I've taken the liberty of adding the "Practice What You Preach" title to this most recent UVA student (ek5c) post. Powerful stuff, if you ask me. Goes far beyond what a school should expect of their students by pushing the school itself to answer the same questions they are putting in front of their learners:
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"Practice What You Preach"
Schools are institutions of cultural transmission. They seek to pass the knowledge, values, and ideas of the older generation to the younger generation. While younger generations often recognize the value of this knowledge, they sometimes resist having it thrust upon them. If there is one trait that the youth can effectively identity, and that drives them to rebellion, it is hypocrisy. This is the worst characteristic for a school to have, and it appears far too often.
The greatest hypocrisy that an educative institution can commit is failing to adhere to the principles it teaches. Schools seek to cultivate students who are constantly questioning their current values, and seeking to improve their old beliefs. Yet the schools themselves adhere to strategies that are centuries old. While seeking to teacher future participants in the global economy they use techniques that were created to teach entirely different things to different kinds of students. The minute a student realizes, subconsciously or not, that their school does not “practice what it preaches” they stop listening to its sermons. Like the old Catholic Church which preached disdain for worldly wealth yet collected indulgences, many schools have lost the trust of their students.
What schools should be doing is constantly asking the questions they are teaching their students to ask. Why are we doing things this way? What are our goals and what strategies can be used to achieve them? What knowledge is out there and how can we learn from it? How should we change, improve and make things better? These are tough questions to ask, and the answers may lead us to some unsettling truths and a whole lot more work. But if schools ask these questions, and use the answers to make informed decisions about who they are and what they do, the students will notice and may follow suit.
Reading about the Museum magnate school at the Science Museum of Minnesota we see that some schools are already doing this. When making decisions about how they run their school, how they teach and how they evaluate their students, they used the same scientific methods of inquiry that they teach their students.
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Your Thoughts?
I'm afraid that anything I add to this will only water-down what this student has written. Let me echo a few immediate thoughts:
One, in the past, schools did not need to defend the premise of their existence. They held the default information/certification in hand. One could either accept what was offered or drop-out at a certain point. Today, however, engagement is far more powerful than merely showing up. Schools that do not offer programs, courses, experiences that truly engage students in real-time ROI-ways will simply not remain competitive over time. Since schools no longer have a monopoly on information and students of all ages can become producers of content in ways never before imagined, this changes the game for schools.
Two, whether to reflect the higher ideals of the school's mission or to simply remain vibrant and relevant to their students, the idea of schools having to ask essential questions of their own is inspired. For K-12, this means one thing; for higher ed, quite another. At the end of the day, however, the power of following this expectation of self-reflection and mission-investigation seems both provocative and limitless. This reminds me of hearing that the trustees for Stanford University ask themselves each year if they can exist without buildings, if they could provide the same world-class education without the traditional campus of old. A provocative -- and counter intuitive -- conversation to say the least. But the answers that most inspire often come as a result of asking questions of daring in ways that usually only the students are traditionally expected to complete.
Good questions. Maybe we could start with asking, "are schools really 'institutions of cultural transmission', and if so, should they be?"
Posted by: marcopolo47 | November 14, 2006 at 07:25 AM