Minimalism in Education

From IAE-Pedia

Jump to: navigation, search
Image: IAE-pedia Header.png


Contents


"Less is more." (Frequently used adage. Often stated as, "More is less. Less is more.")
"Unfortunately what is little recognized is that the most worthwhile scientific books are those in which the author clearly indicates what he does not know; for an author most hurts his readers by concealing his difficulties." (Evarist Galois, mathematician, 1811-1832)

[edit] Introduction

The total of collected human knowledge is both huge and is growing quite rapidly. Perhaps you have seen estimates that this total is doubling in ten years or less. Or, perhaps you have seen comments about specific areas such as brain science, with the claim that the total knowledge in the field is doubling every five years.

Other related data is the total size of the Web, or the total amount of data that is being collected and stored on computers each year.

There is far more information added to the Web (including the changes to the current Web content) each day than a person could read in a lifetime. And, as you know, lots of the world's accumulated knowledge is not available on the Web.

Here are some Web statistics:

We've known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we've seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days—when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!

Here is a related tidbit of information. On 5/10/2007 the American Educational Research Association Special Interest Group for Communication of Research published a list of 246 open access electronic journals that are scholarly, peer reviewed, and accessible without cost. (These are in a variety of languages, but English dominates.

A November 2004 report listed about 560 refereed educational research journals that are available in English. The point to such numbers is that the World's yearly amount of new research being published in just one field—education—would overwhelm any person trying to read it all.

[edit] The Educational Challenge

"Try to learn something about everything and everything about something." (Thomas Henry Huxley, English biologist, science educator, and evolutionist, 1825–1895.)
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it." (Samuel Johnson, English author, 1709–1784.)

Each individual seeking an education faces the challenge of what to learn. Even back in Thomas Huxley's time, it was no longer possible for a person to learn "everything about something" if "something" refers to a major academic discipline. By narrow specialization and many years of hard work, one could be one of the world's most knowledgeable people in a specialized part of one discipline.

Now, more than a century after Huxley's death, researchers tend to focus on very narrow specializations in order to get to the research frontiers and advance their field of study.

The size of the Web suggests that to "learn something about everything" is also far beyond what a student can hope to achieve through our educational system.

Samuel Johnson recognized this situation 250 years ago. Thus, our educational system is faced by the challenge of what students should store in their brains and what they should learn to retrieve from libraries, people and other resources. The various Information and Communication Technologies have provided us with new and powerful aids to retrieving information from virtual libraries and from people and places throughout the world.

In their brief quotations, neither Huxley or Johnson speak to what one might do with what the information one has learned or can retrieve. Back when I was in graduate school, my major professor liked to argue that, "There is no such thing as learning for the sake of learning. There is no 'sake' of learning." He argued that one learned in order to solve problems, accomplish tasks, fulfill personal goals, and so on.

I used to argue with him at the time of his pronouncement. However, over the years I have mellowed and indeed tend to think of learning as a process of increasing one's level of expertise and that one can have a huge number of different islands or pockets of expertise.

Many islands or pockets of expertise contribute to being able to retrieve and use stored information. Moreover, one can develop expertise in the general process of information retrieval.

In summary, I believe that a major goal of education is help each student gain the types of expertise that help in the retrieval and use of information. The processes of retrieving, understanding, and using information are constructive (as is constructivism) in nature. Thus, our educational system needs to deal with the individual needs of each student as it provides general education for what it feels is helpful for many or most students to learn.

[edit] Minimalism

Our educational system finds it difficult to separate the "wheat from the chaff." It tends to follow the path that more is better. It shows little insight into the suggestion that "less is more." Rather, it tends to take the approach that the more that can be put into the heads of students, the better.

Earlier parts of this document suggest that the more is better approach cannot possible work. The percentage of the total knowledge of the human race that a person can put into his or her head is steadily decreasing. What (minimally) should our educational system attempt to have students learn?

Quoting from the Wikipedia:

The term "minimalist" is often applied colloquially to designate anything which is spare or stripped to its essentials.
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is stripped down to its most fundamental features. As a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments in post-World War II Western Art, most strongly with American visual arts in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

[edit] Minimalism in Education

We are all familiar with the concept that formal education includes some "basics" such as reading, writing, and arithmetic. An educational minimalist might say that reading, writing, and arithmetic are the minimal set of areas where we should set goals for student learning and understanding. This is the a model for "back to basics" movement in education. Not only do hard core back to basics people want to cut out all of so-called "frills," they often want the teaching methods to be those that were used many many years ago.

Even in a back to basics model, however, there is still the issue of the specific goals or standards that might be set for students. State educational systems take reading, writing, and arithmetic and develop goals, standards, benchmarks, or other representations that they feel are appropriate for all students. The number of benchmarks for these three areas may well total in the hundreds. This tends to lead to the careful examination of proposed textbooks and other curriculum materials to make sure that every benchmark is covered. In place of a gestalt, we have a fragmentation.

This, in turn, leads to curriculum that is designed to "cover" the material. Every topic in the book—every benchmark topic—must be explicitly taught. Teacher tests, regional tests, and national tests must be designed to assess student learn in a huge number of different small parts of the discipline.

In brief summary, the goals, standards, benchmarks, and so on set by each state's educational system, and the accompanying textbooks, lesson plans, and so on, are a far cry from minimalism. Rather, they seem to be pushing the envelop in the opposite direction as far is reasonably possible.

We are now beginning to see support of minimalism. The recent Focal Point work of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics provides a good example. Three focal points are identified for each grade level, K-8. Quoting from the Website:

The Curriculum Focal Points are the most important mathematical topics for each grade level. They comprise related ideas, concepts, skills, and procedures that form the foundation for understanding and lasting learning.

[edit] Example from Oregon

This point is emphasized in the following quoted material from the 8/17/07 Public Education Network:

SCHOOLS ADVISED TO NARROW FOCUS TO CRUCIAL LESSONS'
Oregon should stop asking schools to teach a laundry list of facts and skills in every subject and instead encourage teachers to focus on crucial lessons with lasting value, a new study recommends. WestEd, a nonprofit research center that specializes in state academic standards and tests, spent nine months examining Oregon's academic standards for every subject and grade plus every question on state tests. The state paid WestEd $350,000 to find weaknesses in its tests and standards and recommend fixes. In its final report, the think tank concluded Oregon should join a new national movement toward "less is more" in curriculum mandates. The state should direct schools, teachers and students toward the most important content for students to master, rather than requiring schools to cover the waterfront, the study recommends. Oregon's current approach to teaching and testing, for instance, calls on fourth-grade teachers to instill 105 new reading and writing skills, including 47 covered on state tests. Those range from "determine the meaning of words from context and structural clues" to "correctly write possessive plural nouns." Nothing signals teachers which of the myriad skills it is most essential for students to learn well, reports Betsy Hammond for The Oregonian. That approach is why U.S. schools have been criticized for a curriculum that is a mile wide but an inch deep, particularly compared to other nations' approach to teaching math and science, said Stanley Rabinowitz, lead author of the WestEd study. It is easy for state curriculum committees to make a long list of what teachers should cover each year, Rabinowitz said. It takes a lot more thought and debate to decide what content is most important -- and Oregon should think carefully about which people get to help make that call, he said. Oregonians, including teachers, employers, parents, college officials and principals, should be at the table, he said.
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/1186626316272730.xml&coll=7

[edit] Minimalist Goals of Education

Many years ago when I first started teaching teachers, I used to write the following quote on the chalkboard at the beginning of the first class meeting:

The goals of eduction are to teach some facts and to teach students to think using the facts.

I would then ask the class to try to guess who said that. They would make a variety of guesses, but never came up with "Dave Moursund." This was an enjoyable activity and was a good lead in to discussing possible goals of the course

Since those long past days, my minimalist goal statement has been slightly enlarged. Now I say:

The goals of education are to help students learn to learn, help students learn some facts, and help students learn to solve problems and accomplish tasks by making use of these facts and their learning skills.

I am a "computer in education" person. However, note that my minimalist goals of education do not mention computers, information and communication technology, or the Internet. In deed, the words reading, writing, and arithmetic are not even used.

I am not trying to advocate a "back to basics" form of eduction. Rather, I think education would be improved if we increased the focus on the big ideas and reduced the fragmentation into the huge number of little ideas that are related to the big ideas.

Nowadays, I further expand on my minimalist statement by discussing ways to improve education. There is a huge amount of literature on school reform. I have written extensively about ways to improve education. So, what might I possibly say in a minute or two that could possibly make any difference.

Well, think as a minimalist. If you are a politician, you might say:

Make school systems and teachers more accountable. Design and implement an accountability system that rewards those who do well and punishes those who do poorly.

This represents a top down approach to defining and solving the "problem" that our schools are not doing as well as they might be doing. There are strong differences of opinion as to whether this type of approach does much good in improving education.

Many years ago I read a book by Seymour Sarason, "The Predictable Failure of Educational Reform: Can We Change Course Before It's Too Late." In this book Sarason talks about the need to empower students and their teachers. These ideas have gradually taken root in my mind. Thus, I now strongly believe:

The goals of education are to help students learn to learn, help students learn some facts, and help students learn to solve problems and accomplish tasks by making use of these facts and their learning skills. To achieve these goals we need to empower students and their teachers. Empowerment includes learning to make effective use of the "traditional" basics in education and the emerging ICT aids to teaching, learning, and using one's learning.
Empowerment is demonstrated by increasing levels of expertise in solving the problems and accomplishing the tasks that one personally wants to deal with and/or that other stakeholder groups feel are important. Thus, for example the collective wisdom of adults insists that students learn reading, writing, and arithmetic to appropriately empower them for adult life in our society.

Certainly, we empower a student by helping the student to gain a useful level of expertise in reading, writing, and arithmetic. We empower a student by helping the student learn to learn, self-assess, make effective use of ICT tools (such as the Web and email), and so on. Substantial more detail on this topic is provided in Empowering Teachers and Learners in this IAE-pedia.

[edit] Empowering Students and Teachers

I find minimalism in education to be empowering. I believe it empowers both teachers and their students. Minimalism presents big ideas as unifying and recurring themes. These ideas and themes can be learned relatively early on in one' education, and then can be built upon throughout one's life.

Our current educational system is top-down heavy. It is not designed to empower students or their teachers. Such a system does not function well as more and more very powerful tools become available to students. Rather, such a system leads to a schism between the capabilities of students and the out of date beliefs and understandings of those who currently hold the power and work to hold on to it.

From the point of view of politicians, it is scary to give more power to students and their teachers. I can understand that. However, I strongly believe that our continued failure to design an educational system that empowers students and places increased emphasis on having high quality, dedicated, professional, empowered teachers is a major mistake.

Of course, as we work to empower students and their teachers, we must remember:

With great power comes great responsibility. (Stan Lee: Uncle Ben, talking to Peter Parker in Spiderman movie.)

The following free book was written specifically for young teenagers. It focuses on students learning to take more responsibility for their own education.

Moursund, D.G. (June 2008). Becoming responsible for your education. Information Age Education. Access at http://i-a-e.org/ebooks/doc_download/39-becoming-more-responsbile-for-your-education.html.

[edit] References

[edit] Author or Authors

The initial version of this page was developed by David Moursund.

Retrieved from "http://iae-pedia.org/Minimalism_in_Education"
Personal tools