CHEBEAGUE ISLAND — Problems with educational achievement have been in the news for decades. The 1983 report “A Nation at Risk” stated: “What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur – others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.”

More recently, the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment found that in mathematics, U.S. students came in 31st (tied with Ireland and Portugal) and in reading 15th (tied with Poland and Iceland). Students in Shanghai, China, beat out all other countries. The 1983 report failed to wake us to the challenge.

There are certainly suggestions for change being made.

One is merit pay: If a teacher generates more learning, he or she would be paid proportionally more. That approach (along with most others, including No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top) makes the assumption that teachers are required for learning.

But in actuality, students would likely benefit if teachers were to play a much-reduced role. Most courses in high school and college involve students in a classroom being lectured to by a teacher or professor (I confess to having done some of that lecturing myself).

Classes meet at fixed times, move at a fixed pace and cover a fixed range of topics.

That organization is neither necessary nor desirable. Consider an alternative: Beginning in the first grade, each student is asked to complete some task on his or her own.

Students will vary in their ability to do so, but those who are able to do so would gradually be given more and more leeway in how they complete their assignments.

Conversely, those unable to do so would be required to spend more time in a structured environment.

Most of us realize that having the freedom to complete a task at our own pace is very rewarding (and that attending classes at fixed times is less so).

Most students exposed to such an arrangement should gradually learn to budget their time and complete their assignments on their own, a skill that is largely discouraged under the current approach to education.

Naturally, students working on their own would need to be evaluated from time to time. The result of such evaluations would in turn dictate whether students could incrementally increase their freedom, or whether it would be slightly curtailed.

In other words, those who did their work would be rewarded with greater freedom, and those who did not would not be so rewarded. This is merit pay for students, with the currency in the form of freedom from bureaucracy.

Consider some of the likely benefits of such an approach. As students able to work on their own leave the classroom, those remaining would receive more attention, attention they might well need.

In this way, students who had difficulty learning self-control would benefit from a greater teacher-student ratio.

Students who could learn self-control would be acquiring more than just an education.

They would be learning tools that would enhance their lives in general. Consider drug abuse. If this results even in part from impulsiveness, students trained in self-control might well be less susceptible.

Impulsiveness is also implicated in areas such as unwanted pregnancy and credit card debt. A person who has learned to budget his or her time might well be able to budget his or her expenses more easily than otherwise.

Apart from helping those who find it difficult to learn self-control, as well as those able to do so, such an approach has the potential to reduce the cost of education.

Much of the money that supports education is derived from property taxes, and, as many of us know, those taxes can be onerous (which is why Andrew Cuomo, the newly elected governor of New York, wants to cap them there).

If self-control were encouraged from an early age, we might find that high schools as we know them largely withered away. With that, associated expenses would likewise decline.

Such an approach could be tested on a small scale, and gradually ramped up as efficacious practices were empirically discovered.

This contrasts with national programs that impose standards on a top-down basis, and return some of our tax dollars if we behave in accordance with those standards.

Practice makes perfect (as Malcolm Gladwell argues in his best-selling book, “Outliers: The Story of Success,” in which he says it takes 10,000 hours of experience to master a field of knowledge or performance).

By practicing self-control, students should be able to perfect their abilities to learn in a manner which suites them best.

 

– Special to The Press Herald

 

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