On August 21, 2012, The Advocate posted an editorial on their website titled “Our Views: Old values amid change,” that asks what form education reform will take. While I agree that thinking about what form it might take is intriguing, I believe it is more pertinent to ask if we are even ready for change at all.
With reductions in the statewide budget and a national call for education reform, the chances that the education system will change are likely. While I tend to agree that there are things that must be changed, I do not know if we are ready to accept that change.
Education is a sensitive subject, and there are complications involved at every level. In high school, for example, there is a concern that our traditional forms of education do not meet the needs of every student. Additionally, in higher education, there is always the concern that students are not receiving a product equal to their investment.
There are already new approaches to education that have been shown to more effectively meet the needs of students, particularly those students that do not succeed in traditional schools. For example, in a talk for ted.com called “A short intro to the Studio School,” speaker Geoff Mulgan explains one such approach happening in the United Kingdom called the Studio School. In this type of school, students are put into teams of three to four and given projects that closely resemble what he calls “real work.”
Mulgan notes in his talk that students who had performed at the bottom in traditional schools shot to the top in Studio Schools. He credits this to the school’s departure from traditional lecture-style teaching to the adoption of a more hands-on, real world approach.
I’m sure there are countless other approaches and theories on how to educate and, with the call for reform, it surprises me that something new like the Studio School has not taken off in the United States.
To me, the reason is, while the need for reform is there on a national scale, we are just not ready to abandon traditional methods of education. I think that people just cannot see real learning happening outside of that traditional classroom.
Perhaps we need to be introduced to new methods of learning gradually and see measured results, or maybe the answer lies in gaining more support from national, state and local governments. I, however, have always believed that change starts with openness. Until society is ready for a big change, education will remain the way it is.