to teach young people. Its never too late.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once argued for complete voting rights for African Americans in a book called Why We Can't Wait. His passionate and powerful prose thoroughly detailed the urgency and timeliness of voting rights. Young people today can't wait any longer for schools to change; we should not make them wait any longer, either.

Get Loud!

I've just finished working on Get Loud! Youth Engagement Workshop Guide. An exciting, hands-on, and effective learning tool, the guide provides 24 workshop outlines for youth workers, teachers, and others who want to engage young people. I wrote it for a variety of audiences with the idea that the workshops can be used in youth programs, classrooms, conferences, weekend retreats, youth/adult training events, and other places where youth voice, youth involvement, and meaningful learning matter most. Check it out today!

Designing Good Learning

Simply put, you can't force anyone to learn anything. I'm sitting in a workshop at the annual meeting of an old line national membership organization, and folks, I'm dieing in here! Seriously, I try to approach every learning activity I engage in fairly and with open eyes and an open heart. Unfortunately, right now I'm largely incapable of appreciating the particular chair I'm sitting in.

A matronly hero of this organization is presenting a PowerPoint presentation with 100 slides that is supposed to last one hour. This is a brand-new PowerPoint, reduced from the previousd 160, developed with the input of literally hundreds of people and passed through federal radars to ensure compliance. It's all very well-intended; it's all very ineffectual, at best. At worst it's demeaning to the viewers, and disconnecting for those who aren't in this effort's choir.

It's not simply the fact that this is a stand-and-deliver slide show, although that is a substantial part of my problem. How many graphic designers and instructional design experts have to present studies to convince folks the need to reassess these approaches? The slides are terribly text-reliant with inconsequential photos peppered throughout. The presenter, who again is a kind and wise person, "birdwalks" a lot. Not terrible, but too much is too much.

Designing good learning requires a lot of attention to diverse learning styles. This post is a reminder.

-- This is Adam Fletcher's blog originally posted at http://www.YoungerWorld.org. For more see http://www.bicyclingfish.com

Regarding Curfews

I received an email this morning from a high school student in Chicago asking me about my thoughts regarding curfew laws. Here's what I sent her, plus some:

I want to start by acknowledging that curfews don't violate an essential human right; however, as with many poorly concieved age-discriminatory laws in the US, they do compromise the ability of children and youth to fully realize their rights as citizens of this country and their responsibilities as members of families and communities. Curfew laws do this by restricting the ability of young people to travel freely between and within borders, and by unjustly limiting the movements of people simply because of the arbitrary markers of age, rather than their personal capacity.

What these arbitrary markers do is label entire segments of the population as incapable simply because of their age. While many opponents of eliminating age limits insist that brain science justifies their discrimination, it's important to remember that age barriers such as the right to vote, the right to choose whether to attend school, and the right to travel freely were started in Victorian times, long before any legitimate brain science was started. Couching illegitimate discrimination in legitimate science is the best adultists can do. Brain science has continually demonstrated the increased capacity of the human brain to more than we recognie at younger ages. Let's pay attention, acknowledge, and capitalize on that reality, and stop infantalizing children and youth.

While mainstream media and many government officials justify this infantalization of young people with brain science and testimonies of parents, teachers, and even youth themselves, these are almost always biased analyses based in adultist, ephebiphobic perspectives. Without honest, open conversations throughout our society about the roles of young people and the effects of curfews and other discrminatory acts, we're going to keep getting get what we've supposedly been getting for a long time: generations of apparently apathetic, seemingly disconnected citizenry who don't vote, don't volunteer, don't rally, and don't create the change our world so desperately needs.



-- This is Adam Fletcher's blog originally posted at http://www.YoungerWorld.org. For more see http://www.bicyclingfish.com