Transforming Education.

“Now, a small group of cognitive scientists is arguing that schools and students could take far more advantage of […] perceptual learning,” the New York Times reports.

Start observing this “perceptual learning” trend closely and you’ll see a fast-approaching revolution in the way students learn, as powerful as anything described in Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

More from the NYT article:

The brain is a pattern-recognition machine, after all, and when focused properly, it can quickly deepen a person’s grasp of a principle, new studies suggest. Better yet, perceptual knowledge builds automatically: There’s no reason someone with a good eye for fashion or wordplay cannot develop an intuition for classifying rocks or mammals or algebraic equations, given a little interest or motivation.

I saw a glimpse of the future last week as I walked around our Acton Academy elementary school during “free time”:

• A six-year-old was learning Chinese on Rosetta Stone.
• An eight-year-old was blazing through algebra problems on “JiJi” math, so he could compare its effectiveness to Kahn Academy.
• A nine-year-old was competing in math online against a European high schooler  using Manga High.

Does this new, student-centered “perceptual” approach work? Yes, demonstrably—much more powerfully than the rote, top-down, assembly-line approach I’ve written about before. And the teacher’s role (and associated costs) is transformed. With student-centered learning, I believe that we can expand the student-teacher ratio from 15 or 20 to 1, to 36 to 1, which will dramatically reduce the cost of education.

We’ve been using this kind of learning at Acton Academy since the school started twenty months ago. Our students advanced more than two grade levels in reading and math in their first ten months, and based on last month’s new round of testing, they’re now 3+ grade levels above age. (And half of our elementary-aged students maxed out the test’s ninth-grade limit, so we really don’t know how far they have advanced.)

And it’s not just us: the Academy joins 40 other blended schools recognized for combining the latest adaptive software for skills with project-based learning. It’s spreading across the country.

For more on this approach, check out Unschooling Rules by Clark Aldrich, a thought leader in this field (full disclosure, I wrote the foreword). If you want a glimpse of what’s to come, Clark’s work is a must-read for any parent or educator wanting to raise or teach kids in the 21st century. And it’s filled with the kinds of perceptual, bottom-up learning techniques being taught by some of the best K-12 institutions in the nation.

A great article at Atlantic.com this week asks the question: Is College (Finally) Ready for Its Innovation Revolution? It’s a good article not because the topic is new or profound (it’s a question that those of us close to the issue have been answering with an emphatic “Yes” for some time now).

No, it’s a good article (1) because it keeps alive a conversation about an extremely important topic, and (2) because some of the objecting comments below the article are illustrative. They help highlight a few reasons—some old, some new—why perceptions about higher education haven’t really adapted much in over 2,000 years:

1. Knee-jerk exceptionalism. At the extreme end, some view higher education as so untouchable as to be out of the realm of most humans’ understanding—that it’s somehow exempt from efforts to question its methodology or measure its efficacy. Surely, it is a special kind of institution. But it should not be exempt. The question should not be “Why should we dare try to measure?” (an obstruction) but “How can we best measure in a way that serves the students?” (an iterative, evolving, applicable process).


2. Misconceptions about technology’s role. Some attack technology as a threat to  the relationships between teachers and students and among the students themselves. Clearly, technology cannot and should not fully automate, discard, or outright usurp those relationships. But it should be harnessed to enhance, scale, and better facilitate those relationships. Some say, “Oh, they said television would change teaching, and radio before that.” But television and radio were mostly passive media and had nothing on the level of engagement and interactivity now afforded to us. Besides, technology is merely a tool; truly transforming education doesn’t start with technology, it starts with paradigm shifts.   


3. Modern cynicism about the general aptitude of the college-aged. One commenter on the Atlantic article went so far as to say that college students are “irresponsible” and therefore “need supervision.” A rather insulting, patronizing statement, isn’t it? The truth is, we have only ourselves to blame for the outmoded K-12 systems we’ve kept in place—the systems that so often leave our children unprepared or unmotivated come college time.