Why are so many college students failing to
gain job skills before graduation?
"So what is
it that so many of these recent graduates are missing? The ability to adapt. To
innovate. To draw conclusions and make a decision.
The ability
to learn.
It's a curious thing to think about, especially since the
ostensible understanding is that people attend college to learn stuff. But as
Selingo notes, today's generation has been raised on syllabi and rubrics. They
can only operate within established paradigms. That structure works well in
academia; it doesn't translate at all to the outside world."
Montessori Builds Innovators - https://hbr.org/2011/07/montessori-builds-innovators/
There are strident disagreements these days over every
aspect of American educational policy, except for one. Everyone thinks it would
be great if we could better teach students how to innovate.
So shouldn’t we be paying a great deal of attention to the
educational method that produced, among others, Larry Page, Sergei Brin, Jeff
Bezos, Jimmy Wales, Peter Drucker, Julia Child, David Blaine, and Sean “P.
Diddy” Combs? They were all students in Montessori schools. According to a Wall
Street Journal article by Peter Sims, there’s a “Montessori Mafia” among
the creative elite. So maybe there’s something to the method Italian physician
Maria Montessori came up with around the turn of the 20th century.
The cornerstones of this method, according to Wales’s
brainchild Wikipedia, are:
• mixed-age classrooms, with classrooms for children aged 2½-or-3 to 6 by far the most common,
• student choice of activity from within a prescribed range of options,
• uninterrupted blocks of work time,
• a Constructivist or “discovery” model, in which students learn concepts from working with materials, rather than by direct instruction, and
• specialized educational materials developed by Montessori and her collaborators.
• mixed-age classrooms, with classrooms for children aged 2½-or-3 to 6 by far the most common,
• student choice of activity from within a prescribed range of options,
• uninterrupted blocks of work time,
• a Constructivist or “discovery” model, in which students learn concepts from working with materials, rather than by direct instruction, and
• specialized educational materials developed by Montessori and her collaborators.
That list rings true to me. I was a Montessori student in
northwestern Indiana from a very early age through third grade, which was as
high as the school went at that time. The teachers were an earnest group of the
biggest hippies that could be found in small-town Hoosierland in the 1970s, and
they gave us a lot of room to explore stuff that we found interesting.
For me this included the beads
Maria and her colleagues came up with to teach us about numbers. No matter how
young you are, after you see five beads on a wire next to 25 arranged in a
square and 125 in a cube, you have a grasp of 5^2 and 5^3 that doesn’t leave
you. And after you hold the five-cube in one hand and the ten-cube in another,
the power of taking something to the third power becomes very real. One is
eight times as heavy as the other!
The parents of Larry, Sergei, Jimmy, Jeff, and all the
others gave their kids good genes and nurtured them in many other ways beyond
sending them to Montessori (I know that’s true in my case). But research
indicates that Montessori methods work even for disadvantaged kids who are
randomly selected to attend (although this might not be the best idea for dental
school). And as far as I can tell from my quick glance at the studies,
Montessori kids don’t do worse than their more classically educated peers on
standardized tests. So why do we spend so much time on rote learning and
teaching to the test?
How a Radical New
Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses
"Access
to a world of infinite information has changed how we communicate, process
information, and think. Decentralized systems have proven to be more
productive and agile than rigid, top-down ones. Innovation, creativity, and independent thinking are
increasingly crucial to the global economy.
And yet the
dominant model of public education is still fundamentally rooted in the
industrial revolution that spawned it, when workplaces valued punctuality,
regularity, attention, and silence above all else. (In 1899, William T. Harris,
the US commissioner of education, celebrated the fact that US schools had
developed the “appearance of a machine,” one that teaches the student “to
behave in an orderly manner, to stay in his own place, and not get in the way
of others.”) We don’t openly profess those values nowadays, but our educational
system—which routinely tests kids on their ability to recall information and
demonstrate mastery of a narrow set of skills—doubles down on the view that
students are material to be processed, programmed, and quality-tested.
School administrators prepare curriculum standards and “pacing guides” that
tell teachers what to teach each day. Legions of managers supervise everything
that happens in the classroom; in 2010 only 50 percent of public school staff
members in the US were teachers.
The results speak for themselves: Hundreds of thousands of
kids drop out of public high school every year. Of those who do graduate from
high school, almost a third are “not prepared academically for first-year
college courses,” according to a 2013 report from the testing service ACT. The
World Economic Forum ranks the US just 49th out of 148 developed and developing
nations in quality of math and science instruction. “The fundamental basis of
the system is fatally flawed,” says Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of
education at Stanford and founding director of the National Commission on
Teaching and America’s Future. “In
1970 the top three skills required by the Fortune 500 were the three Rs:
reading, writing, and arithmetic. In 1999 the top three skills in demand were
teamwork, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills. We need schools that are
developing these skills.”