posted February 19, 2009 06:58 PM            

Thomas Jefferson was arguably one of the most well-educated Americans of his time. He was well-read, thoughtful, knowledgeable in a wide variety of topics from the arts to the sciences,and the founder of the University of Virginia. The same could probably be said of Ben Frankllin, or James and Dolly Madison. On the larger world stage, we could credibly make such claims for Rene Descartes, William Shakespeare, Galileo, Michelangelo, and Plato.

Buter this one thing unique about the education of all these people, which is different from that of you, me, and our children: none ever were given grades. All attended schools or had teachers who worked entirely on a pass/fail system.

The model of education from its earliest times was one of mentorship, starting with hunter-gatherers taking children out on the hunt 100,000 years ago, all the way up to the teaching methods employed at the university founded by Thomas Jefferson. The teacher and the students got know one another. They interacted constantly throughout the day. The teacher knew each child, had a clear vision of each child's understanding of the coursework, and worked with each child (or encouraged them to work with each other) until the teacher was satisfied each child understood the material...or was hopelessly incapable of being educated. Because this latter was virtually an admission of failure on the part of the teacher, it happened rarely.

When a student graduated, the most impressive thing she or he could share with prospective employer was not a Grade Point Average (GPA) or even the name of the institution attended: it was the name of the teacher. Students of the great teachers of history often became famous themselves because of thoroughness with which their mentors had inculcated knowledge, understanding, skill, and talen in them.

This is how things went from 98,000 BC to roughly 1800 AD. Then name Wailliam Farish.

Around the turn of the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution was going full-bore. Piece-work payments were becoming increasingly popular, and many schools were beginning to pay teachers based on the number of students they had, as opposed to a flat salary.

William Farish

William Farish was a tutor at Cambridge University in England in 1792, and, other than his single contribution to the subsequent devastation of generations of schoolchildren, is otherwise undistinguished and unknown by most people.

Getting to know his students, one may suppose, was too much trouble for Parish. It meant work, interacting and participating daily with each child. It meant paying attention to their needs, to their understanding, to their styles of learning. It mean there was a limit on the number of students he could thus get to know, and therefore a limit on how much money he could earn.

So Farish came up with a method of teaching which would allow him to process more students in a shorter period of time. He invented grades. (The grading system had originated earlier in the factories, as a way of determining if the shoes, for example, made on the assembly line were "up to grade." It was used as a benchmark to determine if the workers should be paid, and if the shoes could be sold.)

Grades did not make students smarter. In fact, they had the opposite effect: they made it harder for those children to succeed who style of learning didn't match the didactic, auditory form of lecture-teaching Farish used.

Grades didn't give students deeper insights into their topics of study. Instead, grades forced children to memorize by rote only those details necessary to pass the tests, without regard to true comprehension of the subject matter.

Grades didn't encourage critical thinking or insight skills, didn't promote questioning minds. Such behaviors are useless in the graded classroom, and within a few generations were considered so irrelevant that today they're no longer listed among the goals of public education.

Grades didn't stimulate the students, or share with them a contagious love for the subject being studied. The opposite happened, in fact, as the normative effect of grades acted as a muffling blanket to any eruptions of enthusiasm, any attempts to dig deeper into a topic, any discursions into larger significance or practical application of content.

What grades did do, however, was increase the salary of William Farish, while, at the same time, lowering his workload and reducing the hours he needed to burrow into his students' minds to know if they understood a topic: his grading system would do it for him. And it would do it just as efficiently for twenty children as it would for two hundred.

Farish brought grades to the classroom, and the transformation was both sudden and startling: a revolution as rapid and overwhelming as the Industrial Revolution from which it had sprung. Within a generation, the lecture-hall/classroom shifted from a place where on heard the occasional speech by a famous thinker to the place of ordinary daily instruction.

While grades didn't help students a bit--and, in fact, had the now well-known effect of "dumbing down" entire nations--they vastly simplified the work of teachers and schools. So they spread across Europe and to America with startling speed, arriving here in early 1800s.

Without grades, the assembly-line-classroom would not be possible. With grades, whole categories of children were discovered who didn't fit onto the conveyer belt, providing an entire new realm of employment for adults who would diagnose, treat, and remediate these newly-discovered "learning disabled" children.

Responsibility for the success of learning shifted from teachers to students: when kids failed, it was their own fault, because they obviously had a defect or disorder of some sort.

A processs of sorting and discarding the misfits began (just like in the shoe factory) which, to this day, rewards the "standard" and wounds the "different."

William Farish gained, but something precious was lost to generations of students thereafter: the mentored learning experience.

Research by Child Development Theorist Linda Kreger Silverman suggests that less than 30% of the population strongly uses visual/spatial thinking, another 45% uses both visual/spatial thinking and thinking in the form of words, and 25% thinks exclusively in words. According to Kreger Silverman, of the 30% of the general population who use visual/spatial thinking, only a small percentage would use this style over and above all other forms of thinking, and can be said to be 'true' "picture thinkers"

Accoring to L.K.Silverman's research for over two decades, there is a high confidence (over 80%) that:

* At least one-third are strongly visual-spatial.
* One-fifth are strongly auditory-sequential.
* The remainder are a balance of both learning styles.

Of that remainder (who are not strongly visual-spatial nor strongly auditory-sequential):

* Another 30% show a slight preference for visual-spatial learning style.
* Another 15% show a slight preference for auditory-sequential learning style.

This means that more than 60% of the students in a regular classroom learn best with visual-spatial presentations and the rest learn best with auditory-sequential methods. http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Visual_thinking

To sum is up, schools use to be all about mentoring, one-on-on interaction between the student and teaching,adapting to the student's learning style. There were no grades which were based on factory systems. They were pass/fail. Mainstream schools involve auditory lecturing teaching, but it is only suitable for less than 40 percent of students in the regular classroom. If schools were like the schools before the 1800, the diagnosess of learning disabled,ADHD as well as the dropout rate would be considerably smaller. To address the students that are truly learning disabled (or should I say learning differenced),there are special education therapies that can address those things like auditory therapy,speech therapy,motor skills therapy. That's what special education programs are for. They are not just for children that are mentally retarded.

Raymond