Education reform
Education reform is a broad variety of movements, programs, and reccomendations that have been put forward in the interest of improving education. Often these reforms are politically-motivated, especially in democratic societies, where the quality of governance depends in considerable part on the ability of citizens to make informed, intelligent choices, the ambitious programs advocated by Thomas Jefferson for public schooling in Virginia are an obvious example of this type, but politically motivated education reform stretches at least as far back as Plato, who dealt extensively with reforms to the education of Greek youth in The Republc.
Other reforms are aimed at addressing socio-economic problems. Small improvements in education may have large social returns, in health, wealth and well-being. For example, in Kerala, India, women's health was substantially improved when female literacy rates improved in the 1950s. Literacy makes large amounts of health information available. In Iran, primary education in the countryside increased farming efficiencies and income. Farmers gained reliable access to national crop prices and scientific farming information.
Reforms come in all shapes, sizes, and orientations; there are conservative, liberal, and progressive reforms, reforms that push towards content and reforms that push towards process, etc.
Cost reduction
The low cost reforms were pioneered by Protestant church schools in Europe and the New world in the 1800s. These compassionately tried to develop the most valuable education for the least cost. When these succeeded, governments and the Roman Catholic church rapidly developed similar programs and implemented them on a huge scale, world-wide.
The basic program was to develop "grammar" schools. These taught only the grammar phase of the trivium and bookkeeping. "Grammar" was the first third of the then-prevalent system of Classical education. This program permits people to start businesses to make money, and gives them the skills to continue their education inexpensively from books.
If a society plans to educate its populace to the highest standards using grammar schools, it needs a system of free lending libraries. Libraries allow adults to complete their educations. Free lending libraries are conspicuously absent in most countries other than the U.S. Ideally such a system would be supplemented with debate societies, so people can learn critical thinking and logic.
The ultimate development of the grammar school was by Joseph Lancaster, who started as an impoverished Quaker in early 19th century London. Lancaster used slightly more-advanced students to teach less-advanced students, achieving student-teacher ratios as small as 2, while educating more than a thousand students per adult. Lancaster promoted his system in a piece called Improvements in Education that spread widely throughout the English-speaking world.
Discipline and labour in a Lancaster school were provided by an economic system. Scrip, a form of money meaningless outside the school, was created at a fixed exchange rate from a student's tuition. Every job of the school was bid for by students in scrip. The highest bid won. The jobs permitted students to collect scrip from other students for services rendered. However, -any- student tutor could auction positions in his or her classes. Besides tutoring, students could use script to buy food, school supplies, books, and childish luxuries in a school store. The adult supervisors were paid from the bids on jobs.
With fully developed internal economies, Lancaster schools provided a frighteningly (this used advisedly) good grammar-school education for a cost per student near $40 per year in 1999 U.S. dollars. The students were very clever at reducing their costs, and once invented, improvements were widely adopted in a school. For example, Lancaster students, motivated to save scrip, ultimately rented individual pages of textbooks from the school library, and read them in groups around music stands to reduce textbook costs. Exchanges of tutoring, and using receipts from "down tutoring" to pay for "up tutoring" were commonplace.
Established educational elites found Lancaster schools so threatening that most English-speaking countries developed mandatory publicly paid education explicitly to keep public education in "responsible" hands. However, the problems of honesty, educational quality, and accountability that would likely occur in Lancaster schools implemented on a large scale does present a legitimate argument against governmental endorsement of the model.
Lancaster schools have obvious application to impoverished societies. Lancaster, though motivated by charity, claimed in his pamphlets to be surprised to find that he lived well on the income of his school, even while the low costs made it available to the poorest street-children. Ironically, Lancaster lived on the charity of friends in his later life.
Teaching by experience: Progressivism
The next swing of reform attempted to teach things of fundamental physical importance first. Usually, this meant farming, literally from the ground up, combined with ethical education from first principles. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's book on this is "Emile." H. D. Thoreau's "Walden" and reform essays in the mid-19th century were influential also (see the anthology "Uncommon Learning: Henry David Thoreau on Education," Boston, 1999). For a look at Transcendentalist life, read Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women." Her father, Bronson Alcott, a close friend of Thoreau's, pioneered progressive education for young people as early as the 1830s. (See Laurie James, "Outrageous Questions: Legacy of Bronson Alcott and America's One-Room Schools," New York, 1994.)
The transcendental education movement failed, because only the most gifted students ever equaled the skills of their classically-educated teachers. These students would, of course, succeed in any educational regime. Accounts seem to indicate that the students were happy, but often pursued classical education later in life.
Maria Montessori, an Italian doctor educated in Rome, best realized the ideals of the transcendental movement. She tried to provide for the needs of children at each stage of their development, by carefully observing and meeting the needs of the actual children. In another view, she provided rewarding activities to lure children to practice skills on their own, as soon as they were able. Her books include "The Montessori Method" (1912) and "The Advanced Montessori Method" (1917). Unlike many successful educators, M. Montessori successfully taught others to emulate her methods, which are now widely available.
John Dewey, a philosopher and educator, influenced most modern education. An important member of the American "pragmatist" movement, he believed that a person's intellect would grow by acquiring experience. People would thereby analyze new situations and synthesize more inclusive and accurate understandings of the real world. These would let a person reconstruct a complete story about a situation from fragmentary information. In this way, educated people would respond more accurately to real-world situations and better achieve their goals.
Dewey criticized the rigidity and volume of classical education, and the emotional idealizations of transcendental education. He presented his educational theories as the science-based synthesis of the two views. His slogan was that schools should encourage children to "Learn by doing." He wanted people to realize that children are naturally active and curious. Dewey's understanding of logic is best presented in his "Logic, the Theory of Inquiry" (1938). His educational theories were presented in "My Pedagogic Creed," "The School and Society," "The Child and Curriculum," and (if you read just one, read this one) "Democracy and Education" (1916). It might be instructive to note that Dewey left the University of Chicago in 1904 over issues relating to the Dewey School. After this, he taught at Columbia's Teacher's College.
Jean Piaget, Isabel Myers, and Katherine Briggs seem to have collectively driven the nails into the coffin of Deweyism as it is usually practiced.
Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist who studied people's developmental stages. He showed by replicated experiments that most young children do not analyze or synthesize as Dewey expected. This means that Dewey's reforms are inapplicable to the primary education of young children.
Katherine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers developed a psychological test that reliably identifies sixteen distinct human temperaments, building on work by Jung. A wide class of temperaments (half by category, 60% of the general population) prefer sensory modalities to intuitive modalities.
In terms of education, this means that most people prefer to learn answers to concrete "Who, what, when, where," and "how" questions, rather than theoretical "which" and "why" questions.
Preference in this case means that most people do not use non-concrete information. This means that 60% of the target population only use, and therefore want to learn, facts, not principles.
This information was confirmed (on another research track) by Jean Piaget, who discovered that nearly 60% of adults never habitually use what he called "formal operational reasoning," a term for the development and use of theories and explicit logic.
That is, Dewey schools, or -any- schools that teach -principles- will fail to educate 60% of the general population.
Dewyism has failed in primary education in the U.S.
National Identity
The ability to learn a new language seems connected in some way with the age of the learner. Since most modern schools copy the Prussian models, children start school at an age when their language skills remain plastic, and they find it easy to learn the national language. This was an intentional design on the part of the Prussians. The primary purpose of Kindergarten was to have the children spend time in supervised activities in the national language, when the children were very well able to learn new language skills.
In the U.S. over the last twenty years, more than 70% of non-English-speaking school-age immigrants have arrived in the U.S. before they were 6 years old. At this age, they could have been taught English in school, and achieved a proficiency indistinguishable from a native speaker. In other countries, this approach has dramatically improved reading and math test scores.
Notable reforms
Some of the methods and reforms seem to work, and certain weaknesses can be identified.
First, anything that more precisely meets the needs of the child will work better. This is the great lesson from M. Montessori.
The teaching method must be teachable! This is a lesson from both Montessori and Dewey. The transcendentalists failed here.
It might be wise to base conservative programs on classical education, which reliably teaches valuable skills to the majority of Myers-Briggs temperaments, by teaching facts.
Programs that test individual learning, and teach to mastery of a subject have been proven by the state of Kentucky to be far more effective than group instruction with compromise schedules, or even class-size reduction.
Schools with limited resources can use a grammar-school-only approach, using students as teachers. If the culture supports it, perhaps the economic discipline of the Lancaster school can reduce costs even further. However, much of the success of Lancaster's "school economy" was that the children were natives of an intensely mercantile culture.
In order to be effective, classroom instruction needs to change subjects at times near a typical student's attention span, which can be as frequently as every two minutes for young children. This is one of the tricks that seems to help Marva Collins teach. The other is a genuine love of students-- which cannot be trained, and therefore must be selected-for.
The Myers-Briggs temperaments fall into four broad categories, each sufficiently different to justify completely different educational theories. It might be socially profitable to test and target these temperaments with special curricula.
Some of the Myers-Briggs temperaments are known to despise educational material that lacks theory. Therefore, effective curricula need to raise and answer "which" and "why" questions, to teach students with "intuitive" (Myers-Briggs) modalities.
Philosophers identify independent, logical reasoning as a precondition to most western science, engineering, economic and political theory. Therefore, every educational program that desires to improve students' outcomes in political, health and economic behavior should include a Socratically-taught set of classes to teach logic and critical thinking.
Another valuable reform is to permit students to test out of classes. This saves resources, increases motivation, directs individual study, and reduces boredom and disciplinary problems.
To support inexpensive continuing adult education a community needs a free public library. It can start modestly as shelves in an attended shop or government building, with donated books. Attendants are essential to protect the books from vandalism. Adult education repays itself many times over by providing direct opportunity to adults. Free libraries are also powerful resources for schools and businesses.
New programs based on modern learning theories should be quantitatively investigated for effectiveness. A notable reform of the education system of Massachusetts occurred in 1997.
See also educational philosophies.
Education reformers
Education reform in specific nations
Educational Reform in Taiwan
In other parts of the world, educational reform has had a number of different meanings. In Taiwan in the 1990s and 2000s there was a effort at educational reforms based on the premise that schools were emphasizing facts over reasoning and that there was overemphasize on central control and standardized testing. Efforts at reforming Taiwanese schools were limited by the fact that although there was some degree of consensus on what the problems of the schools were, there was little consensus on how to fix the problems and the goals of educational reforms. By 2003, the push for education reform had declined.