First Post

Greetings and thank you for reading the inaugural post on Insteaducation. I'll be upfront and let you know that this blog is being started in part because I was asked to create it. That being said, I am eager and excited to have a place to chronicle my thoughts about education and (hopefully) acquire feedback, criticism, poignant questioning, and new ideas.

So, why Insteaducation? The name is in part inspired by Heidi Hayes Jacob's book Curriculum 21, which my colleagues and I were discussing this morning on the first day of our school's first Summer Institute (certainly a lot of firsts today). Jacobs brings up the fact that a lot of our educational structure (180 day school year, classes separated by age, 8 years of elementary school/4 years of high school, etc) can be traced back to a report by the Committee of Ten in 1892. I have been aware for some time that our summer breaks stem from our agricultural roots, but I was surprised to find out so much of what dictates our educational decisions today was put in place over 120 years ago. Since there is little else that we do the same as we did decades before WWI I think it is about time to figure out what education should look like instead.

My premise for this blog is that education can be anything. There are no rules here. There is no 8 period day, no report cards, and no homeroom (definitely no homeroom). We can start a new Committee of 10, except lets be a committee of a lot. In fact, we don't even need to come up with one report because one of the rules that we don't have is that all education must look the same. There is no need for any two schools to teach the same material to every student. (Hear that E. D. Hirsch?!) The goal is not to find the best kind of education (bestucation doesn't have the same ring to it anyway) but to recognize that what we are doing isn't perfect, so it can be done better. That being said, if we are trying to get to the highest peak we sometimes need to walk downhill to get to another mountain. Fortunately for us, we can create as many mountains as we want.

I think this quote from John Dewey helps to summarize what I am getting at in a concise way:

“Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.”

 We talk excessively about improving education, but we do it within the confines of our current structure. No major innovation has ever come about by starting with the status quo. I think its about time that we forget about what we are doing and start talking about what we could be doing instead.