One Size Fits All

Jeremy Hiebert links to this interesting article on the changing face of education. Kathy Seal is in agreement with Jane Gilbert, that is, industrial-age models of education which prepared students to meet the needs of an industrial society are no longer relevant.

The one size fits all, production line approach to education worked acceptably for most of the 20th century ensuring that all students received a reasonable standard of "comprehensive" education with higher education reserved for those deemed most able. Of course this scenario held true only while enough unskilled jobs existed to gainfully employ those who fell off the assembly line. Seal makes this point when she describes the trend in the US employment market:

…factory jobs accounted for 32 percent of employment in 1959, that figure plunged to 17 percent by 1997. Gone are the days when auto, steel and rubber tire factories hired "warm bodies," meaning just about anyone who could pass a physical.

What Seal doesn't make clear is the quality control role of curriculum in sorting students. I'd recommend looking at Jane Gilbert's ideas on knowledge and her call for a shifted curriculum in which we "think carefully about what we think students need to learn (and why)."

Once you realise that the objective of this "You can have any color as long as it's black" approach to education is to produce standardised students, you can share in Will Richardson's dry irony when lamenting public education (also via Jeremy Hiebert).