Anyone in the U.S. with any passion for manufacturing (or technology, for that matter) strongly questions the overall condition of our education system. We're no exception.
But the problems are numerous and solutions complex - there just isn't one magic bullet to fix what ails us. Manufacturing depends on bright, energetic, and curious talent to thrive and allow us to compete.
Heck we all know that, right? But I came upon a post today that really got me thinking about it in a different way.
Over at Grockit, "Schools Make Students Like Factories Make Cars" makes an interesting comparison of how we turn out students with how we make cars.
In the early 1900s, the number of schools in the country was cut in half. Any guesses as to why? This was the mass movement from single room schoolhouses to larger city schools. The idea was that if factories could improve quality and quantity of manufacturing, so could schools. Instead of teachers being facilitators of a classroom where students taught each other, they became the factory worker, the school the line, and the student the car making its way down the line.The post goes on to stress for education what Demming screamed to the auto manufacturers decades ago - improve quality.
Demming argued that equipment must be constantly checked to be within a tolerance. At the end of the line you get Toyota cars that all work to the same exact specifications with almost 100% quality. The analogy is this. If cars were made like we make students, they would come off the end of the line and some would work and some wouldn't and we wouldn't know where things went wrong. The cars that came off the line non-functional wouldn't be fixed, they would be shuffled off to places where functional cars aren't really needed. Without metrics measuring the delta of a student's learning before and after said 'learning', we are left with a system that shuffles students down a line and out the door. Some work, some don't. Nobody knows where (it) went awry.I'm still convinced that factors other than the "system" need some repair. And no Toyota will ever conduct the Philadelphia Philharmonic or repair a child's cleft palate. But I haven't heard many solutions lately that make this much sense.
Tags:
commentary,
education
