A response to Steve Witherspoon’s “Seeking Educational Traction: The path to the New Normal”

Right-sizing Education

In the recent CANDOR “Front Burner”, Reeser, Ewy and Blankley [like the public at large] saw the COVID challenge to education as an unwanted and expensive but potentially opportune moment to compare conventional in-person-synchronized with pandemic virtual-asynchronous learning. Reeser went even further to suggest “we must start asking the question: ‘What is the best approach for an individual student.’” … a question which, if taken seriously, will bring calls for reVolution not merely eVolution in education … as “time, elections, trust and vouchers” provide stage and setting for diverse factions. Ewy voiced a warning about “opening people’s eyes” to alternatives they cannot “unsee”. Blankley candidly concluded there may not be a “right answer”.

But, perhaps, there is a “right answer” … which depends not on the method of communication but on the SIZE … of a class, of a school … even of a curriculum.

For example, in his address on “The Aims of Education” AN Whitehead stated:

“Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.

“Let us now ask how in our system of education we are to guard against this mental dry rot. We enunciate two educational commandments, “Do not teach too many subjects,” and again, “What you teach, teach thoroughly.”

“The result of teaching small parts of a large number of subjects is the passive reception of disconnected ideas, not illumined with any spark of vitality. Let the main ideas which are introduced into a child’s education be few and important, and let them be thrown into every combination possible. The child should make them his own, and should understand their application here and now in the circumstances of his actual life. From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery. The discovery which he has to make, is that general ideas give an understanding of that stream of events which pours through his life, which is his life.”

Blankley hinted at this in his comments on ”project based learning” but failed to articulate any  principles of size. Homeschoolers have long sensed the wisdom of Whitehead’s observations, but few would dare to reach for its power in a MOOC.

At Northfield School of the Liberal Arts in Wichita, faculty discovered the benefits of a “cohort class structure” using a “deep dive subject approach” in which a small group of students were largely attached together with a single teacher for the entire year in a series of intensive studies that crossed traditional subject lines … in a real life communal experience. Unexpectedly exceptional results encouraged all stakeholders to continue the practice in the coming year … no “return to normal” there. I am certain other schools have important discoveries to share as well.

I am also certain the effects of SIZE can be recognized by those educators who are willing and able to step back from the pandemic experience and look at education afresh. For those who would like to press on with this theme, I highly recommend reading JBS  Haldane’s wonderful essay titled “On Being the Right Size” in which he concludes:

“And just as there is a best size for every animal, so the same is true for every  human  institution.”

Perhaps, even after COVID’s uncomfortable disruption of the status quo, we are still not asking the right questions about education … public or private … classical or traditional … parochial or secular. If not, we have certainly missed an opportunity.

I will close with observations, a question and an answer by Whitehead in the conclusion of his address which might encourage us to examine our COVID excursion from another perspective … that of size.

"The first requisite for educational reform is the school as a unit, with its approved curriculum based on its own needs, and evolved by its own staff. ... When I say that the school is the educational unit, I mean exactly what I say, no larger unit, no smaller unit. Each school must have the claim to be considered in relation to its special circumstances. ... When one considers in its length and in its breadth the importance of this question of the education of a nation’s young, the broken lives, the defeated hopes, the national failures, which result from the frivolous inertia with which it is treated, it is difficult to restrain within oneself a savage rage.

"We can be content with no less than the old summary of educational ideal which has been current at any time from the dawn of our civilization. The essence of education is that it be religious.

"Pray, what is religious education?

"A religious education is an education which inculcates duty and reverence. Duty arises from our potential control over the course of events. Where attainable knowledge could have changed the issue, ignorance has the guilt of vice. And the foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity."

Perhaps, COVID was nothing more than nature giving us all a religious education. Let’s be sure we take full advantage of the experience.