Governor's Conference on
Education
"School,
Goals and the 1990s"
Wichita,
Kansas: Nov. 2, 1989
Speakers included: Lamar Alexander, president's advisory council; Dr. Frank Newman,
presidential fellow at Carnegie Foundation of the Advancement of Teaching; Rudy
Perpich, Minnesota governor....
Home
Introduction:
"We have saved the best for last. Dr.
Shirley McCune, who will talk about restructuring of schools, is a native of
Colorado, an educational researcher, a federal executive.
her interest have included community development and restructuring education to
meet need for informational society. Currently
she is the Senior Director with the mid-continent Regional Educational Laboratory and
provides great assistance to schools in our region and state departments. She has
received numerous degrees, worked with NEA, US Department of Education, state
offices... She worked with our state department, Kansas schools for the Twenty-First
Century... Our state department in Kansas would not be where it is today without Dr.
McCune.
Find
more background information in Star Wars
and Atlantis
and
Brave New Schools, Chapter
3 - A New Way of Thinking
Dr. Shirley
McCune: "It seems to me that far too
much of our efforts have been focused on the issue of let's find a short term fix...
rather than... understanding that what we are about is total
restructuring of our society. What's
happening in America today... is not simply a
chance situation in the usual winds of change. What
it amounts to is a total transformation of our
society. We have moved into a new era...
But what I'm not sure we have really begun to comprehend and act on sufficiently is
the incredible amount of organizational restructuring and human resource development
restructuring.
There are only two things that really matter: One is the information
capital that we can put together.... [the other is] to produce human capital.
Schools have always had two tough things to do in society.
One... to conserve the past and to take knowledge of past generations and move
it ahead so that our children can know what happened in the past and that we can
conserve the advancements that our society has already made to a certain date.
That's the conserving function of schools and we do well at that....
The other function of schools, which sounds paradoxical, yet is not, is the
fact that we have to prepare students, not for today's society, but for
a society that's 20, 30, 40, 50 years down the road.
So we have to anticipate what the future is, then move back and figure out what
it is we have to do today. This is the anticipatory
socialization or the social change
function of schools.
During the past ten years we've been going through a reform movement.
That reform movement began with
governors of this nation... their concern was to understand the very close
relationship between economic development and human
capital. It may be easy to
say, if it's broke, why fix it? Why
should we try to deal with that? Unfortunately,
while the system still continues to work
for some parts of the population, it isn't going to work over the long run.
What has to happen at conferences like this... is a commitment of understanding
that what we have to do is build
a future. It is the future
that motivates us, not what we are doing now.
We have to understand the breath of the
task before us. You cannot begin to think
about restructuring education without understanding that our total society is in
crisis of restructuring. You can't
get away from it... you can't go into
business and hide from the fact that what we
are facing is a total restructuring of society.
First of all we have to understand that we are in a new economy We can't rest
in that things will remain as they are. Next
five years may be the most chaotic in or lives. ..
If you talk with business men, most of them understand the critical importance of
human resource development.
Major challenge: our society is becoming older.
Eighty percent of our wealth today is held by people 50 and over.
And of that particular group, that wealth is going to have to be invested in
future generation... Thirty percent of district's children are either physically
emotionally, or sexually abused.
When we look at a society that allows
30% of its children to be abused, it seems to me that we have to ask ourselves about
quality of our adults that we have.
People say we're spending more on schools but getting less. I disagree totally.
We're spending more on schools, but we're taking on more... and that trend will
continue... We're not only feeding kids at
noon, we're feeding them i the morning. We, in fact, are providing more
psychological services and special Ed services.
More and more, the school is the cob or the center
of all human resource development services in the school.
We have to have better people in this society.
Not only do we have to grow better kids,
kids that can function at higher physical, intellectual and social levels--but we have
to have adults can be leaders with visions
of where we can go in the future.
Curriculum is not simply putting some facts in kids' minds--and it isn't
teaching the past history of the world. While
that is important... we also have to prepare them with a range of knowledge and skills
that they are going to need for their personal psychological well being, their self
esteem, their ethics, their ability to give and care for others, with group and
organizational al sills, leadership skills, conflict resolution skills, working with
people who are different than they are. We're
going to have to provide them with career development skills...
If you want to be worried about a school, be worried about a classroom where
it's quiet. Because one of the things we
now about learning is that the only way we learn
to think is when we are talking to others or writing... And when you see row after
row of kids sitting in bolted down desks, be very worried.
They may be learning some facts, but they're
not learning how to think or how to process information.
We also need to restructure or curriculum. What
the revolution has been in curriculum is that we no longer are teaching facts to
children. It is almost impossible for us
to guess the kinds of facts that they will need.
Basically we are still measuring the output of schools by national tests which
measure nothing but factual recall. The issue for most children and the issue for
society, is that what is changed in education today, is that we
no longer see the teaching of facts and information as the primary outcome of
education. We use facts and we use
changing facts in a variety of ways to teach them information processing. and the reason for that is that none of us can guess what they will need in the future.
we must also provide more individualized and learning-directed
learning. We have to understand that the
only way anyone ever learns is from their own frame of reference, and that all
learning begins with the affective parts of life.
One of the developments that is going on in more and more communities, is
taking place in Phoenix. The mayor of
that city has an educator whose job is to work with the social welfare community and
put together a total network of human resource activities in that community, where we can actually
provide for all the needs of the children and adults....
We know is that the earlier we intervene
into the lives of people, the cheaper it is.
I would hope this state would undertake a series of demonstration projects to
build learning communities in some rural
areas--where we can serve all ages, where we begin to demonstrate what can happen when
we put people together and deal with them in a holistic fashion--and begin to demonstrate schools of the future and encourage
the creativity we need.
Mike
Hayden, Kansas:
"Goals for education... We shouldn't settle for mediocrity... Goals must
stretch the full potential in each of us. We
must be willing to develop strategies--challenging and controversial strategies to obtain these goals.
With the nation focused on education, we must take advantage of this...."
Commentator:
"So there you have it: A global
educational revolution is under way, which wants babies and pregnant mothers cared
for by the schools, just as in national socialism.
And educational revolution, despising facts and academic environment, just like
national socialism. A
revolution which sees children as human capital
to be used by the nation to advance its economic competitive welfare is
national socialism.
A reporter friend of the Educational Research Institute called Dr. Shirley
McCune's lab which supplies teacher trainers and curriculum strategies.
He asked for paper work to better understand the new quality performance
education, which is also known as Outcomes
Accreditation. This is what he got:
a spread sheet listing methods being used in all American schools... methods
designed to accomplish the first goal of the radical revolutionaries: change
beliefs.
The teacher training and the new QPA is
based on the work of Pavlovian behaviorist, BF Skinner and the taxonomy classification
of Benjamin Bloom. As Bloom himself
stated so well, "The purpose of education
and schools is to change the thoughts, feelings and actions of children.
And good teaching is defined as challenging the students' fixed beliefs."
Later
the same month, she -- with the Mid-Continent Regional Educational Laboratory --
stated,
"Radical change
is necessary now; you cannot escape it.... Strategies and behaviors must be changed
because the dawning of this new age is far more significant than the transformation
of the national and world economics taking place...."
Dennis Laurence
Cuddy, Ph.D., Chronology of Education with Quotable Quotes,
page 85.
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