A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis, serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. © James Conner.

21 September 2016

21st century learning — A slogan for winning school bond elections?
This decade’s education enthusiasm? A scheme for selling computers?

The correct answer? All of the above. The phrase permeates school bond election campaigns. An organization comprising computer manufacturers and cable communications companies touts 21st century learning. And it pops up in essays by educators, such as the vote-for-the-bond oped by Michele Paine, Assistant Principal at Flathead High School, that ran in Sunday’s InterLake:

The innovative classrooms that will replace the 80- and 100-year-old lecture hall and half floors give our students flexible learning space. The lecture hall at Flathead High School is a cavernous, two-story room that can house 100 students in the university style of giant classrooms. This seating works for lecture style instruction but is not conducive to 21st century learning. Students need to collaborate in groups and tackle tasks using technology, texts and other learning tools.

I’m impressed by Paine’s sincerity and enthusiasm, but not by her arguments.

Twenty-first century learning, which I’m going to call 21CL, often is described as the three — but sometimes four — Cs: creativity, communication, and collaboration. The fourth C is critical thinking. Some would say there’s a fifth C: con artistry.

The 21CL Cs are the way today’s students are expected to learn the three Rs: reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic. My generation mastered those, and other, subjects while sitting at a desk, paying attention to our teachers, taking careful notes, followed by hours of homework. Today’s generation learns to spell and do math with a computer while sitting at a table and chatting up a storm with other children (collaboration). Watching, teams of teachers beam, clasp their hands in satisfaction, cooing to each other, “Oh, how well they work and play together.”

The parents of the collaborators, instead of supervising homework, organize to demand that their little darlings not be subjected to the trauma of standardized tests. This, too, delights the teachers, who fear they might be evaluated on the results of those tests instead of on how many credits of continuing education they complete at the academics without rigor summer sessions at Mickey Mouse State College.

Here’s the old school truth about collaboration: it’s a con. Honor student Johnny is assigned to work with dunderheads Prudence, Rufus, and Nan. Johnny does all the work to earn an A, then has to share his grade with his companions, who on their own would be lucky to receive Cs and Ds. That raises the grade point average of the class and his fellow collaborators while cheapening the A he earned. Johnny’s teachers exploit this outrage by publishing a paper reporting that collaboration raises grades.

But the con sounds good — that’s the nature of cons. Which is why educators ooze enthusiasm for 21CL, just like previous generations of educators oozed enthusiasm for the education panaceas of their day, and why Paine and School District 5 want to raze a perfectly good lecture hall and replace it with expensive, computerized, interactive, whizz bang dandy, classrooms and an even more expensive new gymnasium.

Will the students benefit if the bond passes and they are condemned to the shifting spaces of 21CL environments? Not likely. Students who want to learn will master difficult subjects studying by candlelight in a frosty tarpaper shack in a war zone. Those who do not want to learn will find a way to hack their school issued laptop or iPad to play video games that glorify violence and demean women.

Will the teachers and administrators benefit? Sure, some will. Everyone likes a nice place to work.

But the group that benefits most from 21CL is the consortium of computer manufacturers and communications companies that forms organizations such as P21, the Partnership for 21st Century Learning, whose primary partners are:

  • Government:
  • U.S. Department of Education
  • Founding Organizations:
  • AOL Time Warner Foundation
  • Apple Computer, Inc.
  • Cable in the Classroom
  • Cisco Systems, Inc.
  • Dell Computer Corporation
  • Microsoft Corporation
  • National Education Association
  • SAP
  • Individuals:
  • Ken Kay, President and Co-Founder
  • Diny Golder-Dardis, Special Advisor and Co-Founder

If parents, educators, and school board members, embrace 21CL’s tenets, these corporations stand to make billions selling computers, routers, and other communications hardware and software, to local school districts. A lot of 21CL theology is little more than greed masquerading as altruistic principle and pedagogical revelation, but it has an almost narcotic effect that causes people to stop thinking critically.

There’s still a place in our high schools for large lecture halls. We should not be collaborating to tear them down.