Danielsaurus

Bad Advice About Kids #27: ‘Have School on Saturdays So We Can Compete With China’

Former assistant education secretary Chester E. Finn Jr., commenting in the Wall Street Journal on how to improve our education system:

In the face of budget shortfalls, school districts in many parts of the United States today are moving toward four-day weeks. This is despite evidence that longer school weeks and years can improve academic performance. Schoolchildren in China attend school 41 days a year more than most young Americans —and receive 30% more hours of instruction. Schools in Singapore operate 40 weeks a year. Saturday classes are the norm in Korea and other Asian countries—and Japanese authorities are having second thoughts about their 1998 decision to cease Saturday-morning instruction. This additional time spent learning is one big reason that youngsters from many Asian nations routinely out-score their American counterparts on international tests of science and math. […]

[N]early every young American needs to learn more than most are learning today, both for the sake of their own prospects and on behalf of the nation’s competitiveness in a shrinking, dog- eat-dog world. Yes, it will disrupt everything from school-bus schedules to family vacations. Yes, it will carry some costs, at least until we eke offsetting savings from the technology-in- education revolution. But even Aristotle might conclude that this is a price worth paying.

Sadly, Finn Jr. has fallen prey to so many misplaced and inherently flawed assumptions in his eloquently-assembled article, and I only wish I had the time to go through them all. A few key points: More of the same kind of education doesn’t get you better results. Our education system is flawed, but not for lack of time our kids spend in school – rather, that our schools are wasting our kids’ natural talent. Another thing: Schooling has never necessarily equaled learning, and a child’s future success isn’t necessarily dependent on their learning classical literature or many of the other things that we still use to compile our definition of “academic performance.” In truth, that phrase – that concept of academic performance – has arguably never been a good indicator of a child’s future success, either personally or economically (which is more often the concern in these Compare-U.S.- Education-to-Other-Countries games).

The simple paradox here, as Sir Ken Robinson has written about before (and as even the business community and the likes of Seth Godin and Dan Pink understand all too well), is that in order to improve our education system and help America “compete”¹ in a global market, we have to stop worrying about the big and instead concentrate on the small – individual children and how they best learn. We have to help our schools be the best they can be for each individual student, enabling them to find out what they’re good at – what their “element” is, as Robinson writes – and then helping them develop that talent. Cookie cutter education doesn’t work anymore. We have to make small change first, with an individual child-centered education, and only then the changes ripple outward and we’ll begin to see a meaningful and real difference at the macro level.

Oddly, the only good point that I see Finn making is one that he interprets completely wrong:

With continuing advances in hardware and software, the boundaries among “learning in school,” “learning in other settings” and “learning on your own” will gradually disappear, with potent implications for time spent learning, which need no longer be confined to the classroom hours stipulated in the teachers’ union (or custodians’ union) contract or the 180-day year prescribed in state law (and, in some jurisdictions, not allowed to start before Labor Day).

It’s absolutely true: there is no meaningful boundary between where learning occurs. If anything, though, that’s a reason to advocate for shortening the school days and years, not to increase them. Hopefully there will be a day when schools, as we know them, are gone forever – replaced with active learning that occurs out in the world, mediated and encouraged by mentors and a child’s community, and facilitated by local learning centers, libraries, personal technology and more.