Marion Brady is a progressive educator who has never given up the fight to make education a lively and engaging experience.
He wrote the following to me:
Diane,The courses of study I give away were developed for Prentice-Hall over a period of seven years, working with dozens of middle school teachers nationwide. They taught every lesson, providing feedback and suggestions, and those that P-H thought were most insightful were brought together for a week at the end of every semester to go over final versions.
P-H shelved it and gave me copyrights when the marketing department concluded that Phyllis Schafley’s claim that departures from tradition were a slippery slope to communism.
Since my brother and I put them online and free, downloads of files range from 600 to 1600 per week without a dime to advertise.
Standardized testing is the major obstacle to acceptance.I’ve double-checked the links. They’re important.
Thanks much for all you do.
Marion
Salvaging public schooling
By Marion Brady
Public schooling should be the bedrock of democracy, but the institution’s failure to produce a citizenry more resistant to authoritarianism and fantastical conspiracy theories is surely evidence of a serious institutional problem.
Unfortunately, it’s also a problem that most schools are poorly equipped to address. It has to do with what learners think and, with one exception, traditional schooling’s interest in what learners think is minimal.
That exception: How much of the “core” curriculum’s standardized, secondhand information can kids stuff into short-term memory long enough to pass a test?
Good teachers do good things with the subjects in the core curriculum, but no mix of traditional school subjects will produce learners or a citizenry with sufficient intellectual depth and breadth to support democracy, societal stability, and the fresh thinking required by the accelerating rate of social change.
Rethinking the core
The brain seeks order, organization, pattern, regularity, connections, relationships, wholeness. The core gives it a hodge-podge of disconnected subjects with differing aims, incompatible conceptual frameworks, specialized vocabularies, myriad abstractions and dissimilar methodologies, all at odds with both the integrated nature of the world that schooling is supposed to explain and the way our brains organize information to create sense and meaning.
A couple of paragraphs from a column I wrote twenty or so years ago for Knight-Ridder/Tribune newspapers for a series called “Rethinking Schools” illustrates why the core’s standalone subjects can’t do the job that needs doing.
“We want a pair of socks. Those available have been knitted in a Third World country. Power to run the knitting machines is supplied by burning fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels contributes to global warming. Global warming alters weather patterns. Altered weather patterns trigger environmental catastrophes. Environmental catastrophes destroy infrastructure. Money spent for infrastructure replacement isn’t available for health care. Declines in the quality of health care affect mortality rates. Mortality is a matter of life and death. Buying socks, then, is a matter of life and death.
“Making detailed sense of this simple cause-effect sequence requires not only some understanding of marketing, physics, chemistry, meteorology, economics, engineering, psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science and a couple of other fields not usually taught in middle or high schools, it requires an understanding of how fields fit together and interact.”
Planet Earth is on an unsustainable path largely of humankind’s choosing. The accelerating rate of environmental, demographic and technological change is creating problems with no known solutions. If our children and our children’s children are to have more than a snowball’s chance in hell of coping with the world they’re inheriting, they need more than a curriculum based on the Common Core Standards or similar knowledge-fragmenting curricula can give them.
Curricular change
Fortunately, a general education discipline that welds not only the core subjects but all present and future school subjects into working parts of a single, comprehensive, integrated, easily understood and used structure of knowledge doesn’t have to be invented. It already exists, is in universal use, teaches at rates unmatched by any other approach, costs nothing to adopt, and fits inside present bureaucratic boundaries and expectations.
Every reader of these words began using that discipline’s major organizers at birth and developed them to sophisticated levels long before reaching school age.
We’re born hungry. We fuss and a nipple with nourishment appears, introducing the thought process that, radically elaborated by lived experience and appropriate schooling, will teach us most of what we’ll learn for the rest of our lives.
That thought process? Not recalling information, but relating it.
Relating
Knowledge expands as relationships are discovered between and among aspects of reality not previously thought to relate—nipples relate to fussing, tides relate to moon, societal stability relates to trust, peace relates to justice, time relates to space.
The relating process that teaches so much so rapidly and efficiently has five elements rooted in the questions where, when, who, what, why? When we focus attention on a particular matter, we (1) locate it in space, (2) establish time parameters, (3) identify relevant actors or objects, (4) describe action, and (5) assume or postulate the action’s cause. The five, integrated systemically, create sense, meaning, “stories,” knowledge, understanding.
Because all fields of study are elaborations of answers to the five questions, and because (when focused on a particular matter) the questions integrate systemically, all knowledge integrates systemically, maximizing the knowledge-creating relating process.
And humankind’s chances of survival.
Institutional transformation
Do this: Switch middle and high schooling’s primary focus from learner ability to recall secondhand information, to learner ability to relate information. Engineer “deep” understanding by requiring adolescents to discover the relating process for themselves via “active learning”—engaging in activities that help them lift the relating process into consciousness and put it to intellectually challenging use.* Do that, and the young will move to levels of academic performance not now possible, levels so far beyond the reach of machine-scored standardized tests their inability to evaluate complex thought will be obvious.
I know this to be true beyond a shadow of doubt from leading a seven-year-long nationwide project involving dozens of middle school teachers working with kids of every level of ability. The project was cut short by the reactionary “back to basics” fad, followed by “standards and accountability” and high-stakes testing.
Using scores on tests of recalled core curriculum content to shape education policy doesn’t just invite societal suicide, it assures it.
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*The links below access FREE—no strings, no advertising, no obligations—materials supporting and implementing the above.
· What’s Worth Learning? Small, jargon-free e-book elaborating the above. Read a review:
· Courses of study written for middle school and older learners—
An introduction to systems thinking; American history; civics; world history; world cultures. (Free for teachers/mentors for use with their own learners:)
https://www.marionbrady.com/Systems-Based-Learning-Courses.asp
· Provision for user dialogue to encourage continuous improvement of lessons; other books, articles, op-eds, blogs. https://www.marionbrady.com
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Love Marion Brady’s work.
Thank you, Diane.
Twenty years ago and we are right back here again! Thank you for reminding me of this. I incorporated these ideas into my teaching as much as possible and my students still managed to pass! Remind the Sec. of Ed. about this!
Thank you for introducing me to Marion Brady. I just did a deep dive on his website. So many good articles and resources. I just bookmarked the site.
I am inspired, wowed, and learn so much from what is posted on your blog, Diane. This one particularly hit a nerve. We need to fundamentally change/transform Elementary School, IMHO! There are many, countless number of caring, motivated, intelligent elementary school teachers who are trapped in the “get them ready for learning,” “drill-kill,” “first they need to learn how to read, then they can read to learn,” etc.–that by the time students reach middle school so much of a student’s curious, self-reliant, risk taking, sense making, analyzing self has been dormant, locked away. More time and energy needs to me invested in supporting our elementary school teachers in creating an intellectually, stimulating learning environment where our youngest learners will not only thrive but have their inherent critical thinking, problem solving skills will be nourished and flourish.
Content subjects should be about relating and connecting, not just memorizing. Deep learning involves understanding relationships and being able to apply knowledge to new situations. We need creative problem solvers in our complex society today. Rote learning will not help people solve tomorrow’s problems.
The public school students with this prescribed curriculum will be relegated to second class status compared to the privileged elite who can afford to send their children to private institutions like Sidwell which use the teaching techniques that should be available to everyone regardless of socioeconomic or racial status.
Those in power will do whatever they can to stay in power and make sure their children will follow in their footsteps.
“departures from tradition were a slippery slope to communism.”
I just watched a series on Einstein and J Edgar Hoover thought Einstein was a commie and was out to get him because Einstein had the audacity to think differently.
Ironically, the real commies are ones like Hoover who believe everyone should think the same.
Of course, Hoover was just a pathetic self loathing little man who never did anything but destroy lives.
Hoover was also a white supremicist who despised MLK.
And he also hated JFK.
It seems that what Hoover hated most was anyone whom the public loved.
If I am given whole books and a chalkboard, I can design a worthwhile curriculum for my students, an experience that connects their lives to the lessons learned by humanity over the course of decades, centuries, and millennia. I have nothing to gain but self-efficacy and the esteem of my community for building forward. If, on the other band, profiting companies are charged with designing curriculum for me instead of allowing me to do the work, those companies have nothing to gain but monetary profit. Their end justifies to them their means of creating something which can be packaged, supposedly quantified, and marketed as “accountability”. They can and do produce systemic racial and economic inequality for profit, whereas I could have produced paradise. Standards-based education is not educational; it is capitalism gone wrong.
Pre-deform teachers always wrote their own curricula in NYS. It was a labor of love, and it promoted ownership among teachers. I worked on several curriculum projects in my district, and I worked on two others for New York State. It was a very creative process that enabled teachers to connect curricula across other content areas as well. We never had a “canned curriculum.”
What was a labor of love has become a googling of babble.
We get google in a can.
Beautiful…
“‘We want a pair of socks. Those available have been knitted in a Third World country. Power to run the knitting machines is supplied by burning fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels contributes to global warming. Global warming alters weather patterns. Altered weather patterns trigger environmental catastrophes. Environmental catastrophes destroy infrastructure. Money spent for infrastructure replacement isn’t available for health care. Declines in the quality of health care affect mortality rates. Mortality is a matter of life and death. Buying socks, then, is a matter of life and death.
“‘Making detailed sense of this simple cause-effect sequence requires not only some understanding of marketing, physics, chemistry, meteorology, economics, engineering, psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science and a couple of other fields not usually taught in middle or high schools, it requires an understanding of how fields fit together and interact.’
“Planet Earth is on an unsustainable path largely of humankind’s choosing. […]”
Yep, Systems Thinking. Beautiful Systems Thinking.
I planted a Little Free Library in my yard last month and purposefully stock it with age-appropriate children books of the type that just might spark or resurface Systems Thinking competencies I believe all children are born with.
But why a Little Free Library?
Because there is too much litter in the Southwest Atlanta community in which I am a relatively new resident. The litter signals a community that is challenged to know about and to appreciate “interrelatedness” sufficiently well.
Because of “the interrelated structure of reality” the Systems Thinker Martin Luther King Jr spoke about, litter accumulations influence untold many systems, in untold ways, to untold extents. Some systems that litter accumulations influence, directly or indirectly, are: business systems, competition systems, crime systems, economic systems, education systems, environmental systems, familial systems, hate systems, health care systems, justice systems, political systems, religion systems, reward systems, selfishness systems, sex trafficking systems, social systems, spirituality systems, street maintenance systems, water and sewer systems, wealth systems, wellness systems—you name it, from A to Z.
Litter accumulations influence untold many systems, and untold many systems influence litter accumulations. Untold many systems also influence each other, so are interrelated. What influences one system directly, influences untold many other systems indirectly.
For example, consider litter as being interrelated with a K-12 public education system, directly. Children who go through the system without learning about litter and litter effects will be influenced to become adults who tolerate and/or add to litter accumulations without awareness, and thus directly undermine wealth accumulations in their own communities that then influences all other systems, one way or another, for the better or for the worse. Moreover, influence from adults who tolerate litter accumulations and who role-model adding to litter accumulations will reach into the future to influence generations of children not yet here, not yet born.
More here…
https://mailchi.mp/552347af7d59/request-for-recommendation-for-take-a-book-share-a-book-project
As a librarian I wrote my own curriculum and tried to find innovative ways to teach library skills which, let’s face it, aren’t the most exciting topic. I used puppets, played games, sang songs, told jokes, and found ways to engage the students. A teacher was required to attend my classes since it wasn’t considered a prep, and sometimes, if available, they sent the teacher aide ( all of them loved coming to the library). The best teachers participated in the class instead of grading papers. Even if the students didn’t learn everything they needed to know, I tried to teach them a love for books and the library. If I succeeded in this one “skill” then I can call my career a success.
I wish those who are making the decisions about education would listen to Diane Ravitch and people like Marion Brady instead of those who have a “hidden” agenda. The true test should be the question “Would you send your own children/grandchildren to a school which follows the curriculum you endorse?”
This is reminding me of an interesting paper posted in the comment thread of a recent education article. The author uses cognitive brain science advances of the last 15 years to demonstrate that we’ve been teaching math backwards/ counterintuitively for 30 years. (Which he ties to steady decline in US math scores on natl & intl tests during that period, accelerating in the last decade – FWIW.) http://www.chemreview.net/CCMS.pdf
The cognitive science, unsurprisingly, confirms what Brady says under “Curricular Change” and “Relating.” What I found most interesting was that the ‘relating’ that goes on in the brain, as a new input connects like a switched-on electrical grid illuminating a sequence of clusters of lights, is in the nature of those clusters – info in long-term memory. The new brain discoveries are about the very limited nature of working memory, and the nearly infinite abilities of LTM segments to be called into WM for application to new info. The paper brings all that to bear on superior ways of teaching math (that were actually in use before 1989 or so).
Not a math person here, but I draw a parallel to the mile-wide inch-deep nature of core curriculum that Brady speaks of here, and learning just enough to pass a test and move on.