"Solutionaries"

Zoe Wiel's idea is an interesting one.  It seems as though she's proposing an inversion of how we approach school in general, and I like that.  Put the Big Ideas out at the forefront, and give the students something real to work toward.  Let the skills that you'd need to accomplish your goal be taught as needed, and have the students learn what they need to learn by putting those skills to use toward some useful end.  It reminds me a lot of what Alan November had to say in his Tedx talk (here).  Instead of endless drilling of basics in the classic style of 'Empty Vessel' insertion of knowledge, put the kids to the test and let them learn by doing. 

What occurs to me in this discussion is something that I have observed in my years of working with young people, and that is this:  kids can smell contrived material a mile away, and nobody, however young or old they may be, likes to be talked to like they're some stupid kid.  In fact, this also reminds me of a quote from the student's comment about the New Tech high school:

"I like doing projects in the New Tech High School, but for some projects I feel as if they are making up pointless projects where I really don't learn anything." - Chris Lehman, responding to this article.

Chris's comment really hits home, I think.  We don't want to drum up contrived, useless things to hand off to these kids and tell them that it's "MEANINGFUL." (heavy emphasis on the air quotes)  We do, however, want to present an opportunity to give students real things to work on, real problems to solve, and real chances to build experience.  After all, if everything they do up til 12th grade is completely encased in the strange, safe little bubble that is the microverse of High School, every student who graduates will have a gaping deficit when it comes to real world experience the minute they hit college.

What this all reminds me of is a strange thought that popped into my head earlier this week.  I'll try to keep the life-history part of things brief, but bear with me, it's going somewhere. 

I graduated High School at the tender young age of 17 (I was a late August birthday) and promptly packed it up and moved to Chicago to go to school.  Having a heavy design element to my degree, all the freshmen were required to do a standard figure drawing class their first semester.  So that meant that I was sitting in a room, for credit, looking at a naked person very carefully, and trying to reproduce all of their various bits via pencil and paper.  And I'm still 17 for at least the first few days of school.  So I'm in an art studio, I'm with a bunch of other generally overwhelmed and bewildered 18 year olds, and we're sitting there looking at a naked person, listening to a cranky prof who swears like a sailor. 

The contrast that seems most remarkable to me is what life had been like only 3 months earlier.  I was in an institution where there were heavy penalties for bad language, inappropriate behavior, or lewdness.  Teachers were Mr. or Mrs., classes were rigidly structured by automated bells, and there was definitely not some poor starving art student coming in every afternoon to pose in front of the class buck-nekkid.  I think you could get the dreaded 'In-School Suspension' if you even drew a penis, let alone a whole person attached to one.  You would probably have been hauled off to the magistrate for a sex crime if you went and did a few nude studies of someone who was perfectly willing to pose for you and some administrator got wind of it. 

So I guess what I wonder is, why in the world are we NOT doing exactly the sort of 'Grand Inversion' that both Alan November and Zoe Weil are talking about here?  Why are we keeping these young people in this weird little bubble, pretending that there is no coarse language, that there are no legitimate classes out there where you are actually required to draw penises or other naughty bits (and the people attached to them), and where every minute of every day is run by a system of automated bells?  Sure, we need structure, we need respect, we need to give students guidance, but by removing every last vestige of personal responsibility from every kid in every grade, aren't we just training year after year of people who have been systematically instructed to believe that they were incapable of even moving from room to room at the right time?