Paradigm-Shifting Questions

I just finished The Homework Myth, an intriguing book in which Alfie Kohn makes the claim that homework, with just a few exceptions, should be eliminated.  In that book, Kohn includes a chapter entitled The Questions Left Unasked, in which he asserts that virtually all of today’s educational debate focuses on “incidental aspects” of schooling, not the core questions we should be asking.  He comes up with examples such as these:

• We discuss how much homework should be assigned instead of whether or not homework should be given at all
• We discuss how grades should be calculated rather than finding completely new alternatives to grades
• We talk about how to call on students fairly and how to allow wait time for children to respond instead of thinking about why teachers are calling on students in the first place (What if the students asked the questions? Or what if the students had to figure out how to avoid interrupting each other without raising hands?)
• We think about what criteria (e.g. grades, test scores) should be used to find the best students to accept into college; instead, we might wonder why colleges are designed to seek only the most high-performing students in the first place (wouldn’t colleges potentially have a greater impact on underachieving students than on kids who are already achieving great success?)

I love digging into these types of questions and making clear the assumptions we all take for granted.  Other examples I can come up with include the following:

• We figure out ways to help our students be successful on standardized tests rather than debating whether doing well on those tests is a worthy goal
• We look to hire the best principals and administrators we can find rather than debating whether schools should have principals and administrators at all
• We figure out ways to medicate children to make them pay attention rather than re-examining a system that forces our youth to sit still for hours on end

If we want to revolutionize education, we need to examine every assumption we’ve made about what education is and is not.  As we do, we may very well find that our assumptions have held us captive and prevented us from bringing about real change.

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