Book 3 - The One World School House

It is appropriate that I am reading this book at the same time I am working on edmodo.

In this book, we learn about this guy, Sal Khan, who was asked to help his younger cousin with her studies. Since he lived far away, he had to use youtube as his way of getting the videos to her. Since they could only be ten minutes long in order to be posted, he had to make sure he kept his points short, concise, and interesting. After seeing the results these videos had on his cousin, as well as feedback from random youtubers, he decided to take a deeper look into how his videos became so popular, and why they are were effective.

He brings up so many interesting points, but I would like to focus on just one at the moment. Khan describes what he calls “Swiss Cheese Learning,” which is this amazing concept that I used to talk to my own students about…but I didn’t know it was called Swiss Cheese Learning. 

In my debate classes, I would always play the devil’s advocate. Sometimes, in my quest to prove the seemingly improvable, I would actually convince myself that the nonsense I was saying was actually something to consider. This concept describes one of those moments in my debate class.

If we look at the current educational system, based on the Prussian model, it seems to be pretty reasonably assembled. Children at any given age are put in classes based on their age group, then tracked based on their ability to perform in academic subjects. Everyone graduates around the time they are 18, ready to join the workforce. Job opportunities are, of course, divvied based on academic performance.

It appears to be a fairly just system.

But, when you get down to the brass tacks, there are a few fundamental issues that we never really question. First of all, why is 18 the magical age that we should graduate? It is something we just accept without really questioning, but it is a valid point. Kids are moved around, tracked, and pushed through the system, and what does the system spit out? People approximately the age of 18 with varying levels of competence.

In this situation, the constant is the age, the variable is the degree in which they are educated.

THIS is what Khan refers to as “Swiss Cheese Learning.” All of these little “holes” in our education are put there by the very institute designed to educate us in the first place. And these examples of tracking and such are the more extreme examples. That is to say, they are easily noticeable.

If Billy took AP English and social studies, and Jim graduated late because he stumbled through remedial math, then we expect Billy to be more educated than Jim. So surely this represents the exception, not the rule, yeah?

No.

As teachers, we see this all the time, yet we don’t consider the impact it might have on our kids. Let’s say that Billy and Suzy are in math 100 together their freshman year. He gets 65%, she gets 90%. The following year, they are both in math 200. Now, Billy maintains his 65%, as he is missing a lot of those foundational concepts from the year before, so building on them proves difficult. She also performs comparably. However, they both graduate with the same NYS Regents diploma, at approximately the age of 18.

Imagine this: Education where age is the variable, and education is the constant…I wonder what that looks like?