What Do Students Need?

   A System For Organizing Knowledge

by Marion Brady    International Education Daily  January 22, 2001

http://members.iteachnet.com/~webzine/article.php?story=20010122161206802

[ From his article series featured in The Orlando Sentinel ]

A system of organization - the alphabetizing of names-makes it's possible to find, in a matter of seconds, a phone number in a phone book.

A system of organization - the periodic table of the elements-made it possible to predict the existence of the element germanium before it was actually discovered.

A system of organization - an organization chart makes it possible to quickly grasp a company's approach to the distribution of human resources.

Systems of organization make it possible to find a particular book in the library, a particular kind of cereal in the supermarket, a particular automobile tail light in a junkyard, a particular departure gate for an airplane flight.

We take our systems of organization for granted, but it's no exaggeration to say that it's systems of organization that make civilization possible. For everything from the most mundane action, such as getting a cup from a kitchen cabinet, to the most esoteric research in biology or physics, it's awareness of a system of organization that guides action. The better the system, the more efficient and effective the action will be.

From this it follows that, if we want to improve something, taking a long, hard look at its system of organization is a good place to start.

We want to improve our schools. We should, then, be carefully examining the organizing systems that shape them.

There are plenty of systems to examine. Systems of organization sort students, assign them teachers, set schedules, lay out instructional programs, check on individual and collective performance, establish consequences for success and failure-in short, systems of organization control the educating process from start to finish.

Educators, worried about system effectiveness and under the gun from politicians, policy makers and the general public, constantly fiddle with these systems, experimenting with different ways of sorting students, different staffing arrangements, different schedules, different ways to measure performance, different strategies for controlling and motivating behavior.

Unfortunately, the one system of organization that gets the least attention is the one that's far and away the most important-the student's mental system for organizing knowledge.

Think of the student's brain as library, as supermarket, as junkyard. Then, follow the student through the school day, watching and listening, as into that library, into that supermarket, into that junkyard, a conveyor feeds a constant stream of information and dumps it in an unorganized heap. That which we see as essential in every other dimension of daily life-a system of organization-is routinely ignored in the one place where it matters most: in the mind of the student.

In earlier times, when the volume of information directed at students was far less, when there was more agreement about what the young needed to know, when there was little awareness of the importance of teaching people to think for themselves, the need for a system for organizing knowledge was less apparent. Then, rote learning worked reasonably well. But we're deep into an information explosion, there's no consensus on the aim of education, and, as the Japanese have found, an emphasis on rote learning may pay off in high standardized test scores, but it may do so at the cost of creativity, innovative thinking, and undue dependence on authority.

Rote learning, learning in which a system for organizing knowledge is either unnecessary or else is imposed on the student, no longer comes even close to meeting the challenge of educating. What students need now but aren't getting is a comprehensive system for organizing knowledge, a system they understand, a system that allows them to store information and then, days, weeks, months or years later, find it. What makes that possible is a knowledge-organizing system that depends not on memory but on logic. As is evident from how little most adults can recall of what they once learned in school, unaided memory simply isn't up to the task.

For most people, even for far too many educators, this is unfamiliar territory. It's assumed that the main point of schooling is to pass along to the young a million answers to a million already-asked questions.

Wrong assumption. Yes, it's an ancient assumption. Yes, it's the assumption driving much education "reform" legislation. Yes, it's the mainstay of the textbook industry. Yes, it's the assumption that keeps the testmakers in business. But it's wrong.

What students need most, what we all need most, is the clearest-possible understanding of the system we use for storing and retrieving what we know. Ignoring that need assures that most of our academic "stars" will continue to be simply those students who happen to have the best short-term memories.

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