Plan of Action
For many, attendance in early schooling means twelve or more consecutive years of formal instruction beginning in early childhood at three, four or five years of age and continuing until the late teenage years. Attendance occurs five days a week for forty weeks, for twelve consecutive years, minus breaks occurring during the summer months and during the celebration of holidays.
Surely, this experience has had a significant hand in shaping and maintaining, for better or worse, the attitudes, beliefs, values, and personal orientations of individual students, their parents, grandparents, and significant others before them who have attended conventional schools. These personal characteristics found to be troublesome today are linked to what happens to individuals that are connected to formal processes of schooling.
Most families have passed through the activities of public schools, now including charter schools, and they perpetuate the troublesome results, beginning with parents along with their offspring who are conditioned to carry on the traditions of the conventional system. This will not change until self-knowledge and self-understanding becomes the focus of their educational experiences, accepting the fact that current unconscious motivations will remain in place, warding off change, and believing life’s tasks regarding changes in education carry with them a sense of doom.
Psychiatrist Lawrence Kubie MD wrote this seldom understood description of a basic societal problem: Our thinking apparatus is continually being braked and driven off source by the play of unconscious forces. Educational procedures which fail to recognize this end up by increasing the interference from latent and unrecognized neurotic (rigid) forces.
The work of numerous scholars add clarity to Kubie’s formulations including these scholars: Jean Piaget, Viktor Lowenfeld, Lev Vygotski, Lawrence Kohlberg, Benjamin Bloom, Robert Gagne, Leland Bradford, Warren Bennis, Philip Phenix, and Bela Banathy among others. Each contribution contains explanations for what has happened, is happening or is not happening in conventional schools, exposing root causes of today’s social unrest.
Through experimentations and demonstrations this author has formulated a newly designed assessment and evaluation system if implemented will likely convince the public of the critical need for systemic changes in the way we educate our youth.
In 2020, despite the last twenty years of standardization and standardized testing, 75% of this country’s student body in public schools was determined through standardized testing to be deficient in mathematics and English, and the record is even worse in history and geography.
The remaining 25% includes those who have been showered with the rewards of the system while the other seventy-five percent patiently or not so patiently watch and learn to live with the humiliating aftereffects of award ceremonies, occurring several times each year. During these ceremonies those in the majority are promised a share of the rewards if only they pay attention and work harder.
There is also a compulsory work drive promoted by business interests instilled in everyone through conventional education, especially important for those who aim to reap the financial rewards for hard work. This imposed work drive is currently being rejected by the seventy-five percenters who view it as an encroachment on their personal freedom.
The Blogs on this website are designed to provide the background for understanding the unknown elements of schooling revealed through the work of reputable scholars from different parts of the world and different times throughout the centuries. Their concepts, models, and theories will be revealed that can be validated in everyone’s personal experiences and in the experiences of selected scholars that describe what’s involved within each of the four categories listed below:
1) All dimensions of individual development, and the processes of mentation that involve learning and mental health.
2) Communication within and between individuals, and the processes of group dynamics and group development that result in improved communication, learning, and mental health.
3) The nature of knowledge and what it means to know by engaging the disciplines of general education viewed as ways of constructing and communicating personal meaning.
4) Systems thinking that treats systems design as a process of learning and systems analysis as an effective strategy for achieving authentic assessment and evaluation of learning outcomes.
These four categories contain the ingredients for understanding the origins and solutions regarding current antisocial behaviors related to the practices and structures of conventional schools.
While this analysis may be viewed as severe criticism regarding the longstanding conduct of educating our youth, the policies and mandates from its hierarchical leadership do not emanate from teachers. There are many teachers who labor daily to meet the needs of their charges. These are among the heroes of our age.
Responsibilities for educating in conventional schools rest with the directors of the existing authoritarian system that frequently bases decisions on outdated traditions and unexamined assumptions. Their decisions are routinely clothed in a so-called validation process composed of “Blue Ribbon” panels that are chosen by them to give the impression of legitimacy in their policies.
Teachers do not make policy, but they are obliged to carry out their mandates even when they run contrary to what is needed to meet the needs of their individual students. Their livelihood depends upon maintaining conformity. Administrative structures have been established to ensure that reality.
Teacher education, in its present form, is limited to a brief exposure to existing practices that border absurdity when compared with the requirements for implementation of the foundation knowledge base indicated through the messages of these studies. Successful systemic changes require a new system that demands fundamental changes in the commitment to educate teachers as facilitators of learning in this twenty-first century.
Background Information
I earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Potsdam State Teachers College in 1953 with a license to teach the common school subjects N-9. I began my career as a teacher in “self-contained” public elementary classrooms in the third and sixth grades, followed by employment at the middle and junior high school levels, teaching departmental social studies and general science.
I completed a Master of Arts Degree from Teaches College Columbia University in 1954 just prior to entering service in the military.
After serving in the US Army during the Korean campaign as a Troop Information and Education NCO, I was appointed to the rank of Assistant Professor of Education as a demonstration teacher in Potsdam’s College Campus Laboratory School within their Education Department. It was then that I partnered with a member of the College’s History Department in the development of The Discovery Approach to the Teaching of Social Studies.
Students in that project which was begun in 1957 were involved in constructing knowledge in history and geography as young historians and geographers. They utilized the methods and materials of these disciplines to create in-depth knowledge of their local county.
Their studies included the natural physical features including bedrock and minerals, relief features, and drainage patterns, soils, vegetation, weather and climate and location. In addition, it involved observing and studying the documents related to the social/cultural characteristics of its inhabitants, and their economic and political structures and practices.
Students built a scaled model of their county on which they plotted verified information as an aid to recognizing the interrelationships between those variables listed above. Iconic models were created that feature representations that look like the subject they represent. Their scaled model of a block of earth is such a model.
Some are symbolic that do not look like the objects they represent; their meaning is conveyed perhaps mathematically or within scientific formula.
When the object cannot be seen or touched, it is represented in an analogy that is either iconic or symbolic.
The successes of this history and geography experience resulted in an epiphany regarding my teaching philosophy and practice. I then dedicated my career to expanding and promoting this methodology across this country believing that it held important keys to changes in elementary and middle school experiences. It integrated two longstanding opposing viewpoints, one promoted by child development advocates and the other by subject matter interests.
This approach to teaching and learning became accepted with enthusiasm by state and national decision makers with interests in history and geography. This led to invitations for demonstrations before meetings of the National Council for the Social Studies, the American Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, and the New York State Historical Society. Interested public schools included Reidsville, NC, Mentor, Ohio, and many other locations across this country including major universities such as the University of California at Berkeley, Illinois State University at Normal, Ill, and The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, NC.
Demonstrations at each of these locations utilized selected local primary sources of information assembled specifically for each region where participants were engaged in historical and geographic inquiry.
Unfortunately, the enthusiasm generated through these workshops could not be sustained due to limited technology for making primary documents accessible in the classroom. The quality of the images on microfilm at that time was poor, and it wasn’t until the late eighties and early nineties that digital technology had advanced in making original documents for local regions readily accessible for learning activities in the classroom. By that time the enthusiasm of the 1960’s had waned.
In 1960, I entered a doctoral program majoring in Teaching and Curriculum Development at Teachers College Columbia University with a minor in Developmental Psychology. I participated in a replication study of Piaget’s genetic epistemology, conducted by Professor Almy of TC.
I enrolled in a course taught by Professor Philip Phenix entitled Ways of Knowing that offered a significant expansion of the principles of inquiry that had been studied at Potsdam with the disciplines of history and geography.
All members of this course were asked to interview people whose reputations had been established as experts in their fields of interest, embracing all areas of general education offered in conventional schools and universities. The interviews were designed to determine what these scholars considered to be the methods and materials of their disciplines, including modes of inquiry, key concepts, and organizing principles.
The results of these interviews were analyzed, and the conclusions were grouped based on similarities of structure and processes within the disciplines involved. The results have been published in Phenix’s book entitled Realms of Meaning – A Philosophy of Curriculum for General Education.
There are six interrelated realms of meaning identified – Empirics contain all the sciences including social sciences, Symbolics contain all languages including mathematics, Aesthetics contain all the arts and architecture, Synoptics contain history, geography, cultural anthropology, religion and philosophy, Ethics includes matters of morality, and Synnoetics relates to self-knowledge and self-understanding.
What had been learned regarding the Potsdam Project in local history and geography was found consistent with Phenix’s Synoptic Realm. His schematic expanded the Synoptic Realm to include the other five realms that included all the disciplines of the general education curriculum.
At this time, I was appointed an Assistant Professor of Education at Jersey City State College with responsibilities for instruction in psychology and curricular construction, and conducting supervision of elementary education candidates as they participated in classrooms across the region surrounding the College.
Having background from Phenix’s class, I was prepared to determine the results of engagement with an experimental group of teacher candidates at the freshman level utilizing the methods and materials of the disciplines in their general education program. I proposed to take responsibility for a group of twenty elementary teacher education majors as their sole facilitator of experiences in general education.
The successes of this project led to an appointment in 1966, as an Associate Professor of Education at The State University College at Plattsburgh, NY where I initiated a project entitled the Open Curriculum. That project continued what had been learned about the validity of Phenix’s formulation. The project initiated involvement by all freshman students enrolled in general education as majors in elementary education.
In 1973, I completed all the requirements as a certified candidate for an Ed D degree subject to completing a dissertation. Having developed The Environmental Relationships Test based on the Potsdam experiences with junior high school students, I proposed to do a validation study of this test as my dissertation. However, I found limited acceptance for this project, and since I had moved on to other venues I chose to write and publish my findings resulting from many firsthand experiences.
This Plattsburgh project was designed to break the lockstep format of its traditional teacher education program and to replace it with an inquiry-oriented plan for direct engagement in the disciplines of general education. I served as the curriculum coordinator for this project, involving three hundred students, and twenty full time faculty; also included were thirty teachers from the campus laboratory school.
The plan featured several innovative changes that led to resistance by the members of administration with perceived responsibilities for maintaining the established routines. Despite excellent endorsements by scholars in this field, the project was terminated after three years, and traditional instruction was resumed for a period.
I then initiated a subsequent plan called the Block Program that featured the teacher education faculty who had been involved in teaching traditional methods and materials of teaching.
The Block Program featured three fifteen-hour blocks of time, one for each level that began at the junior year for elementary majors. The first block was dedicated to a study of the foundations for quality education, drawing upon my experiences of the past. I facilitated the activities offered in that block for nearly thirty years.
It was anticipated that block two would build upon the concepts developed at the first block emphasizing an inquiry dimension. However, coordination between my block one and two did not materialize due mainly to traditional faculty in block two who were steadfastly oriented to lesson planning and teaching as they had been taught.
The third block offered student teaching experiences that led to certification as classroom teachers, supported by traditions that had existed at that institution since its inception as a Normal School.
After retiring from Plattsburgh in 1992, I became an adjunct professor working with all three blocks at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. I designed and received approval for creating an on-campus research institute entitled The Plattsburgh Research Institute for Defining Education. (PRIDE) Under this umbrella I consulted with numerous local school districts and formulated a “Goals 2000” project entitled A Rural School Consortium for New Standards Implementation.
This project was cancelled midway due to the State’s philosophical shift after the No Child Left Behind legislation was enacted in 2001. Now after twenty years during which students have been taught as much information as time would allow, learning has been found to be minimal, at best. Now is the time to make a shift to a different model based on developmental concepts with an emphasis on the pursuit of meaningful knowledge that lasts.
I left Plattsburgh in 2003 and began writing and publishing essays dealing with issues in education along with excursions into the field of primary health care, medical education, and leadership training in industry. I taught courses in personal health and environmental education at the junior colleges of the area.
I served as the founder, and president of TruVu International Inc., an R&D enterprise developed, before the digital revolution, dedicated to researching the potential uses of color microfiche and automated projection equipment for improving the accessibility of primary source materials required for engaging local history and geography as ways of creating knowledge.
In 2013, I published a book entitled: Remaking Our Schools for the Twenty-First Century – A Blueprint for Change/Improvement in our Educational Systems. Unfortunately, due to health issues, the owner of this publishing house dissolved the business, and the book was declared out of print. Fortunately, I have saved copies for use in this project if it ever comes to pass.
Following are examples of numerous attempts to promote the concepts detailed in that book.
In 1995, the Superintendent of the Willsboro Central School asked me to write a proposal to obtain a grant to improve his school, under a program sponsored by the NYS Education Department funded by the Goals 2000 legislation of the Clinton administration. At that time the State was engaged in a plan based on developmental concepts called “The New Compact for Learning.”
I informed the Superintendent that funding would not be available for a single, small rural school, hence a plan was submitted that involved seven rural schools under the title, “A Rural Schools Consortium for New Standards Implementation.” This program’s outline was used in other projects outlined herein.
This plan was envisioned in two parts. 1) Under a separate grant, $375,000 was obtained for the first two years of a five-year commitment to establish with teachers of a consortium of rural schools a new foundation for K-12 education based on the four components listed earlier that developed from my work in SUNY Plattsburgh’s teacher education department while teaching Block one, foundations of education. 2) The remaining three-year segment was projected to be dedicated to implementations consistent with the foundation established in the first two years. The amount of funding for that segment was not determined at that time.
Workshops rotated among consortium schools drawing upon expert assistance from scholars from throughout the region, including SUNY Plattsburgh and Rutgers University. The research component of the plan certified excellent progress in establishing an understanding of a new foundation. Detailed descriptions of every workshop were compiled by an assigned writer.
In 2001, resulting from “The No-child left behind legislation”, the existing philosophy of education based on developmental theory was arbitrarily shifted from a human development paradigm to a behaviorist one that created the Common Core Curriculum, teacher proof instructional practices, and frequent standardized testing. Without discussion, the Goals 2000 grants were arbitrarily discontinued as the State assumed a different philosophy.
Another effort to secure funding for this plan nearly succeeded. The New American Schools Development Corporation proposed by President George H.W. Bush attempted to raise capital for funding thirty proposals to change education across this country. The proposal I submitted was ranked seventeenth among nearly seven hundred submitted to the Rand Corporation for evaluation. Unfortunately, insufficient investments were obtained to fund thirty proposals, and eventually only a few received limited funding, and their impact faded into the woodwork.
Facing this disappointment, an effort that involved the proposed implementation of the theory involved in development of a regional charter school for a rural region of Northeastern New York State. This comprehensive proposal was summarily rejected, considered inconsistent with the traditional understandings of decision-making agencies.
Several related projects that featured the concepts drawn from the proposed theory were spearheaded by me including a successful plan to establish one of nine model primary health care centers in this country, occurring in the early nineteen seventies. My plan received funding in the amount of $520,000 resulting in the creation of the Smith House Health Care Clinic in Willsboro, New York, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. This project was designed to reflect the new rationale applied in family health education with computerized medical records, among other innovations.
A second project involved facilitating learning experiences in cell biology designed to upgrade instruction/learning with medical students across this continent. This project was conducted at the American Tissue Culture Association Headquarters, then located in Lake Placid, New York. The project originated from the Cell Science Department of the University of Saskatchewan’s Medical School at Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. It was my job to facilitate the work of a group of leading cell biologists in accomplishing the goals of the project.
A third project involved facilitating a federal initiative known as a “Job’s Seventy Program” designed to prepare first line supervisors in a textile plant in Greensboro, NC to successfully integrate into their production lines underemployed or unemployed males, mainly Afro-Americans. This project demonstrated its applicability for leadership requirements in industry, confronting the well-worn prejudices of the time.
This website, www.Edupultz.com, is a work in progress that provides more details regarding these and other attempts to bring about needed changes designed to pave the way for initiating individualized learning throughout this country.
Clearly, teaching through independent topical offerings appears to be part of the problem. A major reorientation is needed that replaces the teaching paradigm with one focused on individualized learning that would establish individual mastery of a systems orientation.
Systems thinking consolidates ideas that reduce the complexities of life’s problems to manageable units. Through design and construction of models, students form the representations of any subject of inquiry expressed in “enactive, iconic, or symbolic forms.” (Bruner)
Models have four important functions: 1) Organizing thoughts, 2) Predicting events, 3) Measuring quantities and relationships and 4) Heuristic considerations that stimulate interest in further investigations. In-depth analysis of each variable or parts of systems. A search for interrelationships among these parts is the central theme for a continuous-progress curriculum.
Drawing on the wisdom of A.N. Whitehead who wrote nearly a hundred years ago that the legitimate curriculum for the school must be the study of life in all its manifestations, aimed at developing an eye for the whole chessboard and the bearing of one set of ideas on another. This has become the guiding philosophy for this plan.
He warned us of inert ideas simply taken into the mind and never placed in fresh combinations. He claimed these inert ideas are not only useless but also harmful.
The departmental, compartmentalized teaching paradigm promotes the process of conditioning through instruction of disconnected inert ideas. That process produces a low level of learning that is easily forgotten. When the findings of research and writings of a list of experts are studied, it paints a much different picture of what can produce competent and compassionate citizens.
My plan proposes to become part of an effort to create a positive impact by establishing a demonstration project featuring an on-site teacher education program funded by outside sources.
Given a widespread desire for individualized education in this country, in combination with the unique learning opportunities offered in colleges, there is a promising vision being initiated to propose establishing a teacher education program featuring a new, individualized, and countrywide system of K-12 education.
Since the recent pandemic, changes have occurred regarding perceptions among the populace that produced a strong desire to find a way to establish an individualized K-12 education for the youth of this country. Parents now have a clearer understanding of what their youngsters have been experiencing in their school and they are looking for new solutions. The recent report of the “Population Index” lends credibility to the existence of that desire. This philanthropic group “Stand Together” has pledged their funds to meet this need.
Coupled with the critical shortage of teachers countrywide, the timing for launching an innovative plan could likely gain support.
Hence, an outline for systemic change in teacher education has been prepared to guide the discussion with a possible host for such a project. A plan for discussion is titled: “A demonstration project in teacher education for facilitation of individualized K-12 schools.”
The first year of this plan’s implementation will focus on upgrading the knowledge base of a group of five to ten former students who attended my seminars, an experience that left them with a lasting philosophical shift that matches the rationale behind the proposed plans for change in K-12 education.
Many of these former students have communicated with me to express appreciation for what happened to them back when they were my students.
That group now contains many experienced teachers who have resisted the regimentation mandated by the conventional wisdom of decision-makers in K-12 education. They represent the promise of carrying the torch for this new approach to change in education developed by this author.
The projected role for these participants and the first year’s content and activities are outlined below:
The following six areas of inquiry will be reinforced and extended during the first year for the group of candidates who have a head start at forming a solid theory of education resulting from their Block One experience. This group of experienced facilitators will become the cadre of personnel who will assume responsibility for the first recruits entering the college plan at a future date. They would aid the process of recruitment as well. Each of the following six topics and their contributors will be studied and internalized and validated through personal experiences linked to an in-depth study of the experiences of the scholars listed below:
1) Individual development, learning and dimensions of mind related to learning and mental health, 2) Communication between and within individuals, 3) Group dynamics and group development, 4) The general education curriculum composed of the disciplines found within six “realms of meaning,” experienced as ways of creating knowledge, 5) An application of general systems theory, treating systems design as an individualized process of learning guided by the modes of inquiry within each discipline, and 6) Systems analysis as a strategy for assessment and evaluation of learning outcomes.
(1) The individual student:
- Jean Piaget’s developmental cognitive theory of Genetic Epistemology
- Lev Vygotsky’s theory of “zones of proximal development”
- Lev Vygotsky’s developmental theory of language development
- Viktor Lowenfeld’s developmental theory of children’s drawings
- Edgar Dale’s developmental theory of experiences
- Robert Gagne’s developmental theory of cognitive learning
- Lawrence Kohlberg’s developmental theory of moral decision-making
- Lawrence Kubie’s dynamic theory of mind related to learning and mental health
- Lev Vygotsky’s theory of social learning
- Arnold Gesell’s developmental theory of physical growth - birth to ten
- Maslow’s theory of self-actualization
- Everett Shostrom’s theory of personal orientations
- Eric Erickson’s theory of psychosocial development
- Rebecca Treiman”s theory of Linguistics and reading
(2) Robert L. Arnold’s Consolidated theory of communication detailed in Remaking our Schools for the Twenty-First Century – A Blueprint for Change/Improvement in our Educational Systems.
(3) Group dynamics and group development:
Leland Bradford’s teaching/learning transaction
Warren Benis’s theory of small group development
Other contributions from National Training Laboratory participants
(4) General education curriculum:
Philip Phenix’s theory of the realms of meaning in general education.
Benjamin Bloom’s –Taxonomy of Educational Objectives – Cognitive Domain
David Krathwohl’s Taxonomy of the Affective and Psychomotor Domains
Robert Davis’s formulations for Learning Mathematics – The Cognitive Science Approach to Mathematics Education
(5) General systems theory applied in education:
Bela Banathy’s applications of systems theory that involves the processes of learning and learning outcomes, treating systems design as a process of learning.
(6) Systems analysis as an authentic assessment and evaluation of learning outcomes.
These are the theories to be studied, internalized, and applied in the interpretation of behaviors in students. Collectively, they reveal the interrelated variables within individual development that will enable facilitators of learning to accurately select developmentally appropriate experiences geared to the dynamics of individual learners.
Taken together, these theories will become synthesized during the process of internalizing, forming a theory of development, a belief system for each facilitator. This system will become a lasting tool for facilitators of learning, serving their profession with distinction. They each will have a Facilitator’s Handbook to refer to when needed.
The development of each newly synthesized theory will be recorded in a “Facilitator’s Handbook” that participants will construct according to the protocols of a system’s-oriented assessment and evaluation plan called the CARES Model – The Constructive Assessment, Recordkeeping and Evaluation System.
Recordkeeping is required in this process for keeping track of the reactions to experiences as they happen. That will aid the process of differentiating the parts of the theory with a focus on the discovery of their interrelated features.
The sequence that leads to competency begins by asking students what they currently know about these topics and theories. This would be followed by exposure to a synopsis of each theory to be followed by extended study of the relevant literature.
It’s important that each student decides if the theories make sense to them, if they are plausible and worthy of exploration.
Backgrounds are searched to determine where they are in mastering the theories, according to Gagne’s theory of cognitive learning. This reveals a sequence of learning that must occur if mastery is to be achieved. All the steps in learning must be recorded in the language of each student, made available with a computer command for later access when needed to refresh one’s memory.
Of course, cognitive learning is not all there is to human development; physical, emotional, social, and spiritual dimensions simultaneously occur.
It is often asked for explanations about the philosophical shift occurring today and why there is this current surge to create individualized educational experiences rather than a common core of information selected to be taught.
It must first be noted that standardized tests are designed to measure recall of what has presumably been taught. Since the pandemic forced remote instruction, each student was left to live without direct access to a teacher for personal direction in their studies. Remote learners were deprived of their usual connections. The results for many were displayed with separation anxiety since dependency on the teacher is built into conventional systems, and remote learning deprived them of that face-to-face contact.
Recall that standardized tests are designed to measure recall of what has been taught. Since much was not taught through the remote channels, they missed instruction from their teacher, so they were not prepared for the tests. Their scores reflected this, described as “falling behind, and needing to catch-up.” Translated, this means falling behind exposure to the prescribed lessons that usually happen through instruction. The extent of learning derived from that instruction appears to remain a major problem.
This proposed project will demonstrate how remote facilitation can occur, providing direction for inquiry by placing in the hands of students the methods and materials of the disciplines of general education and providing suggestions for activities individuals in their learning group could choose to accomplish becoming competent.
General Education engages all manifestations of life (Whitehead) including the study of natural physical habitat, along with the social/cultural, economic, and political dimensions of community life and living. These constitute the study of all offerings that Philip Phenix writes about in his book, Realms of Meaning – A Philosophy of Curriculum for General Education, the contents that form the general education curriculum.
Realm number 1 is labeled Empirical, including all the sciences, and social sciences.
Number 2 is labeled Symbolics which includes mathematics and all other languages.
Number 3 is labeled Aesthetics which includes all the arts and architecture.
Number 4 is labeled Ethics which includes morality and moral decision-making.
Number 5 is labeled Synnoetics which includes self-knowledge and self-understanding.
Number 6 is labeled Synoptics which includes history, geography, philosophy, and religion.
There are disciplines within each realm that have structural similarities that fit within each category. Each discipline represents a community of scholars who have joined to pursue a particular topic, for instance, geologists study rocks. historians study the past, physicists study matter, energy, and change, etc. These disciplines are represented in career choices. If studied in-depth utilizing the methods and material of those disciplines, career choices will be informed by personal experience within a system of beliefs developed through execution of this plan.
It must be understood that each of us has had a unique life experience that has resulted in our attitudes, beliefs, values, and personal orientations. This must be respected and dealt with through consensual validation practiced in communications at mature levels of small group development.
This is an essential exercise expected to occur during education but often prohibited by psychological rigidities that Psychiatrist Lawrence Kubie MD discussed in Chapter three of his book: Neurotic Distortion of the Creative Process.
Viewed through the lenses of scholars, the practices of the current one-size-fits-all program are found to have gaping holes in its rationale and supporting assumptions, discussed in numerous publications of mine and others. Building from the collective findings of these scholars, I have pursued the implementation of a new systemic design to be implemented through the construction of a prototype that can provide a firsthand view of what’s involved, based on the parts of the system outlined earlier.
I am presently initiating discussions concerning this plan with two established colleges facing serious financial difficulties. They are asked to consider becoming a host for this project which could have widespread appeal, thus presenting an expanded recruitment pool.
Outside funding is required to launch this comprehensive attempt to define the requirements for implementing an individualized education for K-12 students.
The individuals reported in newsletters that describe individualized learning activities are doing their best to change education, one step at a time. Unfortunately, their efforts are like putting iodine on a cancer.
How much progress have we been able to achieve with the current emphasis on high stakes testing and drill/regurgitate methodology approached one topic at a time that does not produce a unified approach to improvements that recognize the complexities of education or life?
In 1993, Bela Banathy, a leading advocate of systemic change in educational institutions had this to say in the first chapter of a book that sounded the alarm for the need for systemic reforms. ( Reigeluth, C.M., Banathy, B.H., & Olson, J.R. (Eds.) (1993). Comprehensive Systems Design: A New Educational Technology. New York: Springer-Verlag.)
“The ship of education is sailing on troubled waters. One national report after another highlights the current crisis of a ‘nation at risk,’ pointing out dangerous currents and menacing shoals. There is an ever-increasing realization that unless we change course, the ship will sink. But people are still trying to ‘rearrange the chairs’ on the deck of a sinking ship.”