Higher education innovators in search of a guide should look back to a 23 year old book whose author was called “one of the most prominent education reformers of the latter half of the 20th century.” College leaders may be shaken a bit that the book is about high schools – but the insights and lessons in Horace’s School speak directly to the challenges facing most campuses today.
Ted Sizer, the author of a series on high school reform, was a voice for rethinking education in a way that cut through the jargon, sacred cows and status quo’s embedded in American schools. He straddled the worlds of secondary and post-secondary education having led a premier prep school and founded a new public high school while sandwiching in time as the dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and chair of the education department at Brown University.
Horace’s School is Sizer’s attempt to bring school reform to life through a fictional account of the beginning of reform led by a veteran English teacher, Horace Smith, at a local public high school. Amazingly, Sizer’s 1992 book touches on many of the issues that form the national discussion on higher education today. These insights can help innovators develop a framework to assess their current environment and create a plan for innovation focused on student success.
Not only is the book on point but it is so well written that I offer the following quotes with no elaboration on my part. The captions are mine and there is some minor editing; but otherwise what follows is all Sizer:
The status quo is the problem
The status quo is never challenged. We talk only about revising the accepted subjects, never pondering what the curriculum could be (and) never ask the basic questions about the uses of time. We “restructure” while assuming that all the existing building materials and architectural commitments – physical and intellectual – will remain as they are.
Student learning must be the goal
Most important is the emphasis on the students. Until we understand clearly just what they should do with their minds and hearts, and what standards they should meet, it is difficult to design a sensible school. Few school people have any experience in defining their work by specific ends rather than by detailed means. Indeed, the very universities that trained them describe their academic functions almost entirely in terms of means.
Programs must be coherent
A mindful school is clear about what it expects of a student and about how she can exhibit these qualities. There’s too much in the curriculum now, too many courses, too many promises, too much stuff. We know that most of it is covered superficially.
Learning requires an active environment
Can you express (your) program in terms of what the (students) do rather than in terms of what you do? The doing is the ultimate achievement. Just knowing stuff isn’t enough. School is about equipping people to deal with the fresh, the new, the unknown. (Students) learn how to deal with the unknown by practice with the known – which is, in many respects, yet unknown to them.
New capabilities enable new learning environments
When the vehicles of communication were sparse and the population thinly spread, school as a place made sense. (But) with a much larger and more concentrated population, with communication technologies of great power and low cost….new ways of “getting educated” are likely to be formulated and accepted. An obvious one is the practice that lessens the importance of school as a place and allows varied routes to agreed-upon credentials.
Summing it all up
The (college) with more than a superficial mission has an air of collective assurance, an ease, pride. One sees it in the ability of its many students to describe substantively what they are working on and why. One feels it in the interaction of adults; they are colleagues, not free-lance professionals sharing a building and students and functioning by the rules of an administrative hierarchy.
Ted Sizer’s thoughts are heartening in that they show how thoughtful educators can articulate a path to increase student success. At the same time, it is more than a bit sobering that he wrote this over two decades ago and we still live in a world with so many schools and colleges firmly entrenched in the standard operating procedures Sizer called out long ago.
The post A “Must Read” Book for Higher Education Leaders — from 1992 appeared first on Ed Policy Group.
