Back to the Future

Back to the Future

When the need of educating baby boomers met with the turn of the 20th Century's Science of Management, traditional educational systems were born.

 http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/classical-scientific-school-of-management.html

This traditional educational system was meant to identify efficiently the proficiency at specific skills for large numbers of students. For what it does, it was scientifically refined to do well (for as such, it is modified until it does do it well). Two people who's work can be thought of as seminal in the traditional method are: behaviorist B.F. Skinner (operant conditioning) and E.L. Thorndike (conceiver of puzzle boxes and multiple choice assessment). Certainly these individuals contributed far more to the fields of psychology and to education than the tags being associated with their names.  However, for the purposes of this writing, these are terms of focus.  

Class size in a traditional 20th century classroom is 20-30 students. There are studies which suggest that the 21st century classroom student can benefit from class sizes 20-30% smaller. But what then is to be made of the claim that achievement gains can be made by opening a school's walls and letting students connect to the world via the internet? The perception is that students in a traditional educational setting may not be well served by techniques which are designed to work efficiently for groups of a specific size.  Take for instance the Hatchery Model example where chicks are sorted by gender by a few trained experts.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v_I9fnDbTs

A small number of experts can sort and meet the needs of a reasonably large number of baby chicks using specific processing techniques. But what if the number of chicks being processed increases, or the number of experts doing the processing grows, to the point where the needs of individual chicks are not met or not respected? To that end, the traditional methods of processing need to be modified or replaced to address any identified inadequacies (assuming that no chick should be left behind, so-to-speak).

The upshot of all of this being, that changes meant to improve a scientific management system are (by design) made relative to the system that exists. Thus to get to the future (scientifically speaking), we must confront and scrutinize the past.