Education for 21 {+s} {+t} century requires willing minds

Commentary

This is going to be the century of the education revolution. Across the country - around the world - cognitive scientists, educational psychologists and other researchers and educators are studying how people learn, how they develop or change habits and how to make it all work better.

Notice I said "people," not "students," as the need for effective education spans the age spectrum.

Why now? After all, classroom education goes back to antiquity. But now that we want to educate everybody , the various sciences of the mind and the brain are finally developing a workable view of how we think, and we are finally developing the technology to make effective mass education practical.

We can get an idea of what is coming from the great 19th century success story. Two hundred years ago, a patient was often better off with a lay healer's herbs than in a doctor's office, and every cemetery was cluttered with the graves of small children and young women who had died in childbirth. The fact that we expect our children to grow up and we expect to grow old shows how far medicine (and public health) has come.

We might even learn a few lessons from such a success story.

First of all, science matters. Two centuries ago, medicine was afflicted by pointless controversies that turned out to be bunk. A lot of the strange things doctors did long ago - bleeding people or routinely cauterizing wounds - made sense at the time. It was only by tracking the outcomes of treatments and preventative measures that doctors found out what worked - and what didn't.

Science matters in education, too. Are short quizzes just after lectures more effective in learning retention than discussion just after lectures? Conduct a study and find out. How much homework should students do to reach a certain level of mastery? Conduct a study and find out.

For that matter, how effective are lectures - as opposed to, say, sitting in groups reading notes, or even sitting in classrooms interacting with computers? Conduct a study and find out.

Slowly, but surely, effective educational techniques emerge - often, techniques no one had even thought of before.

This requires patience and discipline, and just as quacks sold snake oil to frightened patients in the 19th century, quacks are selling snake oil to impatient and gullible pundits and politicians today. We can solve all our education problems by firing the bad teachers, privatizing the schools and abolishing the unions. And if you act now, here's a deed to the Brooklyn Bridge. In medicine, the best you usually could hope for from snake oil was that it didn't hurt you, but all too often snake oil just made matters worse. The same is probably true in education.

Teaching is not magic. Teaching is a profession based on learnable skills, like medicine. Skills based on techniques developed from scientific research, like medicine. And if America is to participate in the coming educational revolution, we will have to push the politicians and pundits out of their armchairs and make them listen to the educators who are making the revolution.