Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
[I] first learned about paradigms at a teacher workshop in the 1990s. We were watching a video about how schools needed to entirely derange themselves for the 21st century. It was narrated by an eerie sounding, condescending expert who predictably wasn’t a teacher. You run into a lot of these characters at workshops convened to tell teachers how to teach. This one just happened to be on film.
By way of fair notice, I’m always put out by education experts who aren’t teachers. I’m also predisposed to be skeptical whenever anybody, especially anybody with something to sell, declares his brief scene on the stage a signal moment in human history.
Find me the candidate who ever offered to lead his constituents into an insignificant future.
Human history sometimes does turn on particular events. The crucifixion of Jesus comes to mind, for example. But I’ve always resisted the idea that I’m living at one of those moments. Today’s visionaries contend that technology, especially communication technology, has fundamentally changed human existence and, therefore, the lens through which we need to view our existence. According to these social commentators, that change in lens and the consequent alterations we need to make in our assumptions and approach to life constitute a “paradigm shift.” They further argue that schools must make that shift so their students will be able to.
I recognize that I’m no longer typing on a Smith-Corona, and I know people who communicate daily and nightly via Facebook. I consider the keyboard I’m using an improvement and the social network definition of “friend” a corrosion of human values. I’m also more impressed by the technological upheaval my grandfather’s turn-of-the-century saw – telephones, light bulbs, radios, phonographs, movies, antibiotics, automobiles, and airplanes, not to mention zippers and safety razors.
I’ve always reminded my students that the founders may have worn short pants and powdered wigs, but that they considered themselves living at the dawn of what Henry Thoreau would soon lament as the “hustle bustle nineteenth century.” Alexander Hamilton certainly had his eye on his modern times when he created the then modern American economy. John Adams heralded the Revolution as “the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of nations,” a new thing for which James Madison saw “no parallel in the annals of human society.” Government by the people was a fundamental change. The assumption that “all men are created equal” was a paradigm shift. Compared to the Declaration of Independence, Twitter doesn’t cut it.
Back when the century was still the 20th, I was handed a document titled “Paradigm Shift: School Turned Upside Down.” It was a two-column, side-by-side comparison of what schools allegedly had been, and what 1990s paradigm shifters insisted that schools “must become,” which is what reformers have been working to make them ever since. I’ll leave it to you to determine whether their depiction of traditional schools is fair and accurate, whether their recommended changes are advisable, and how familiar many sound today.
For instance, the document condemns “specialization of personnel,” schools where English teachers teach English, and science teachers teach science. Instead, new paradigm students engage in project-based, interdisciplinary learning, a preference that lurks behind the present-day banners “universal design” and “transferable skills.” Meanwhile, schools like mine are filled with so many behavioral and psychological specialists that I can’t keep track of their names, let alone and what, or who, their specialties are.
The document characterizes traditional teachers as concerned only with “posturing to promote” their own positions “without concern for what’s best for everyone.” While old paradigm school communication and leadership are “top down,” new paradigm “central office staff” exist to “support the principal” and school-level teacher teams empowered to “set standards” and “monitor progress.”
My teachers were no more motivated by self-interest, nor any less concerned about their students than my colleagues and I are. There’s nothing new about teachers who strive to teach “effectively” or who want “to make a difference in the life of student,” both of which are goals allegedly unique to the new paradigm. The concept of “lifelong learning” dates back to Socrates and the prophets. The notion that today’s central offices exist to serve schools would leave most teachers rolling their eyes or laughing hysterically. As for standards and assessment, in this age of the Common Core, imposed scoring rubrics, and obsessive standardized testing, anyone who thinks that teachers get to set standards needs a refresher course in what top-down looks like.
Not all 1990 new paradigm proposals were bad ideas. Advocates pledged to curtail the intrusions of “state and federal mandates and reform initiatives.” Unfortunately, in their zeal to impose mandates and initiatives, reformers forgot about this one.
New paradigm schools minimize the use of textbooks and eliminate “routine and rote learning.” Remember this the next time your child surprises you with how little he knows.
In new paradigm classrooms “the focus is on learning,” and teachers are committed “to prevent[ing] student failure.” Except I recall my teachers were more focused on academic learning than today’s instructional philosophies and nonacademic distractions allow teachers to be. As for preventing failure, thanks to reforms like standards-based grading, today’s students can’t fail. They can’t even earn a zero when they don’t hand something in.
Under the old paradigm schools faced “pressure to keep the tax rate down.” New paradigm districts miraculously won’t have this tax problem thanks to “innovative budgets.”
I’ve left out the most indecipherable jargon, like “organizational units are autonomous; individual units build organizational schemata.” Once you get past the verbiage, you find a fairly typical education document – part common sense, part irrelevancy, part absurdity, and taken as a whole, inane and pointless.
That said, the new paradigm isn’t going away. It’s here, more or less, in your school and mine. My quick 2018 Google search detailed three primary features – a redefinition of curriculum, new prominence for technology, and classrooms where “the distinct roles of teachers and learners are becoming increasingly blurred.”
I’ve battled the purging of academic content from school curricula and witnessed the slavish adoption of mind-numbing technology. I’ve also seen what happens in “student-centered” classrooms where students determine what they learn and teachers are reduced to facilitators.
I’ve seen the new paradigm.
It’s not a pretty picture.
It’s a picture of us.
