A New Paradigm for Excellence in American Education: A challenge to change the way we think about learning and education based on common sense and scientific progress.

By Charles K. Stallard and Julie E. Cocker

Stallard and Cocker examine why America's schools continue failing to meet the needs of children and society. It explains why the present system cannot be reformed and why a new vision of how children and youth prepare for adulthood must replace it. The process begins with making School Choice a national option. Doing so will create a market for educational services beyond what traditional schools can provide. Their thesis holds that conventional schools are organized around teaching, not learning and that current schools' design and resources were developed to facilitate teaching, not learning. The new paradigm is all about learning and how to support each learner through the process of becoming educated.

The authors explain why Education is not a profession and why there is no Science of Education. They cite research in other fields that could improve learning and explain why that knowledge has yet to be applied. They show how government bureaucracies have impeded the adoption of more effective practices and new insights from psychology and neuroscience and why their role needs to change.

The authors call for the end of schooling as we know it and offer a better alternative. Their Web of Learning can organize the vital elements needed for academic success and is more suited to the new kind of child coming to school today. They describe an approach to developing curriculum and learning resources to individualize each person's path through school in ways that match their abilities. Instead of cascading failures in school, the program provides for success by eliminating learning debts and compensating for experiential deficits.

The final chapters offer a detailed technical specification for the system, including the steps necessary to create it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Nov 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781665749916

Charles K. Stallard

Dr. Charles Stallard and his co-author, Julie Cocker, have decades of experience in education at all levels. Their two previous books examined the role technology could and should play in the future of education and why its use in K-12 schools has yet to improve America's educational ranking among nations. Their work as teachers, professors, and consultants has given them a broad and deep look at schools, the children of today, and the government that owns and runs the education enterprise. In this comprehensive review of the various elements of education in America, they reveal why schools, designed for a different era and different society, are beyond reform and what a new system that utilizes the power of the digital age can accomplish with the proper application of learning science and a clear purpose, a purpose undiluted by special interests seeking to extend their influence. They have broad experience in developing learning support systems for schools of all types across the U.S. and abroad. Based on what other nations are accomplishing with their learning support systems, their concerns are the motivation for this book, two years in the making. The intended audience includes parents, citizens, educators, and those in government who care about America's future.

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Copyright © 2023 Charles K. Stallard & Julie E. Cocker.

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This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

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ISBN: 978-1-6657-4990-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-4989-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-4991-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023917276

Archway Publishing rev. date: 09/07/2023

This book is dedicated to the Graduating Classes of 1969 and 1970 of J.I. Burton High School of Norton, Virginia in honor of the intellectual journey we shared.

Charles K. Stallard

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1:     The Challenge of Complexity

Dimensions of the Problem

How We Got Here

A Path to Progress

Chapter 2:     Untrue Assumptions

The Real Purpose of Education

Education is a Collective Enterprise

Environment and Early Language Development

Developmental Disorders and Home Life

Issues of Child Rights and Responsibilities

Chapter 3:     Learning

Complexity Science and Learning

The Meaning of Meaning

Learning Is A Complex Process

Cognitive Structure

Need, Desire, Motivation

Assessment for Learning

When Learning Becomes The Purpose of Education

Obstacles to Learning

The Significance of Individual Differences

Metacognition and Learning

Chapter 4:     Curriculum Issues

Knowledge Structure

A Digression on Disciplines

Polysemy and Curriculum

Psychological Structure of Knowledge

What and How Much To Teach

Curriculum for the WoL

Chapter 5:     The Education Profession

Teacher Preparation and Work-Life

Education Struggles to Find a Path to Success

What Do Teacher’s Colleges Teach?

School Administrators and Management

Are Schools Expected to Do Too Much?

Teacher Burnout

Chapter 6:     Resistance to Change

Inertia in Edu-Tech

Government Resistance

Emerging Forces for Change

Misapplication of Technology

A Lesson Learned

Democratize Curriculum Development

Quality of Options to Public Schools

Parental Right’s

Quality Control

A Process for Change

Chapter 7:     Individualized Education

Metadata and Individualized Learning

Learning Analytics in Individualization

Chapter 8:     What the WoL Does and How

Specifications and Rationale

Learning Problems Addressed by the WoL

Technologies Required

Physiological Metrics

Chapter 9:     How It’s Made

Let the Market Emerge On Its Own

Develop Via Government Initiatives

Option 3: White Knight

Chapter 10:     What Do We Gain?

More Equity

Reduced Cost

Size and Space

Socialization, Collaboration, Discourse

Time Management

New Roles for Educators

Postscript

Appendix A:     Affective Computing

Appendix B:     Reinforcement Learning in A.I.

Appendix C:     Memory in Cognition

Appendix D:     Human Variability at Birth

Appendix E:     General Systems Theory

Appendix F:     Learning Metadata

Appendix G:     Administrative Positions

Appendix H:     Complex Adaptive Systems

Appendix I:     Oppositional Defiant Disorder

Appendix J:     Selected Writing Enhancement Programs

Appendix K:     Cognitive Biases

Appendix L:     Learning Environments

Glossary

Citations

PREFACE

No matter how you measure it, the effectiveness and productivity of American Education have declined for more than half of a century. Not only has the intellectual development of children fallen behind that of less technologically advanced societies, but the public school has also become, in various ways, an abuser of children and a killing ground for far too many. Like many Americans, the authors fear for the future of our country and our way of life if solutions for the crisis in education go unsolved.

Previously, we have written about different aspects of school failure and pointed to solutions outside the traditions and processes of K-12 schools and higher education institutions. In this volume, we bring our decades of experience as teachers, administrators, and consultants in rural, suburban, urban public, private, and parochial institutions to search for a new vision of what schools could and should be. We suggest ways to create them, beginning with a commitment to School Choice for the nation. Our experience has given us access to thousands of students, teachers, administrators, and legislators at local, state, national, and international levels. We have been early adopters of educational technology and worked with hardware and software companies developing and testing learning applications. Our involvement with educational technology projects has provided opportunities to see what applications help and which inhibit the learning process. Our last two books have pointed out the misapplications of technology in education; the opportunities missed that other professions have used to achieve success, and the general failure of the education establishment to think outside the box of traditional schooling.

America’s economy and culture are changing at a pace never before experienced. Its institutions and all levels of government have failed to keep up and, in many ways, have lost the people’s trust. We have seen firsthand changes in students, classrooms, teacher training, and the disruptive problems societal change bring to traditional classrooms. In this volume, we look closely at the roots of the decline of academic learning and describe a new paradigm for formal education, one more befitting the kind of society we have become and one capable of continuous improvement as we evolve culturally and cognitively

Our goal is to inform the creation of a more suitable learning institution and a much-needed science of education. We explain why the present education model is incapable of meaningful reform and must be replaced by one with different expectations and more focused procedures that directly support intellectual development. We know that schools should do more than teach content. However, intellectual ability, informed by academic knowledge, provides the foundation for other social and personal qualities children need to become successful, happy adults. Education’s primary focus must be acquiring knowledge and developing intellect. Individuation and accepting the necessity for working within and contributing to society flow from the growth of the intellect and understanding our social history and the possibilities our democratic republic affords us. In pursuit of the American Dream, generations of young people have never been taught what it takes to achieve the dream for themselves.

While our model relies heavily on technology, it is more humanistic, individualized, equitable, and guaranteed to do less harm to the developing minds and psyches of those who learn from and with it. We call it The Web of Learning (WoL). Web refers to the rapidly developing digital environment wherein we are born, learn, and work. Still, another web is involved, the web of interactions of the human brain that processes information and creates meaning. These two webs, both complex systems, must be mutually supportive for individuals to achieve success. In other words, what the education system does must be compatible with how the brain functions and address the needs of individuals and the broader American society as they change. Today’s schools are increasingly incompatible with the learning needs of children of the digital age. Today’s schools and how they operate evolved in and for another time and another culture. Therein lies the root of their inability to meet today’s needs.

The environment children grow up within has grown farther away from the natural world with each new generation. Now we learn, grow, and develop in a rapidly changing human-created world. The survival of a society and, ultimately, a species depends on its ability to adapt in ways that accommodate change. For modern humans, the rate and the degree of change are unparalleled. In this light, the crisis in education is existential, and efforts to reform the existing system are unlikely to address the degree and kind of change needed. For these reasons, we offer an adaptive instructional and learning management system designed for quality assurance, equity, and adaptability to the challenges of the modern world. Consider this book a seed of an idea for the future of formal learning.

Creating a new system requires a commitment to abandon the old one. Deciding to take that step requires understanding why tweaking the existing one will never overcome its inherent deficiencies. We offer reasons why radical change is needed and what it will take to satisfy the different needs of our multicultural, multiracial society. We describe a highly personalized learning system based on the power of adaptive computing to create new and more relevant roles for adults while recognizing and responding to the learning needs of individual children.

The WoL is a management system that individualizes each learner’s time, tasks, and the selection, order, and presentation style of the abstract academic content they must learn. It does this more effectively and in less time than traditional schools. It does it while monitoring their emotional, physical, and mental conditions, identifying learning difficulties or obstacles as they arise, and applying alternative modes and methods of presenting content that eliminates learning debts. The system’s signal processing capability evaluates each learner’s ability at each learning task. It adjusts instruction accordingly at the precise moment it is needed, something impossible in traditional classrooms. The power of modern human-computer interfaces and interactions enables a level of personal tutoring previously unimaginable, and that capability is expanding rapidly.

The WoL is much more than a learning management system; it is a foundation for a new conception of a place to learn. It requires a new approach to how learning content is selected and organized and a precise definition of the mission of K-12 education. It redefines the role of teachers and administrators and eliminates the need for many who practice there today. It is a system supported by specialized services to address the broad range of educational disabilities, learning obstacles, and severe limitations that plague today’s schools and teachers. It defines a new role for professional educators. By freeing them from the repetitive burdens of planning, developing, and assessing lessons, they can assume more productive roles as mentors, coaches, and models of successful learners and citizens. In ways we describe in detail, this system changes the focus from instruction and teaching to learning and problem-solving. Refrain from assuming that the approach keeps children focused on a computer screen throughout the school day. The efficiency and effectiveness of the content presentation create large blocks of time for language experience, group interactions, and problem-solving through collaboration with adults and other learners.

The problems of today’s schools are many and widely misunderstood. Therefore, we devote the book’s early chapters to examining the assumptions on which the system operates and the inadequacy of current procedures for creating, implementing, and evaluating its success or failure. Assessments in use today are for the benefit of administrators and politicians and offer little specific feedback to learners. We identify actors and institutions whose inability to accommodate change has been most influential in suppressing meaningful reform. Of significant concern is the general misunderstanding of the nature of the learning process, how it differs among individuals, and why. We delve deeply into the learning process and explain the misplaced emphasis on teachers and teaching as the primary problem.

Along the way, we point out the trends and forces that have diluted the perception of the value of going to school and created multiple generations of poorly educated Americans who fail to develop their potential and live lives of quiet dissatisfaction with themselves and the schools and society that failed them.

The technologies of the system described here are in use today, albeit many are in the early stages of development. The reason why it is urgent to begin the move to a new technology-enabled paradigm of education is multifaceted. Unless we commit to fully understanding the complexity of formal learning and develop strategies to address the growing range of obstacles to learning our culture has produced, more generations of learners will become victims of the misplaced allegiance to the non-functional system of the past.

The education system will evolve, and we are observing other nations that are more advanced in understanding the complexity of the task. They are ahead in developing systems to empower learners and mentors to work together in ways that naturally promote learning. This book offers a vision of what is possible, and while the mature version of the WoL will be genuinely revolutionary, even early versions of the system can immediately impact individual learners and those who work to develop the resources needed.

INTRODUCTION

This book has multiple goals. The first is to examine the underlying functions of how one becomes educated and how current schools try to help children do so. Another is to illustrate why the existing schools cannot adapt to changes in the children and adolescents they work with and how their failure to do so introduces obstacles to academic achievement. Chapters 1 through 5 examine the most critical of these and explain the science behind our conclusions.

Chapters 6 through 10 outline a strategy for change and describes a technology-empowered system that can do what traditional schools cannot. We suggest possible ways to create and implement such a system. The audience we have in mind includes citizens who already sense the severity of the problem, especially those who have school-age children or will have them in the near future. We have heard the worry and fear of mothers and fathers who struggle with deciding whether to leave the public system and how to find alternatives. They uproot themselves and move, hoping to find better options elsewhere. Another audience is government, national, state, and local. In the past, we have interacted with officials at all levels. While they share many of the parents’ concerns, they remain unable to move their institutions to take the necessary actions to solve them. We write for our former colleagues in higher education and public schools who feel pressured and do not know where to seek guidance or support. We write in hopes of motivating a return of investigative journalism with an eye to the need to inform, in unbiased terms, the public about the forces that work against honest, open dialogue about the resources and changes needed. Finally, we write for those institutions that are consumers of the products of the educational system. Businesses and industries of all kinds depend upon intellectual prowess to remain functional. Increasingly, they rely on foreign talent to sustain their empires and leave their fellow citizens ignorant, with declining prospects for success and happiness. If you doubt the latter, ask why so many American cities are awash with homeless families and individuals who have given up on themselves and their country.

There are specific things readers will encounter in this book. Some of the most important seek answers to the following:

Are the children and teens coming to school today different from those of the recent past? How are they different? Do schools understand these differences, and why do their programs and practices not produce the results they once did? What do today’s learners need that schools do not and cannot provide?

Why haven’t schools changed with the times? Other societal institutions have? What forces keep schools mired in past practices and mindsets? Who is in charge of change? Who is providing direction and oversight? Why haven’t they been effective? What is it about learning abstract academic content that is problematic for many of today’s students? Has the knowledge become too complex, or has their learning potential changed?

Why have trillions of dollars of investment in facilities, staff training, and millions of computers in classrooms yet to make a difference? Will more money to hire more teachers and buy more computers help? Why? Why not? Have cultural changes influenced what children and adolescents value and seek out of life and from going to school? Are the forces for cultural change helping or endangering the future happiness and success of its children?

Are schools overburdened and distracted from the real purpose of education? What is the purpose of a national education system? Who defines the purpose? Whose interest does it promote and protect? What resources and strategies can existing and emerging technologies offer as alternatives to traditional ineffective ones? Are these being developed around the real needs of today’s students? If not, why not?

Given decades of ineffective reforms and lack of informed leadership to direct educational practice, what force, events, and conditions might put education on track to become a science in its own right, with the ability to provide direction and oversight and allow education to become the profession it should have been all along? We explore all these questions and topics to ignite a more sustained and productive national dialogue about the future of education and the survival of the society we owe so much.

We include a glossary of terms that offers definitions and examples to make the issues and topics easier to understand. Underlined words in the text have glossary entries. Appendices A through L can be helpful for those seeking more in-depth information on specific issues and concepts.

This volume is our third book on this topic. In 2001 we shared broad optimism about technology’s role in the future. The Promise of Technology in Education: The Next Twenty Years ¹ was followed in 2015 by Technology and Failure of American Education ², which pointed out how education was misapplying education and creating obstacles rather than eliminating them. This volume is our attempt to tie more directly the learning process to tools that empower the mind to fill gaps that inhibit intellectual development and make access to them universally available.

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CHAPTER 1

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THE CHALLENGE OF COMPLEXITY

T HESE ARE PIVOTAL YEARS FOR America. Crises follow one another in ordered regularity, and it seems that the ominous vision of W. B. Yeats’s poem,  The Second Coming , speaks to us directly about monsters for our time. You may recall some of the lines:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Why is American education, our largest and most complex institution, deeply in trouble? Whether it be the declining academic achievement of students, the rise of violence in the form of murder, bullying, and attacks on teachers and other students, or the high levels of dropouts and the large numbers graduating functionally illiterate in reading, writing, and arithmetic, the evidence is of failure is everywhere. Because of the growing public awareness of educational failure, increasing numbers of parents seek alternatives for their children. What does this bode for the current public school system? What are the implications for the United States’ ability to maintain our democratic republic if this critical institution continues to underperform? How will it impact our quality of life and those of our children and grandchildren? These questions merely suggest the dimensions of social stability and challenges to our national survival the problem presents.

Something fundamental is wrong with how we try to meet our educational needs. At the same time, the dilemma of educational collapse is given scant attention by the very institutions on which it depends for resources and direction. Journalists and the media ignore the problem and offer adulterated news and polemical commentary inciting hatred for Western values and traditions. Operating on the principle that if it bleeds, it sells, the media is quick to cover the chaos and dimensions of our failure to support learning but never investigate the underlying problems or possible solutions. Entertainment has replaced investigative journalism, and Americans fail to understand the dimensions and causes of failure.

The government is too engaged in power politics, and elective officials are too focused on personal gain to spend time on real problems. Media of all kinds promote violence and sex and wallows in virtue signaling instead of reinforcing the qualities that sustain a healthy society. Apathy and anomie have become the state of the union. It is easier to ignore and use the problem to create fear and profit than it is to take action to solve it. The condition of education is an existential issue for America and should rank at the top of national priorities.

The crisis in education is not new but one that has been building over decades. Its roots lie partly in how our society has reacted to Alvin Toffler’s warnings about Future Shock. Those warnings rapidly became a reality. The world, especially our nation, underwent fundamental changes in 1970, and the pace has accelerated yearly. At the same time, we worked and played through a golden age of American power and world dominance, unaware of the speed of that change and what it was doing to our institutions and the generations growing up with it. Our sense that we had achieved the good life was at its peak. Then, lost wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan disillusioned. Fractures in our system of government, plus the frustration of minorities and the poor to share equitably, have festered through the decades, causing some to question the motive behind our republic’s foundations and its founders’ virtue and intentions. Established institutions such as the church and government began to lose the trust and support of the people. Still, despite the warning signs, structurally, little changed to address the loosening grip of the traditions and values that enabled us to reach the heights of freedom and technological achievement, for the moment, we continue to enjoy. Well into the new century, our calm and sense of security are shaken. Institutions we once trusted now work against everything we once held sacred, including pride in being Americans.

Today, our way of life faces existential challenges as never before. They are a complex set of conditions that institutions are not managing because their complexity and interrelatedness are not recognized. Concerned citizens have come to realize that our society is becoming increasingly dysfunctional. Found wanting and collaborating with the destructive forces themselves is the one institution we have relied upon to ensure new generations become imbued with the values and ethos that made us successful. It was considered the best hope of surmounting whatever threats arose. That is our system of education. Like Thomas Jefferson, we assumed that our free society could tolerate any idea so long as educated minds were free to challenge it. Who could have imagined that the educated mind would become such a rarity in our race to modernity? The education system has stopped producing that kind of mind and spirit in many ways. We are left vulnerable to emotions and ideas that ask that we abandon those that guided us to our prosperity and security. That failure touches all races, economic levels, and communities and is a problem for everyone.

The nations that pose the greatest existential threats to our survival now lead the world in educational achievement. Chief among them is China. Chinese policy uses our universities and research laboratories to provide them with technological advances. They systematically infiltrate higher education and other institutions to gain access to that knowledge and spread their anti-western ideologies. Those who want to destroy Western Civilization have successfully infiltrated public school curricula with propaganda favorable to their preferred forms of government, society, and class distinctions. The dragon has risen. It challenges our position in the world and our ability to protect our way of life. At the same time, many other nations focus intently on educating their children to higher levels of academic achievement; China, perhaps more so than any other. In as much as knowledge created the modern world, the failure of American schools to match the intellectual productivity of other nations bodes ill for our future position in the world order and our way of life. The rough beast of Yeats’ poem could be a world without a strong America to protect freedom and progress for all. Some within our society are making the case that we have reached that point already and that it is time to let a new philosophy, perhaps implemented by a global authority, take control of our lives.

At this moment, America needs the best education system a democratic society can produce. Yet, the national consciousness is misplaced. It does not focus on the danger our increasing illiteracy has created. Instead, we debate the virtues of our founding documents and rewrite our history to denigrate our democratic values and institutions. Lenin has been attributed to the following statement, Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the world. What we are witnessing today suggests he was right. The subversive tactics of Marxists/Socialists do not end with propaganda; they also work to diminish the teaching of academic knowledge in public schools. They attack the virtues of merit, talent, and perseverance, weakening the reasoning abilities and aspirations of generations. They have successfully watered down the school curricula by alleging to improve equity and combat systemic racism. The value of self-actualization has come under attack. These claims are not some wild conspiracy theory. Evidence of the dumbing down of America is clear, as decades of research and statistics have been telling us.

Dimensions of the Problem

America needs a new attitude about what its education system should be and what it must try to accomplish. There is an absence of informed leadership in government and academia to point the way. Governments will not initiate the needed change without public intimidation and real threats to their positions. There is no science of education to inform effective change, not even within the educational research arm of our federal government or universities. Research and development in fields other than education have developed knowledge that can inform the creation of an effective learning system capable of providing structures and processes that enable children of many cultures, classes, and abilities to develop their intellectual and social potential. The initiative to create change must come from outside the existing education bureaucracy and accommodate the complexity of learning and human development. If substantive change does come, it will be because of the force of public opinion and parental pressure. When Americans have options, market pressure is the force that will ultimately bring the change needed.

Learning and human development are complex processes, and formal education needs to support them along the way to intellectual and moral maturity. The factors presented in the following chapters are only a piece of that complexity, but among those most ignored or misunderstood.

Tower of Babel

Today’s debate about what to do to improve education is neither focused nor informed by what it will take to change an institution and system as large and complex as the education industry is. One of the difficulties we discovered early in our efforts to describe the problems was the necessity to use terms whose meanings have eroded over time by political correctness and semantic weakening or polysemy. We use words carelessly with little thought to their precise meaning, such as systems, learning, and education. Language weakening means education should focus on strengthening literacy and finding ways to avoid communication ambiguity. Instead, we fight over gender pronouns and other irrelevant issues that mask the actual needs. At the very least, we should improve citizens’ ability to recognize polysemy when it occurs and interpret words’ meanings in their context. Language is the only tool to transfer knowledge, and misunderstanding what a word means complicates learning tasks. In practice, it means that education must develop minds that recognize the necessity to seek clarity amid the chaos of language usage. Language development is among today’s most neglected parts of the education experience, especially in the early years. Unless we share a common vocabulary there is no way we can reach consensus on either the problem or its solutions.

Conflicting Expectations

Schools focus on doing what it takes to meet ill-conceived and vaguely defined standards and pass standardized achievement tests. Calls for rigor in the curriculum mean nothing if normalized tests of factual recall only measure a vague notion of rigor du jour. Above all else, education should enable us to discover who, what we are, and what we can make of the life ahead of us. Such insight does not result from taking a course. It emerges from the methodologies and overall experience of being schooled.

Neither the science behind these insights nor their acceptance as necessary functions of education informs what happens in most classrooms today. A demand to improve achievement as measured by international tests has somehow made us forget our individuality and unique human potential. Schools no longer provide adequate experiences from which one can learn about the responsibilities of citizenship and the moral obligation to serve society’s general welfare. Such awareness is a by-product of intellectual development and results from interactions with society’s expectations and values. Since we don’t test for this, it isn’t a significant part of the school experience. Consequently, many of the problems and failures of schools today are products of omission and misguided notions about the purpose of education. As a whole, learning programs in K-12 education have become a melange of activities and experiences influenced by bureaucrats and labor unions instead of the needs of learners to develop intellectually.

Intellectual abilities begin to develop between birth and age five in normal children. The emerging intellect coevolves with attitudes toward others and perceptions of one’s place in the world. An essential part of this awareness is an appreciation of the value of knowledge for success and happiness in life. Including opportunities that address these dimensions of life into curricula is complicated when those in charge of reform have little sense of what they are or how to do so. Further, they are likely to conflict with other social engineering goals. You might assume they exist, but you won’t find them when you look, and we have looked. In the past, such qualities might have developed from life at home. For many children today, such an assumption would be wrong for all races and socio-economic classes. It is not a race or class issue; the system fails them all. Those with supportive home environments are among the few exceptions, and even they are under attack as systemically racist.

Ignorance of Advances in Science Related to Learning

Efforts at school reform have taken little from either General Systems or cognitive science, one example of why education is not a profession, a science, or even a defined field of study. The education system does not use appropriate or sound science in its efforts, significantly limiting its ability to change. Demographics, economics, and the constructed human environment have changed significantly since Horace Mann decided that one model fits all and led the movement for universal public education. Changes in society and culture have produced new human beings whose needs differ from those the system initially served, and old assumptions about learning are no longer relevant.

When we use the term complexity, we refer to the growing awareness of the unity of things and the interdependence of entities and all that influence them. For example, a human being is a creation of biology, culture, and environment. Many factors in each domain influence the individual who emerges and the manner of its development.

Educators and politicians tinker with this piece or that and expect miracles to happen. The complex system of human development and the educational system that is supposed to support its growth needs attention, including the basic assumptions on which it rests. Being a complex system means that any part changed will impact the others. Meaningful reform for education will only come if everything is on the table, including what science has taught us about ourselves and how and why we learn. Tinkering with the existing system will change little. Creating a new system built from new specifications and defined missions is the best route to the kind of educational service the nation needs.

Decades of experience with education at all levels have taught us one thing. Our science and philosophy have failed to teach us what kind of organisms we are, that we are simultaneously biological and cultural entities. Our selves emerge from the interactions and forces inherent in both domains. The interaction between mental consciousness and its encounters with the world creates the complex and dynamic beings we become. Qualities of consciousness and intelligence unique to the human species have emerged over time and become hard-wired into our being. Research in cultural psychology has exposed the role that experience and culture play in developing the mind. Culture, as used here, refers to the environment within which the self exists, not historical traditions or the cumulative culture of an ethnic group. The self exists within family and community environments. A mind experiences a culture and adapts to it. The brain, in turn, using its evolved capacities, influences how a person reacts to and interprets culture and, in doing so, reshapes it. Interactions between the mind and the culture collectively influence the brain’s behavioral patterns, perceptions, and processing. Consider, too, that every mind is different and sees and adapts to the world as no other, a complicating factor.

America has become more diverse racially and culturally by the day. Experiences during one’s early life need to be of a kind and a quality that contribute to a state of preparedness to function in the different cultures encountered at school. Children coming to school will differ in many ways, some so subtle as not to be commonly recognized. Contrary to accepted belief, neighborhood schools do not accommodate the various cultures of their students.

A distance of a few miles or a few blocks in a city can include multiple subcultures that produce different attitudes toward learning and behavioral norms. For most children, their school will be their first encounter with people with different perspectives, views, values, and goals. Being the most multicultural, America brings culturally diverse students together in schools that cannot accommodate their differences. By failing to recognize the importance of culturally conditioned minds when learning abstract academic content, schools neglect the critical contributions the cultural dimension of life contributes to preparedness to learn, thereby creating conditions for many to fail. Cultural influences on cognitive structures play a more significant role in academic success than the biological tissue in which they reside. From the outset, the American model of schools intended to have only some learners fulfill their potential. Thrown together in classrooms, the bright and able would be revealed and groomed for higher learning, and the rest could find lives among the lumpenproletariat. Even if schools were committed to addressing the issues around multiculturalism in their programs, their organization and standard operating procedures would prevent them from being successful.

Schools do not employ such knowledge in creating curricula or choosing methodologies, as evidenced by the design of learning places, all built around large-group instruction. By design, today’s schools must ignore the many differences among the learners it serves. The model can do nothing else. The classroom-plus-teacher model of education provides little time and inadequate resources to individualize. Everyone gets the same course. Meaningful individualization is a myth.

The Disappearing American

It wasn’t long ago that we thought of our culture as American. We were inclined to believe that, for the most part, each of us experiences the world with similar eyes and assigns similar meanings to cultural artifacts. Today, institutions have instilled a new sense of racial identity and culture into every dimension of our culture. Efforts to taint the concept of American culture as systemically racist, patriarchal, and sexist have successfully added to the differences children bring to school.

Culture is both learned and inherited, and that complicates everything. We each see and live in a personal world whose qualities only we can experience. Your consciousness is a part of your cultural experience and a projection of the mind accessible only by you. Little is written or said in education circles about the connection between biological and cultural evolution and its implication on how we should approach education. Darwin’s theories of natural selection must now accommodate the coevolution and interdependence of genes and culture. It turns out that it is not a simple matter of the survival of the fittest but how genes and culture influence each other. It also turns out that it doesn’t take thousands of years for evolutionary changes to occur, and they can and do come very quickly. Epigenetics has shown how genes can change how they express themselves between the time of fertilization of the ovum and the birth of a human child. One may inherit specific genetic information from ancestors in the form of genes, but how those genes express as physical and intellectual traits can be influenced by chemical and electrical conditions within the womb.

Our mass education system, the universal public school system we have today, is not designed and does not seek to accommodate the different needs of the several cultures that comprise our population. These differences cause some to feel discriminated against when the world reacts to them differently than they experienced before they started school. From an early age, they sense that they are different and see how the difference works against them in a one-size-fits-all approach to teaching. Differences also create the potential for many subtle but essential misunderstandings that inhibit academic progress. A successor to public education requires that we recognize and accommodate all differences. That some schools and teachers do this better than others is one element of inequity that we can correct, but only with a new education paradigm.

These are a few problems that go unrecognized with the current system. There are many more. We begin with these because they are among the most fundamental and challenging to recognize. Once we understand them more fully, it is evident that adhering to the traditional concept of what a school is and does can never correct them. Before attempting reform, we have to look further into the origins and operations of the current system to know more completely what challenges a new system must overcome. Otherwise, the new system will continue to react to and try to correct only the failure symptoms and not address the underlying causes. A new model has to respond to real problems with real solutions, which means taking a scientific approach to identify their causes. That requires looking with an open mind and avoiding what, in the past, we merely assumed. We agree that it takes courage to do so. We need that courage to look at issues and not avoid them, whether biological, economic, cultural, or iatrogenic. In forthcoming pages, we pay particular attention to why today’s schools cannot accommodate these differences and show how they can be once a new system developed around limited and specific goals and appropriate strategies can succeed.

How We Got Here

Public Education in America emerged in bits and pieces at different rates across states and communities. The social and economic factors driving decisions at tens of thousands of places have been local and were long considered local responsibilities. During the past seventy-five years, the intervention of federal agencies has taken away many of those responsibilities. The principle of subsidiarity that informed the Constitution devolved over time, reducing the ability of local governments to control the services they offer the public. While the veneer of local control remains with counties and cities, federalism, through its mandated standards and funding policies, exerts the most influence on what the system has become.

Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution provided the initial justification for Federal involvement in education. This Article granted Congress the power to lay and collect taxes. The government needed taxes to contribute to the nation’s General Welfare. Congress and the Supreme Court successfully defined education as part of the General Welfare, which opened the door for federal involvement. Beginning with funding of Land Grant Institutions of Higher Education in 1841, the Federal Government soon found other reasons to take a strong hand in public K-12 and