Weekly Message from Head of School 2024/6/3-2024/6/7
Dear Keystonians,
This week and next I will share two-part letter based on a TEDx talk that I gave at the student led event last weekend. I briefly shared about the history of our current educational model for secondary schools which was developed just over 130 years ago in the United States though a set of circumstances that had nothing to do with learning, but rather with administrative ease and tidy accounting of student time and school resources.
Prior to the late 1800s, most learning and professional training happened in an apprenticeship model in which the pre-professional would learn a set of foundational skills, often in a multi-age school model of some sort, and then go to work in small groups or 1:1 with professionals in their field as an apprentice, until they were deemed competent to perform on their own. This was how professionals of all types learned how to do their jobs well—with applied learning in a real-world context, close personalized instruction and continual feedback until they were ready to perform at the professional level.
When our strategic planning consultant was here a couple of weeks ago, he reminded us that schools can’t be built for adults, they must be designed around the needs of children. The most obvious example of this is the primary school cafeteria, when we sit in there, as adults, we feel welcome, but we know it wasn’t built for us. The chairs are small, the chopsticks are short—it is all just right for our primary school students. Schools must be designed for kids and what we know about their learning needs.
In addition to space, the other important dimension of schools is time. It was in the late 1800’s that secondary schools started to be organized by periods of time broken down into subjects across the approximately 180-day academic year. The basic framework for the traditional high school schedule emerged in 1892 through the work of a group of university presidents and school leaders in the US called the “Committee of Ten”. The group’s goals were to standardize secondary school education to increase efficiency and outcomes to strengthen the workforce capacity for emerging manufacturing in the US. The committee also aimed to create a system of accountability for school management.
If you read through the report, you can see some evidence that the people who were writing it had a great deal of care for students and knew about what they needed, but at the same time they were pressured to design a formula for instructional time that could be scaled and replicated, even if they really knew that it was not quite the right thing to do. In fact, there were several mentions in their report that decisions about the number of hours or days a week of any given subject should be left to the teachers and administrators at the school level. Still, based on their work at the time, the now standard high school schedule divided into different classes and hours, is standard across the globe. This schedule is a massively scaled educational innovation with questionable merit.
The reorganization of schools away from a smaller-scale apprentice model to time organized in subject-specific courses had begun. It was further solidified just over a decade later when Andrew Carnegie, at that point the wealthiest man in the world, was looking for a way to support the professional reputations and wealth of college professors. He began a 10 million USD trust to distribute funds to professors, but the administrators of the trust needed to develop rubrics for determining what exactly was a college, so that they could identify worthy college professors. Essentially the way they decided to do that was to determine what schoolwork people had to complete before they entered college. The way they ended up measuring this was based on the work of the committee of ten that had established the standard high school schedule. But for the Carnegie work, they needed a more specific measurement to sort high schools and colleges so they determined the “seat time” that would be required to earn “credit hours” in each subject prior to matriculating in college. The resulting construct of the Carnegie Unit was born, solidifying the rigid structure of secondary education for the century that followed. (Including the education of just about everyone reading this letter). If you sat in a class for a certain number of hours a year, took some tests, you would earn a “credit”. The global understanding of the “unit credit hour” has made the Carnegie unit perhaps the most transferable currency in the world.
It is incredible that these two events in history resulted in a massive global educational trend that has impacted and shaped school systems for over a century. And it isn’t all bad news, rates of education have increased around the world since the early 1900s, and universities and thus university education have proliferated leading to steady increases in the global economy and reduction of poverty.
Still, this shift from an apprenticeship model, where an individual student learned some skills and then worked 1:1 with a professional expert until they deemed them prepared to do the professional work to a model where all kids learn pretty much the same things and then go out in the world to find work may not have generated all the results and efficiency intended. And the evidence is clear about some of the negative unintended consequences of this model.
So, what should we make of the now ubiquitous notion of seat time as a proxy for learning? Do all people learn at the same rate in the same amount of time? Do all people need to master the knowledge identified by the Committee of Ten for their professions and lives? What are the responsibilities of schools like Keystone to provide the highest quality learner-centered experience for our students? Should we be bound to a factory model designed for an emerging industrial power 130 years ago given our mission to be a New World School for China?
How are we learning from and contributing to the educational innovations in this space as the world experiences the next great transformation in learning design in primary and secondary schools?
Stay tuned here next week for more reflections on this topic!
Happy Dragon Boat Festival!
Emily
