Introduction

Introduction

Never has education become more important as in the twenty-first century. Until the moveable-type printing press was invented, most people could get along in life with no literacy skills and few math skills. The invention of the printing press made books more available to common people and simultaneously made books necessary to more people. As a result, more people could read and more people needed to read in order to do their jobs. By the twentieth century, reading became a necessary skill for most jobs.

The technology revolution has had at least as strong an influence on every day life, needed job skills, and world outlook as did Gutenberg's moveable-type printing press. Along with this revolution has come a need for people to develop an ever-widening group of essential skills that include literacy, numeracy, understanding the world, critical thinking, working on teams, and working independently. The factory job in which one had a boss and one screwed nuts onto bolts all day has gone by the wayside. Today's jobs and tomorrow's jobs--many of which we are unable to imagine--require knowledge across a wide variety of fields and people skills, the ability to work constructively with a diverse range of co-workers.

While the world of work has made necessary a significant increase in skills that schools need to teach, America's schools are in crisis. According to Swanson (Cities in Crisis), only 69.9 percent of American students graduate from high school. And of seniors in high school, according to American Educator, forty percent cannot do ninth-grade math and sixty percent cannot read at a ninth-grade level. Yet with all the accountability required by the No Child Left Behind act, reading scores are flat and progress in math is minimal:

http://www.ed.gov/nclb/accountability/results/progress/nation.htmlhttp://www.ed.gov/nclb/accountability/results/progress/nation.html

What are we to do? Present accountability methods, largely standardized tests, encourage shallow, unengaging learning that removes the meaning and logic from that which is learned. Read a random text to show you can read. Do a random math problem to demonstrate your skills. Connections to a person's "real" life are assumed to be obvious or not necessary to explicate. And yet... we have 30% of our young people who have not completed a basic education. This system is not working. The question becomes, what would work? We know from language development that most children develop spoken language, but they do so idiosyncratically. Children who live around pets often have early vocabulary related to pets while children who do not have pets will be less likely to have this type of vocabulary early on. Yet with or without pets, they all learn to speak and they all eventually learn about cats, dogs, hamsters, and goldfish, whether that learning takes place early or somewhat later on. Children develop language in relation to their need to make meaning. They have many needs to make known: hunger, thirst, boredom, pain, dirty diaper, interesting unknown thing in environment, fear, tiredness. Children are immersed in an environment where people older than themselves use language to make meaning and to solve problems. Children not only imitate what they hear, beginning with rough approximations, but they innovate. They will invent a past tense form using the standard past tense rule (-ed) if they don't know the irregular past tense of a verb. They may invent their own words for things. What drives language development is a cycle of communication in which children attempt communication and then receive feedback. Often the feedback is positive: the baby says dadadadada and the parent gushes with joy--"you said Daddy!!!" Sometimes the feedback is negative, as when a child says a one word sentence and parents fail to interpret it correctly the first time. The feedback both encourages and pushes children to continue to attempt meaning making. The same thing must happen in school. No classroom of 30 first graders is going to be adequately served by a grade one basal reader because each one of these children has an individual relationship with spoken language which must be activated in order for that child to learn to read. Reading is complex enough that a person cannot learn both the meaning of words and how to read them at the same time. Children have to read words that they already know.So, education must be individualized. How do we do that?There is a group of teachers who necessarily individualized their instruction for every single one of their students. These were the teachers of one room school houses, who often taught eight grades of children in the same room. The purpose of this book is to pull one room school house teaching methods into the twenty-first century classroom, acknowledging that most classrooms have six to eight grade levels of students in any given subject. What twenty-first century teachers have that traditional teachers did not have is access to technology. Our goal is to demonstrate concrete ways in which curriculum can be accountable, integrated, and individualized and to help teachers create classrooms where students work well independently and in groups.