Every Parent’s Dilemma

A Paradigm Is The Fundamental Barrier

Consider the possibility that education is in the same position today as medicine was in the mid-1800's. In 1848, London authorities passed the “Nuisances Removal and Disease Prevention Act”. This was a large public investment effectively endorsing the miasma theory of disease. The problem was that London stank; the city had raw sewage running in its streets. The act authorized a large-scale sewer project to wash that annoying sewage directly into the Thames River. It was perfectly logical. The policy makers reasoned that since bad smells, called miasma, were such a nuisance and caused disease, then getting all that filth off the streets was vitally important. The subsequent system was successful at alleviating some of the stench but it also quickly and substantially increased the volume of human effluent that was deposited in the drinking water of over two-thirds of the residents of the city. Epidemics of cholera subsequently killed tens of thousands of people and were far worse than they might have been because of that large public investment endorsing the miasma theory of disease.

Miasma theory was not merely a single idea. It was the central defining feature of a whole suite of concepts, a paradigm that provided explanations for both health and disease. The miasma idea logically lead to several competing varieties of humoral theories … . Those various types of theories gave us the most preferred medical treatments from the pre-germ theory era: blood-letting, purging, and cupping. The miasmatic theories of healing and the treatments that followed from them appeared to be effective because numerous people subjected to the treatments got better. But, miasma theory was a paradigm that misinformed the everyday thinking of both experts and lay people alike about the actual causes of health and disease.

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After the more accurate germ theory became the dominant model of disease in the late 1800's, public health improved, and effective medical interventions such as antibiotic drugs were widely implemented in the 1900's. After public policy became aligned with the paradigm of germ theory, not only were effective public health measures implemented, but previously inconceivable treatments that would have been considered medical miracles in 1848 have now become everyday occurrences.

The delivery theory of education is currently the dominant idea, the paradigm-defining idea, that determines how our school system operates. It is a default, naïve conception. The delivery theory is a model of education that claims that the movement of information into the student's head is the defining feature of learning. Policy makers reason quite logically that accounting for the delivery is what matters, so making a school's access to relevant resources contingent on the measurement of what content is in each student's head is a perfectly logical school management strategy. Standardization also makes perfect sense according to this model, since you would want to make the instructional bookkeeping process as simple as possible; having standard units to measure is as simple as it gets. The intuitive logic of this concept is compelling and has resulted in the apparent political consensus that requiring standardized tests and imposing curriculum standards are necessary mechanisms for school improvement. …  Unfortunately, like the miasma theory of disease, the delivery theory is wrong. … 

The nature of the error in both cases is not intuitively evident. Miasma is an intuitively powerful idea because it is true that the incidence of disease is strongly correlated with the incidence of unpleasant odors. Rotting dead things and effluent, from human populations and our animals, are harbingers of bad outcomes which we normally seek to avoid. But as multiple millions of us gathered into cities without adequate public health infrastructure, those harbingers became unavoidable. …  But the actual and immediate causal factor in disease is germs, not the smells that happen to coincidentally occur under similar conditions. Smells correlate with disease, but they do not cause it. Disease-causing germs are hidden in the conditions that also produce bad smells. … It was only after the development of germ theory that we humans became accurate predictors of the consequences of our investments in the prevention of disease. That ability to accurately predict epidemiological outcomes enabled cities to routinely support multiple millions of people and animals. It has been the global adoption of public health measures consistent with the germ theory paradigm that has effectively prevented the well-known epidemic diseases from periodically decimating large cities since the late 1800's. It was only after we realized how specific hidden factors in the situations of sewage and decomposition determine both smells and disease that we became effective rather than lucky in designing public health infrastructure. 

Information delivery correlates with education, but does not cause it. Education-causing cognition is hidden in the conditions that also produce information delivery. The cartography theory enables us to realize how hidden factors in the situation of learning determine both information delivery and education. … 

The nature of the error in delivery theory is not intuitively evident. The delivery theory of education is powerful because easy access to informational content is highly correlated with what we mean when we consider a person to be educated. Schooling operating within the delivery paradigm appears somewhat effective since numerous people who have been subjected to it end up being educated. An educated person does, in fact, have to have access to a substantial amount of informational content in order to think and act productively. But the immediate causal factor in education is the cognitive arrangement of the relationships between content, goals, and available resources. To put it more simply, what matters in education is how a person makes mental maps of their relationship to their goals, resources, and informational content. This is what I call the cartography theory of education.

Imagine that you have a boat on the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon, and you want me to help you to get to Seattle, Washington. If my standardized response to requests for navigational help is to give out a map of the Oregon Trail from 1848, then I would not be helpful to you. That's what we have now in K-12 education. The system is designed to provide a standardized response to every student, but that standardized response does not account for a) the learners' goals, b) the resources that the learners have access to in order to accomplish their goals, nor, c) where each learner is positioned in relation to their goals and available resources. As a result, the standardized solutions can only serve those who coincidently happen to be in the place where the system designers thought they should be or are close enough that adaptations to their situation might work if they can figure out how to make the appropriate adaptations.

Self-directed learning within a well-structured community, on the other hand, is like having a fully functional iPad with Google Maps in which you can get routes for any transportation mode or combination of modes to which you happen to have access. By giving you the ability to plug in your own goals and available resources, the system provides a customized solution. If I gave you that kind of device, you would be able to navigate not just to Seattle, but to anywhere else you wanted to go in the future as well. What our self-directed learning communities have pioneered are a variety of ways that a school can be sensitive to the learner's context.