What do you know?

This week's Spin Cycle topic is "opinions." Well, you all know I'm very opinionated, and there's something I've been wanting to get off my chest, so here it goes:

When I was pregnant and started reading lots of blogs by L&D nurses and midwives, I saw the term "evidence-based medicine" used a lot. It's a popular term with mid-wives and natural birth advocates, because, apparently, many of the common practices of OB's are not based on scientific evidence. There's lot of, "This is what we've always done. This is what they taught us in medical school. This is the best way to avoid liability." (Apparently the last one is very common. Isn't that sad?)

Now I have different pet area of study, as indicated in Wednesday's post, and I have found that there is another area in or society that is heavily lacking in "evidence-based" practices: education. (I suppose you could argue that it's not really coincidence, since the way doctors become doctors is to spend seven extra years in said education system.)

It would be impossible to put everything I've read into a single post, but I will try to sum up the best I can. Our current system of education is based on a system designed by the Prussians (Germans) of the 19th century. It is a system designed to create obedient factory workers and soldiers. There have been many, many people since then, who, through long study, observation and working with children have devised other ways to educate that are much, much better if your goal is for children to actually learn things like critical thinking skills and independence. Ironically, many of the ideas these people have come up with, like including a sensory education, have become popular both in alternative education and alternative medicine.

The use of these methods is growing at a constant rate in private schools and homeschools, and occasionally you will see them in "progressive" public schools.

Why does the public school system as a whole continue to use an outdated system? There is no evidence to support (and plenty to contradict) the benefit of sitting in a large group of children of the same age, being taught to by one adult on a child's mental, emotional, social (that's right, there have apparently been a lot of people who have shown school to be harmful socialization) or physical well-being. Here's a small example: a short post with a brief history on the school desk. The same day I encountered that, I also read a post about the failure of the Head Start program. Despite study after study that shows little to no benefit to public preschool programs, there has been an increasing demand for government subsidized, universal education for children under 5. (There are apparently effective ways to teach children of that age, as well as older children, but we're not using them, so what's the point?)

I think most people can see that there is something wrong with our current system of education. It's just hard to see what it is specifically, because we have been using it for so long, this one way to teach is ingrained in all of us. It is difficult to replace that old habit with new ways of thinking about how to teach children. It may even be impossible on a large scale.

So instead of redoing the entire system, we keep trying to make small tweaks here and there. Often, in an attempt to "fix" we end up actually increasing the very things that are holding our children back. The result is a lot of perpetuation and compounding of harmful practices through the “that’s the way it’s always been done” mentality.

I don't know how likely it is that our education system will ever be completely renovated the way it needs to be. On the other hand, we now have the amazing gift of access to information in a way that no other generation in the history of the earth has. If enough people will take the time to learn about these things for themselves, maybe it would make a difference.

Stop making assumptions and relying on conventional wisdom and "the way things are done."