Knowledge Cities Final

Reflections on the Possibility of Restructuring U.S. Education Using a Knowledge City Model

A high school teacher once remarked to me that successful revolutions are difficult to come by. Even when people can see that there are problems with a system, she explained, the law of inertia tends to govern social movements. People tend to resist change, especially today when they have to constantly fight to maintain any kind of stasis. So how does one start the ball rolling then? The same teacher explained that calls for system change are most likely to gain followers if there is a defined plan and if substitute practices are suggested to replace practices that are being abandoned. She suggested, for example, replacing a prompt to ‘read more’ with ‘read three new books each month.’ In another example, she suggested ‘read more closely’ with ‘keep an outline while reading and compose a response at the end of each chapter.’

I have been thinking of this teacher frequently over the past few months, and watching the Ken Robinson video after our midterm inspired me to use her as my jumping-off point for this final paper. Like many excellent books, articles, and videos I have recently encountered pointing out the flaws of the current U.S. education system, the video made many good points. My problem was that, again like all the others, it pointed out specific problems but then offered an abstract solution instead of a series of concrete ones. My intention is to use this paper to synthesize the different ideas about knowledge production that this class has explored into a theoretical action plan for actually initiating change.

At the start of the video, it is proposed that there are two reasons that countries are reforming their education systems: economic and cultural. I would perhaps be even more extreme and say that these are the reasons countries have education systems at all. Why is education necessary and why do societies value schooling? The questions given in the video provide some possible answers. Public education is supposed to prepare children to become the kinds of employees the economy needs, and simultaneously it is supposed to socialize them so that they develop a sense of cultural identity. According to the myth that previous generations were raised with, working hard in school and getting good grades would lead to a college degree, which in turn would lead to a “good” job. Students have suspected for a while now that this is an outdated myth, but only recently have those in power begun to notice that their system needs an update, at the very least. Their initial reaction involved implementing more standardized testing in an attempt to ‘raise standards.’ That hasn’t done much good, but I’ll return to the topic of testing shortly.

To begin my response, I have to point out that focusing solely on training children to become employees sounds, if we are honest, completely insane and absurd. Shouldn’t children be children for a while and then grow into engaged adults, free to pursue their interests, passions and talents? One could say that an overly economic idea of the purpose of education is in and of itself problematic, but I am hardly the person to think up an alternative structuring of a whole society. For now, then, I will work with the assumption that students are being trained to take their places in the current economy. What does this mean? Dealing with the current economy means dealing with constant instability. Technology evolves at a rate which creates new jobs and makes others obsolete at a rapid pace, and how does one prepare for a job that does not yet exist? Also noteworthy are the two conflicting trends that are prominent right now: globalization increasing the need to collect credentials that make one look competitive, and degree inflation making this more difficult by making the most accepted credential form worth less and less.

As far as building a sense of cultural identity in United States students, I again have to ask what this means. Since U.S. citizens do not share an ethnic background, our common culture is wholly dependent on learned behaviors and myths. One of the strongest learned behaviors that we share is that of language, but our institutions cling so tightly to English at times that they can be impractical about ignoring the usefulness of knowing another language. This can then make it difficult for students to find opportunities to learn alternative languages even if they want to.

The national mythology taught especially in history classes is also problematic. Generally, the mythology focuses heavily on U.S. history, and only glorious history at that. Sometimes, individuals like Howard Zinn have started movements to include stories about minority achievement and national failures in this narrative. In many cases, however, the fact that the national textbook industry caters to the editing requests of the biggest, wealthiest, and frequently most conservative states leads to the perpetuation of a narrative that does exactly the opposite. This inter-state conflict is just one of many, especially when it comes to public education, and I would propose that such conflicts indicate a need to change the version of cultural identity being taught to one that acknowledges state identity, city identity and ethnic identity as components of the individual. This would allow these different facets to be acknowledged, but it would hopefully also check the dominance of any one identity in determining the education of the individual. The tone of the history stories needs to be changed to one that celebrates the strength that comes from our diversity. Once this is managed at home, then the next urgent matter of business is to start teaching students languages earlier so that they can interact well with the rest of the world and become part of a global community.

While we’re re-writing the old myths of past times, we should also address the myth about the worth of a college degree. Degree inflation is no secret, and by now many of the academic articles on the subject of higher education even admit that jobs are requiring more credentials of employees today even if the skills needed for the job have not changed at all. This is, of course, a result of the supply-and-demand law of economics in the free market: there are currently many workers and not so many jobs so employers can afford to be picky. The problem is that it is becoming more and more necessary—in the U.S. context—for students to spend more of their lives and money on schooling than ever before. This paper focuses on primary and secondary education, so this is all I’ll say directly on this subject, but it is something worth noting and something worth researching further at another time.

The Robinson video goes on to discuss how the system of public education devised in the industrial era, and with us to this day, created an idea that people are either smart academics or not-smart non-academics. This narrow definition of achievement has led to equally narrow definitions of intelligence and of success. Theoretically, once could counter that the idea of multiple intelligences and learning styles has been around since Howard Gardner. And this would be true: the idea has been around. What still hasn’t happened, however, is the translation of this idea into concrete terms. The idea that people learn differently has changed the way some classrooms are run and some exams are given, but this is mostly at the digression of individual schools and teachers. Overall, standardized testing still assumes that ‘achievement’ can be measured best from all students in just this one manner, and society assumes that individuals who do not test well are not as capable or intelligent. If schools are to maintain their autonomy from the federal government, then some kind of assessment is necessary to enable students to transfer credits and to help universities screen applicants with different educational backgrounds. This is only practical. However, this assessment does not need to be in the form of a 4 hour standardized fill-in-the-bubbles test, for which one pays an independent company around $80.

I could actually continue to discuss the problems with standardized testing for a long time; however, the problems that have come up with the increase in mandatory standardized testing are also worth mentioning briefly. Firstly, the problems ESL students have with the testing because they are not given enough extra support during state testing have ESL teachers railing against certain forms of testing and leave the test results in certain states very demographically segregated. Second, there is the problem that teachers feel pressured to cut material out of their lessons so that they can review the information and skills that will be ‘on the test.’ The issue touched on in the video, however, is yet another. Robinson focuses on the increase in the number of kids prescribed ADD/ADHD medication as both frequency of testing and pressure from parents increase. While I can’t comment specifically on this trend, it only seems right to question why so many teachers and parents are taking their kids to doctors on account of trouble in school. Of course, this isn’t the only reason one might make an appointment that results in the prescription of Ritalin; however, I distrust the caretakers who think bad grades are an illness as much as I distrust doctors who put pharmaceutical fashion before the health of a child. Clearly the years of education they underwent failed somewhere along the line to teach them about priorities.

So what should our priorities be? Well, the current educational system was designed to serve the interests of industrialism, and so it maintains the priorities of that bygone era. It aims for standardization. Interestingly, as mentioned above, when it was first observed that this system was no longer effective, the first reaction was to implement more standardized testing and more standardized curricula. Then people were surprised that this didn’t work. Robinson concludes that current schools train students to a grand narrative, in which there is only one answer to each question. Schools also, to use a phrase I came across in a classroom recently, function as ‘sorting machines,’ and focus on isolating students as a result. Ideally, proper reform of the public education system would require scrapping the entire system and rebuilding from scratch, beginning with the very paradigms upon which the system is designed. This is hugely ambitious, of course, and so in the meantime smaller changes will have to suffice. Where to start? It would be good, for example, if schools encouraged cohorts and teams instead of insisting students separating students into batches and tracks. Another huge improvement would be to design programs which encourage divergent thinking. Starting with these modifications would be to start with re-directing the priorities stressed through schooling. The focus would shift from solitary standardization to interactive innovation, the kind of development that the current economic market actually needs.

Would school need to remain school? I would actually prefer to see school buildings replaced with learning complexes devoted to knowledge sharing. The idea of the knowledge city is not one in which I put faith as a solution to urban sustainability problems, but I do feel that it could be one component of a city’s identity. More importantly in the context of this paper, I feel that the concept of a knowledge city could be adjusted and used in redesigning the school system. Ergazakis et. al. defines a knowledge city as a city that “aims at knowledge-based development, by encouraging the continuous creation, sharing, evaluation, renewal and update of knowledge. This can be achieved through the continuous interaction between its citizens themselves and at the same time between them and other cities’ citizens” (2). By definition, a knowledge city is mindfully coordinated to increase the happening of knowledge moments. Knowledge moments, in turn, are interactions between people which lead to the discovery, transfer, nurturing, or recording of knowledge. It seems apparent to me that a smaller scale institution would also be able to provide this sort of environment, and a school certainly could if the value of such a project was recognized.

In establishing a new learning center model, one might find it helpful to reference the characteristics of a knowledge city outlined in Carrillo’s “Century of Knowledge Cities.” To run through them briefly: political and social will must back the project before any kind of change can begin, a strategic vision and specific development plan should be put forth by educational theorists and researchers, financial support would come from taxes and state funds, and investments could potentially come from corporations. As far as an agency to promote regional development, this would translate into state agencies responsible for promoting inter-city exchange and community outreach programs run through the center. Including foreign languages, world history, and ESL support would be steps toward internationalizing that are long overdue in the education system, and re-working the national mythology, as already mentioned, to celebrate national diversity as a strength would help as well. The need for a metropolitan website translates easily into a need for a center website, and easy access to online communication networks is also a must. Value creation would work very similarly as in a true knowledge city, through here the influences of the needs of the market would presumably be more apparent as the center would issue qualification documents. Of course research facilities, access to a public library network, and access to public transit are also all vital to the success of such a project. Ideally, they would be open to the public as places where knowledge producing programs and projects can incubate even if they are not directly linked to a group of students. The final point on Carrillo’s list is the presence of urban innovation engines. It would be ideal if the learning center itself became an innovation engine, creating a stimulating and supportive atmosphere in which divergent thinkers come together and innovate.

Structurally, a learning center model would be something of a hybrid between different knowledge places known for facilitating knowledge moments. Considering that there are certain merits to socializing children together as they hit the milestones of early development, younger students would be grouped in cohorts that span three years, an idea borrowed from the Montessori model of schooling. For these younger geniuses who are still in their exploratory stage of development, the Montessori model through which the students move through their lessons at their own paces would also be preferred. This would allow students with different talents and learning styles to differentiate their educational experiences from the beginning. Beyond what would currently be considered middle-school, and actually up through and beyond university, modules would be available to students. The modules would be interdisciplinary groupings of classes, likely clustered under broader subject areas. This connects to my theory on one possible answer to degree inflation.

Since the death of the concept of the career, it has become widely understood that individuals seeking to maintain employment in the current economy need to constantly be updating their skills and skill sets. Previously, it was possible to know how much education was required for which jobs. Then, one went through the prescribed amount of schooling, worked hard for strong marks, and upon completion of the schooling received a piece of paper called a degree. This degree was an open letter of endorsement from the institution that provided it, and through it the institution bore witness to the fact that the individual had acquired certain understanding and skills through the program. I would like to see developed a system of experience accreditation that matches the call to lifelong education that is increasingly the norm. By this idea, independent research and experiences can officially be added to an individual’s pile of credentials without the debt caused by college tuition. Along with this, I would suggest that formal courses—because of course they are still interesting and necessary—each conclude with a project by which the student can demonstrate their mastery of the material. With the assistance of an online program such as NYU’s eVita or even the U.S. Common App., the notices of accreditation and these projects would be compiled into a virtual file. Through this documentation of knowledge moments both inside and outside the formal academic setting, hopefully many kinds of learning would come to be valued and individuals would also be able to compete on the job market with their individualized and ever-growing skill sets.

Resources:

Carrillo, Francisco Javier. Knowledge Cities: Approaches, Experiences and Perspectives. Butterworth-Heinemann, 2006.

Ergazakis, Kostas, Kostas Metaxiotis, John Psarras. “An Emerging Pattern of Successful Knowledge Cities’ Main Features.” 2006. National Technical University of Athens, Greece. Reader.

Robinson, Sir Ken. “Changing Education Paradigms.” 14 Oct 2010. RSA Animate. 7 May 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U