Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.
—MARC PRENSKY
P icture for a moment a classroom full of students happily learning new concepts in unique and interesting ways. The teacher here does very little lecturing, knowing that every student in the class learns differently and at a different speed. So instead of lecturing to a standard curriculum, this teacher has each student working on the same topic, but in different areas and at a different pace. Essentially, the teacher has personalized the learning for each student.
When I describe this scenario to many people in education circles, I usually get a slight chuckle, followed by an immediate dismissal. “That’s ideal,” they say, “but it’s wishful thinking.” One person called it a utopian dream that, he said, “could never be done on any large scale in America.” Another simply shook her head and smiled, saying, “That’s how it should be, but it would take a miracle to make it actually happen in this country.”
What they did not know at the time, however, is that the scenario that I’m describing has actually already happened—all across America. It’s exactly how teachers in nearly all of the classic, one-room schoolhouses in the early 1800s taught. 7 It wasn’t the future I was describing; it was the past .
So, what happened? How did we lose that level of customized learning? While historians can point to dozens of reasons (e.g., population growth), the change can actually be traced back to an event that took place on March 20, 1856, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This event would later prove to be the beginning of the end of customized learning and teaching for the next hundred years. It was not a war, depression, or assassination that changed the course of educational history, but rather the single idea of a man named Fred.
ONE BEST WAY
As a child, Frederick Taylor was not unlike many other children growing up at the time. He was born into a Quaker family; his father was a wealthy attorney, and his mother a feisty abolitionist. After being homeschooled by his mother, Taylor studied abroad, then attended Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite private school in Exeter, New Hampshire. He earned an undergraduate degree from the Stevens Institute of Technology, then worked as a mechanical engineer, developing a knack for getting things done quickly and efficiently. In fact, he proved to be so much more efficient in his work that he began to question why others could not be just as efficient as he was. Factory workers, he noted, were often intentionally doing less work than he knew they were capable of, and he despised it—he believed it hurt his employers’ bottom line. In an effort to change things, Taylor extensively studied efficiency and productivity, putting his findings into his 1911 book The Principles of Scientific Management .
With their zeal for maximizing efficiency and productivity, Taylor’s ideas swept the country, making his book one of the most influential management guides of all time. His concepts transformed all types of businesses and organizations by eliminating “waste” (and skilled workers) in many industries by breaking jobs into small, individual tasks nearly anyone could do. This change saved employers a lot of money, as they would not have to pay for skilled professionals. It also meant that they needed a great number of unskilled workers to replace those skilled professionals. Managers didn’t need or want their workers to be very smart; to maximize productivity and output, according to “Taylorism,” it was management’s job to be smart, and the worker’s job to do the tasks exactly as assigned.
It was at this point that work in the United States began being equated with quantity rather than quality . It was no longer about how good you were, but how fast you were. Speed was much easier to quantify and used to hold people accountable. Energized by the theories of scientific management, industry focused not on customization or creativity, which bogged down efficiency, but on standardization . This led people like Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Company, to standardize his car manufacturing for mass production by adding assembly lines and low-skilled workers. In the world of standardization, the organization always came before the individual.
Many workers back then had big ideas and dreamed of being entrepreneurs like Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan. They wanted the American Dream that had been promised to them. Being just another cog in a well-oiled system was not what they had in mind. Which meant if industry was going to continue to grow rapidly, they needed to produce the cheap, mindless labor required to fill all those unskilled jobs. And the best way to do that, thought John D. Rockefeller—the world’s richest man and arguably the most well-known entrepreneur of the time—was to start early. That meant changing education to better prepare kids for the workforce.
If there’s one thing Rockefeller understood as head of the Standard Oil Trust oil production and refining monopoly, it was how to make more money. Getting to this peak in the business world was hard, and Rockefeller was in no hurry to let it slip away, which is what led him to become interested in grade school education. For their companies to continue to grow and succeed, Rockefeller and his kind desperately needed a large supply of low-skilled but hard-working employees. Luckily for these business leaders, the ideas behind scientific management were proving quite popular across industries—including education.
In 1912, just one year after the publication of Taylor’s book, the world of education was met with its own paradigm-changing piece of literature: an influential essay rethinking the purpose of school-based education as no longer one that would prepare kids for life, but instead for the kind of labor needed at the time. The essay was essentially a how-to guide for ensuring enough low-skilled workers remained available, saying at one point:
We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up from among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians . . . nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply . . . The task that we set before ourselves is very simple as well as very beautiful . . . we will organize our children into a little community and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way. 8
The essay was drafted and published by a group that called itself the General Education Board, founded and funded by none other than Rockefeller himself. The “Taylorists,” as those who agreed with Taylor’s ideas came to be known, fervently made the case that the purpose of formal schooling should be to provide a “standard education for an average student,” essentially preparing them for blue collar jobs within the Industrial Revolution, rather than encouraging higher-level thinking or fostering creativity. Interestingly enough, as we’ll see later, debate over what schools should be preparing students for continues today.
A later follower of Taylorism was the psychologist Edward Thorndike, who became a huge proponent of standardization in schools, believing they should separate kids based on their abilities so that they could be “appointed” to their appropriate place in life. Only by doing this, he argued, could school funding and resources be used effectively and efficiently. Thorndike and his ilk did not believe that all students were equal, rather that some were simply superior, and it was they the focus should be on. Those less capable, in his view, didn’t deserve the same opportunities. They were basically, and should be treated as, factory workers .
For Taylor, Thorndike, and their followers, there was always “one best way” to do anything ; any deviation would result in lost productivity and greater waste. And one best way meant standardization. Suddenly, teachers began being trained differently. They were now held accountable for how many students were able to pass specific tests, rather than how much progress they made. There were right and wrong ways to teach and you either taught the right way or you were fired. Students were taught the exact same material, in the exact same way, at the exact same speed, regardless of their capabilities as individuals. If the efficiency model said that people on average could learn math in a certain way, at a certain age, then that’s exactly what should happen. It was the inherent inequalities born from ideas like this that redefined our schools during the later phases of the U.S. Industrial Revolution, and kicked off a focus on standardization throughout our education system that persists even today. 9 In 1915, a day after his fifty-ninth birthday, Frederick Taylor died of pneumonia. While widely regarded as a legend in business, he became a pariah in education, especially to those of us trying to improve individual learning experiences.
As I think through the history of education in the United States, I marvel at the parallels between it and my own family’s educational history. My great-grandfather, born in 1867, had a third-grade education. My grandfather, born in 1902, had an eighth-grade education. My mother, born in 1926, had a high school education. And I, born in 1947, was the first in my family to graduate from college, even earning a graduate degree in computer science. I was later followed into higher education by all four of my children. This leaves me optimistic that we’re at least moving in the right direction—just too slowly and with a number of challenges to still overcome.
DEBUGGING THE SYSTEM
It has now been over a century since the Industrial Revolution. Politicians, school administrators, and others argue every year for the need to increase educational rigor and give all kids equal opportunities to learn, yet the standardized model still dominates. K–12 teachers are expected to ensure that every student in their classrooms is “at grade level” no matter their talents, preferences, strengths, weaknesses, or backgrounds. The students who do end up succeeding tend to be memorizers who have learned to play the same education game I did decades ago.
So how do we change it? It’s certainly not going to be easy, but I believe we have to start from the inside and then move out. In other words, before utilizing technology, let’s make sure we understand psychology. Before we put our faith in systems, reforms, or patches, we must put it in our kids. We must believe and understand that all of them can learn and succeed. Like the Taylorists of the past, many teachers, knowingly or not, continue to write off kids who struggle as those who “just don’t get it,” due to the ever-present pressure they feel from endless assessments and accountability measures. This attitude toward struggling students isn’t about apathy, but survival—a kind of defense mechanism that allows them to feel sympathy, but still justify the fact that they must keep moving—or risk the whole class falling behind! This highlights one of the most damaging flaws of the standardized system: it uses artificial timelines that allow the pace of the class to drive learning, rather than the pace of the individuals within it. But classes are not individuals and cannot be taught, nor can they learn. Only the individual students within them have the capabilities to learn and succeed. Successfully rewiring education requires us to focus first and foremost on students as individuals, then on learning, teaching, and the proper use of technology.
We cannot change systems; we can only change people, who must then work together to change systems. Our most powerful weapon, though, is our ability to change ourselves. We must start by asking ourselves if we truly believe that every child has the potential to learn and succeed. Because, deep down, if we don’t believe that, there’s no point in pursuing reform and no amount of technology will help. If there’s one thing I’ve learned by working with Steve Jobs and other extraordinary leaders, it is that transformation always starts from within and works its way out. Once we believe in kids, in our hearts, they will start believing in themselves, and we’ll be on our way to helping them unlock the potential they never knew they had!