Efficiency

Efficiency is a part of our everyday lives and has influenced our thinking of what is good, effective, and worthwhile. If you sit down to think about how efficiency dictates your way of thinking, which is an inefficient use of your time, what you understand is how it influences your thinking in those three areas. Efficiency in business is increasing speed of production, while lowering cost of production, creating a boost in profit. In our everyday lives, efficiency usually is measured in speed, and to a lesser extent quality, to get an outcome. I say to a lesser extent quality because we demand speed and as a culture, I think the norms are starting to be accepting of the low quality as long as it is fast. The experience I had in corporate America has allowed me to see this in a business. Quality was being sacrificed for quantity. It was not overt, but the people who were fast at their jobs, but made mistakes, were more likely to get promoted than those who were slower, at an acceptable rate, and did not make mistakes. This can also be seen in fast food where we want our food as fast as possible in exchange for lower quality, and no one in their right mind can say that fast food is of any higher quality compared to an actual restaurant. That being said we judge what is good, effective, and worthwhile off of the idea of efficiency. Just think of the Internet as an example, if the Internet takes awhile to load a page you can just hear the moans of people saying “This internet connection is terrible”. Why is the Internet terrible, because it has taken an extra 30 seconds to load and is causing you to lose time. It can also be seen as how everyone understands time as money. You always have to be doing something productive or in essence, you are losing money. Efficiency affecting the idea of being effective can be seen as well. Teaching comes to mind with this one, and that is because a lesson that is taught to students in one day that meets the outcome standard is seen as more effective than a lesson taught to students that would take two days. Again quality is not really a huge factor in effectiveness here, because the students who had two days to learn the material could have a deeper understanding of the material, but it had taken two days. Where as the one day lesson does not provide the deeper understanding, but it does meet the objective.  The idea of worthwhile can be seen in almost anything, the statement that comes to mind is “is the amount of energy that I am putting forth giving something equal or better in return”. I think of weight loss with this one, the pills, diets, and exercise, is only worthwhile if you see immediate results. These are daily instances where efficiency has an impact on our daily lives.

            I also think you can see efficiency in the classroom and the grading scale. An “A” is now the belief that you have met the requirements of the assignment instead of exceptional work. If you do not get an A and you met the requirements then you can see just how deeply engrained this cult of efficiency is because the argument will come out that, “I did exactly what you asked me to so I should have received an A”. This does not only affect the grading scale, as stated above it also affects the way in which we teach in general and with technology. If a teacher does things differently, takes longer, but is still meeting the outcome objectives, and another teacher takes less time and meets those same objectives which teacher is more effective? I bet you would be hard pressed to find an administrator, parent, or even student, who would say teacher number one. The same goes with technology and the way in which it is viewed in the classroom. This is glaring when you look at the reasons for not using specific kinds of technology in the classroom that requires a lot of instruction of learning how to use the technology. This causes many to see technology as detracting away from the content that they are trying to teach by taking up their class time in order to teach how to use specific technology. It can also be seen in how we teach, or implement technology, we are using them in ways that make the process faster or improve the process in a way that makes it more efficient.  Some examples of this are: communication, turning in of assignments, presentations, flipped classrooms, and smart boards. If the technology does not work and causes us to lose time than it is not a useful technology to use because it is taking time away from learning. We can see these ideas being implemented by Ayers and what this model has brought into our school systems.

            Robert Ayer’s Laggards in the classroom has multitude of things wrong with it, I will point out three of those. I will start off with a relatively easy one to point out and that is the belief that students who were behind the age defined grades were “retarded”. His age defined grades do not take into account when the children actually started school or primary language, which would cause them to be behind the other students. Without knowing when they started school he is saying that if  you miss one year of schooling, or speak a different language, then you are automatically “retarded”. You cannot judge someone’s academic abilities against someone who is grade levels above him or her, yet this is how he defined “retarded”. He then talks about the cost of educating these students and the amount of money that it is costing the taxpayers. He is stating that it is a waste of time and money to be educating them. He is advocating for a selection process of who gets to be educated and who is forced into dead end jobs while also be labeled retarded. Educating students is beneficial for not only the student, but the public as a whole as well. This idea that it is a waste of time is absurd and skewed towards the elites. He is stating that there are laborers and thinkers just like in scientific management and I would argue that everyone should be able to be thinkers. It is impossible to be an active contributing member of society if you are not educated and can think. Ayers also applied an efficiency index onto schools in order to show how efficient they were at teaching students. This is also the wrong view to put on school systems because it is forcing it into the factory model. It is also stating that education is efficient, that everyone learns efficiently. I would have to disagree with Ayers on this point; academic learning is not efficient at all. Students learn at different rates and others in different ways. If you force efficiency onto the schools students are going to fall behind, because they do not learn through the efficiency model. They cannot gather all the information from the text, or have developed studying skills to help them learn. This model takes away the opportunity for students to learn and only allows those that already have the skills to succeed to get ahead. These are the three main arguments that Ayers in applying efficiency in schools that has hurt rather than helped students learn. These ideas are evidence of a shift towards a cult of efficiency.

            The cult of efficiency is a perfect title and I say that because it describes perfectly the idea of efficiency. Efficiency developed out of the Scientific management and it was a huge success in the business world. This success and the struggles that were occurring in the schools offered a near perfect environment for this model to be transferred into the schools. The success that everyone was seeing in the business world helped to develop a cult of efficiency. When you talk about cults the fist thing that comes to mind is the drinking of the Kool-Aid. A cult is putting blind faith into an individual, or in this case idea, that this is good for you no matter the situation. That everyone is on board and will follow no matter what, that it can apply towards anything. Since it is working for the business world and making people very rich, then it must be useful in other areas. Instead of rationally thinking about the affects of this model, it is applied without hesitation, because efficient is better. The only argument anyone had to make was look at the businessmen. This deep fascination with efficiency and the scientific management helped lead this idea, that it was a perfect model to implement. It had to work because it was efficient, that is the argument. The idea shifted to efficiency equaling, what I discussed before, as good, effective, and worthwhile.  This is why it is a perfect title for the reading, as it is a cult of efficiency. 

The best fit

We have discussed the educational philosophy along with learning theories, taking a deeper look into these theories we should be able to see the underlying educational philosophy. As stated before I feel that progressivism is the educational philosophy that I feel aligns with my belief and as expected the learning theory that aligned with my belief was that of constructivism. This was an easy connection for me as the underlying philosophy is focused on the learner and developing the knowledge through active learning. They both focus on prior knowledge of the learner and want to build upon or in some cases clear misconceptions. Constructivism theory is one that can be seen as influenced by the philosophy of progressivism and can be seen in the way learning is facilitated.  

Behaviorism seemed to fit well with essentialism based on how behaviorism looks to measure outcomes. One aspect of essentialism is looking for students to learn and master basic skills. This philosophy would match up well with the theory in that to know if the students are learning and mastering the skills you would need to be able to measure that through standards. Behaviorism This would also match well with the idea of going off of textbooks to cultivate this knowledge as the skills that would be learned would be developed with textbook companies. The way in which Behaviorism would be facilitated in the classroom would be a focus on mastery of skills and the teaching style would be one of teacher, and text book, being the ultimate source of knowledge. 

 The other two learning theories that we had discussed was not so clear, to me anyways, as to what philosophy that they were directly influenced by. Systems theory looks at the whole, prescribing rather than explaining, and the procedure for designing instruction. I look at this learning theory and can see a big influence through perennialism. I say perennialism based on the belief of the learning theory of the natural order and rationality of the world. This, to me, seems as though it is speaking to a universal truth and perennialism also believes that subjects develop rationality and morality. The facilitation would be of understanding knowledge and one that would be tied to the great works of civilization. 

The last learning theory that we talked about was that of the communication theory. This one also challenged me to really get at the bottom of what philosophy was influencing it. The focus is on the process of, from my understanding knowledge, that would make it closely influenced by essentialism. Essentialism is belief of transmitting knowledge from the teacher to the student. This in and of itself is essentialism but the learning theory also takes into account the background of both individuals, or field of experience, which can be seen in progressivism. The idea being that communication occurs when both individual’s field of experiences overlap. This is one that I am still contemplating which philosophy is influencing it overall.

Reflection

The theory of education that I found to be consistent with my worldview was progressivism. I say that with some reservations because there are parts of the theory that I do not agree with, but it is the most consistent with my worldview. The parts that I do agree with are the focus on the student, the active learning, and opposing isolation of schools. The focus should be on the students and developing the knowledge in order for the successful transfer of that knowledge. Memorization of facts does not help students to know how, or when to use the information they memorized. The focus on the students is developing their cognitive skills in order for successful transfer of knowledge. For this to occur students need to be active participants in their education, which means instead of lecturing, the instructor should utilize project based learning to help refine the student’s knowledge for successful transfer. I also agree with not having schools isolated from the rest of the community, as the community is an important part of the learning process. The community has to support the school in developing the students, if they do not they will hurt the academic process. I do not agree, however, with the view of discipline in the classroom. Discipline teaches basic skills that students will use in everyday life and these skills need to be developed in the classroom. For the most part, however, this theory is consistent with my worldview.

            The one theory that would make me uncomfortable would be Perennialism and that is based on where truth is found, also that the truth is universal and unchanging.  The theory states that truth is found in the great work of civilizations, which they do have a place in education but should not be what we base our educational system on.  Truth is unchanging based on this theory meaning that what was true in 2000 BCE is the same today. This depends on how one is defining the term truth. Truth as laws of how the world works is unchanging and universal, but what about philosophy, education, religion, and politics they are not universal and unchanging. If this were the theory that was applied, to our education system it would make me uncomfortable in how students would perceive others who held different truths and the actions that would come about based on those differences.

            The assignment and the discussion that we had, helped develop a deeper understanding of technology and media. Our definition centered on a process or idea that accomplishes a goal. This is definition is different from the idea that technology as an advancement in computers, phones, or tablets.  Technology is a way in which the knowledge is applied in order to complete a task. Technology was harder to define, as technology has a broad definition, causing you to really think about what constitutes as technology. Media was much easier to define as media was something that stores and transmits communication. Our discussion did a couple things, it helped us understand what technology and media was, but it also set us up for our next discussion on if technology is neutral or not. This discussion should be interesting to see how others perceive technology and would also be interesting to see if thoughts changed based on how we defined technology.