Horace Mann! Where Art Thou? Thy Nation's Learners Need New Ways To Learn!

Quoting Wikipedia: 

"No one did more than Horace Mann to establish in the minds of the American people the conception that education should be universal, non-sectarian and free.

Furthermore he held that its aims should be "social efficiency, civic virtue, and character," rather than mere learning or the advancement of sectarian ends.

Arguing that universal public education was the best way to educate unruly American children into disciplined, judicious republican citizens, Horace Mann won the approval of modernizers.....for building public schools. Most states adopted a version of the system Mann established in Massachusetts. Educational historians credit Horace Mann as father of the Common School Movement.^"

What would YOU do today to improve K12 learning? Let's say you're on Horace Mann's Revision Committee for K12 Reform. From what you know and experienced, how would you design effective new learning and helps us forget schooling as we now know it?  Would you keep grouping learners by age instead of by their needs? In other words, how can you find a way to educate students so that "More May Learn More." Socrates had the same goal thousands of years ago. We're still far, far from making it happen.

Horace Mann was born on May 4, 1796. His father was a farmer without much money. From ten years of age to twenty, he had no more than six weeks' schooling during any year,^[4] but he made use of the town library. At the age of 20, he enrolled at Brown University and graduated in three years^[5] as valedictorian (1819). The theme of his oration was "The Progressive Character of the Human Race."^[6]

It was not until he was appointed secretary in 1837 of the newly created board of education of Massachusetts (the first such position in the United States) that he began the work which was to place him in the foremost rank of American educators. Previously, he had not shown any special interest in education. He was encouraged to take the job only because it was a paid office position established by the legislature. He began as secretary of the board. On entering on his duties, he withdrew from all other professional or business engagements and from politics.

This led him to become the most prominent national spokesman for that position. He held this position, and worked with a remarkable intensity, holding teachers' conventions, delivering numerous lectures and addresses, carrying on an extensive correspondence, and introducing numerous reforms.

In 1838, he founded and edited The Common School Journal. In this journal, Mann targeted the public school and its problems. His six main principles were: (1) the public should no longer remain ignorant; (2) that such education should be paid for, controlled, and sustained by an interested public; (3) that this education will be best provided in schools that embrace children from a variety of backgrounds; (4) that this education must be non-sectarian; (5) that this education must be taught by the spirit, methods, and discipline of a free society; and (6) that education should be provided by well-trained, professional teachers. Mann worked for more and better equipped school houses, longer school years (until 16 years old), higher pay for teachers, and a wider curriculum.

Mann hoped that by bringing all children of all classes together, they could have a common learning experience. This would also give an opportunity to the less fortunate to advance in the social scale and education would "equalize the conditions of men." Moreover, it was viewed also as a road to social advancement by the early labor movement and as a goal of having common schools. Mann also suggested that by having schools it would help those students who did not have appropriate discipline in the home. 

Building a person's character was just as important as reading, writing and arithmetic. Instilling values such as obedience to authority, promptness in attendance, and organizing the time according to bell ringing helped students prepare for future employment. Mann faced some resistance from parents who did not want to give up the moral education to teachers and bureaucrats. The normal schools trained mostly women, giving them new career opportunities as teachers.^[12]

The practical result of Mann's work was a revolution in the approach used in the common school system of Massachusetts, which in turn influenced the direction of other states. In carrying out his work, Mann met with bitter opposition by some Boston schoolmasters who strongly disapproved of his innovative pedagogical ideas,^[13] and by various religious sectarians, who contended against the exclusion of all sectarian instruction from the schools. Mann is often called "the father of American public education."

“If any man seeks for greatness, let him forget greatness 

and ask for truth, and he will find both.” 

“Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery.”

Education...beyond all other devices of human origin, is a great equalizer of conditions of men --the balance wheel of the social machinery.”

“Let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen.”

International Community of Socratic Educators

Published by Tom King · 1 hr · 

Great editorial in the NYTimes today (Jan 17, 2019) by David Brooks and well worth your reading:

Students Learn From People They Love: David Brooks

Putting relationship quality at the center of education.

Jan. 17, 2019

Damon Winter/The New York Times

A few years ago, when I was teaching at Yale, I made an announcement to my class. I said that I was going to have to cancel office hours that day because I was dealing with some personal issues and a friend was coming up to help me sort through them.

I was no more specific than that, but that evening 10 or 15 students emailed me to say they were thinking of me or praying for me. For the rest of the term the tenor of that seminar was different. We were closer. That one tiny whiff of vulnerability meant that I wasn’t aloof Professor Brooks, I was just another schmo trying to get through life.

That unplanned moment illustrated for me the connection between emotional relationships and learning. We used to have this top-down notion that reason was on a teeter-totter with emotion. If you wanted to be rational and think well, you had to suppress those primitive gremlins, the emotions. Teaching consisted of dispassionately downloading knowledge into students’ brains.

Then work by cognitive scientists like Antonio Damasio showed us that emotion is not the opposite of reason; it’s essential to reason. Emotions assign value to things. If you don’t know what you want, you can’t make good decisions.

Furthermore, emotions tell you what to pay attention to, care about and remember. It’s hard to work through difficulty if your emotions aren’t engaged. Information is plentiful, but motivation is scarce.

That early neuroscience breakthrough reminded us that a key job of a school is to give students new things to love — an exciting field of study, new friends. It reminded us that what teachers really teach is themselves — their contagious passion for their subjects and students. It reminded us that children learn from people they love, and that love in this context means willing the good of another, and offering active care for the whole person.

Over the last several years our understanding of the relationship between emotion and learning has taken off. My impression is that neuroscientists today spend less time trying to locate exactly where in the brain things happen and more time trying to understand the different neural networks and what activates them.

Everything is integrated. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang of the University of Southern California shows that even “sophisticated” emotions like moral admiration are experienced partly by the same “primitive” parts of the brain that monitor internal organs and the viscera. Our emotions literally affect us in the gut.

Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington has shown that the social brain pervades every learning process. She gave infants Chinese lessons. Some infants took face-to-face lessons with a tutor. Their social brain was activated through direct eye contact and such, and they learned Chinese sounds at an amazing clip. Others watched the same lessons through a video screen. They paid rapt attention, but learned nothing.

Extreme negative emotions, like fear, can have a devastating effect on a student’s ability to learn. Fear amps up threat perception and aggression. It can also subsequently make it hard for children to understand causal relationships, or to change their mind as context changes. 

Even when conditions are ideal, think of all the emotions that are involved in mastering a hard subject like algebra: curiosity, excitement, frustration, confusion, dread, delight, worry and, hopefully, perseverance and joy. You’ve got to have an educated emotional vocabulary to maneuver through all those stages.

And students have got to have a good relationship with teachers. Suzanne Dikker of New York University has shown that when classes are going well, the student brain activity synchronizes with the teacher’s brain activity. In good times and bad, good teachers and good students co-regulate each other.

The bottom line is this, a defining question for any school or company is: What is the quality of the emotional relationships here?

And yet think about your own school or organization. Do you have a metric for measuring relationship quality? Do you have teams reviewing relationship quality? Do you know where relationships are good and where they are bad? How many recent ed reform trends have been about relationship-building?

We focus on all the wrong things because we have an outmoded conception of how thinking really works.

The good news is the social and emotional learning movement has been steadily gaining strength. This week the Aspen Institute (where I lead a program) published a national commission report called “From a Nation at Risk to a Nation at Hope.” Social and emotional learning is not an add-on curriculum; one educator said at the report’s launch, “It’s the way we do school.” Some schools, for example, do no academic instruction the first week. To start, everybody just gets to know one another. Other schools replaced the cops at the door with security officers who could also serve as student coaches.

When you start thinking this way it opens up the wide possibilities for change. How would you design a school if you wanted to put relationship quality at the core? Come to think of it, how would you design a Congress?

 My ICOSE Commentary:

David Brooks' insights today make a major contribution to our better understanding of how learning happens, and what needs to be done to keep it happening.

There is a great difference between ignorant and unlearned. The learner has a choice to leave ignorant or remain unlearned. Poverty, when I was teaching at an inner-city school back in the early 60's, was a major motivator for students to learn. We teachers led them to drink the waters of knowledge by "salting their hay," as that saying goes. 

We brought students our own passions to learn and shared them, while listening more carefully to their dreams and nightmares. It seems those visions are in shorter supplies these days, and much more difficult to cause. Basic needs are often good enough, and for many young learners, social media and gangs take over where family relationships fail to engage.

Take another look at the photograph that introduces Mr. Brooks helpful column today. If you are a leader, whether teacher, parent, or someone who cares about learning, shout out loud enough to be heard by all, "Have I got a good story for you!" 

Brooks helps with some rubrics for your story...."think of all the emotions that are involved in mastering a hard subject....: curiosity, excitement, frustration, confusion, dread, delight, worry and, hopefully, perseverance and joy. " If you can stand up and share your dreams, your students may share theirs, and the dialogue of learning begins again. 

Take a deep breath, smile and share!

Note the advice of our founder, Socrates: The unexamined life is not worth living. 

And my coda: "The examined life is why we're here!