Do the thinkers, planners, consumers and players of education ignore (but really see) dysfunctionality or are they blind to it?

[I don't really think that the answer is one or the other. In reality it's a combination of these and other factors. However, blindness to dysfunction plays a significant part. And, if we see a wrong that we didn't see before, perhaps we become readier to right that wrong.]

It is hard for many, perhaps most,educators, let alone others, to perceive the problem and its implications. But, I've found that a simulation of classroom consequences has really helped. In it particiipants have to generate consequences from the interactions of some basic assumptions with a 'basic' [probably prevalent] classroom operating style.

Student assumptions: -that the student learns if the teaching strategy meaningfully interacts with his/her understanding [or in teacherspeak, teaches at the student's readiness level]. -for background: students will do what they 'need to do' to get through a class period; they will cope. Coping with, say, seatwork or reading assignments at one's desk, may or may not be accompanied by enhancement of understanding-- movement toward greater understanding. Thus, it is possible to look within a classroom which appears to be quite busy and civilized and thus to be quite unaware that NO student is growing in her/his understanding of the subject being 'taught'.

In my previous entry I concluded my introduction with the hook that not only had schools been underserving their students but that this was a long-standing problem, one that has lasted generations, one that was as true in Socratic and Aristotelean instruction as it in the history or economics lecture or in the third grade social studies or mathematics class.

To stay with the simple two idea improvement system I started with, I am claiming that we almost always lose good learning from students and always the maximal learning of which they are capable unless we start them at the point in learning topic that builds on what they know but begins teaching at the lowest level which they don't know (This is one description of "teaching a student at her/his readiness level"). We have a similar loss of learning if we don't watch closely to see if learning is occuring and adjust our lessons until learning is maximized.

Those two ideas, if implemented, have a major, positive effect. Those two ideas can be implemented in large group learning situations. Those two ideas are, when we speak of the typical school, ignored totally or only given infrequent and minimal lip service.

Why? For starters, because: Schools attempt to do too many things beside teach, because elaborate, child-blaming explanations have been constructed which mask the systemic, "true" causes of nonlearning, because in the welter of destinies schools are being asked to pursue a system of cause and effect for classroom learning is rarely agreed upon, because there is no reward or recognition for the teacher who actually teaches all of her or his students-- and little to no consequence if she doesn't.