The future of education and education systems has been very much top of mind recently — between debates over universal school vouchers on the state level and conversations about getting rid of the U.S. Education Department.
Ida Rose Florez, an author and educational psychologist, has worked in education for years and believes there does need to be change. Rose Florez lays out her ideas in her new book called "The End of Education as We Know It: Regenerative Learning for Complex Times," which came out earlier this year.
Rose Florez joined The Show to talk more about this.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: It kind of seems like to some extent you're advocating kind of blowing up the education system in this country. Would you say that's a fair assessment?
IDA ROSE FLOREZ: Well, I, no, I don't actually, want people to blow up the system. In fact, I talk about this in my book and I, I, I talk about the role of disruption. And we don't actually need to invest our energies at this point in time in disruption because education as we know it is on the verge of collapse.
We got a little taste of that during COVID. We started to see that there's, you know, not only cracks in the system, but that the system wasn't able to handle the complexity that it was experiencing. And you know, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the COVID-19 pandemic was not an anomaly.
It was, it came from the complexity of having, you know, so many billions of people on the Earth and we're so much more connected and so when you have individuals connected, that's what generates complexity.
And so my argument in the book is that not only are our systems, they're just not capable of, and they were never intended to handle the level of complexity that we have in our world right now, but they're also structured in such a way that we're not educating people to be able to handle the complexity that we are experiencing in our world.
BRODIE: Well, so given the fact that I, I don't want to say everybody, but most people I would imagine, want every child to have an education and to have a high quality education. And yet, as you're saying, the system really isn't capable and it wasn't built for handling this many kids. Like what do we do about that?
FLOREZ: Well, you know, it, it's not necessarily the number of kids. I mean, just think about it, we have these really complex issues that we're facing in the world. So, homelessness, the, the lack of affordable housing, inequities in wealth, and, and then we have, you know, we're we're on the tail end of, of, I mean, COVID is still with us, but now, you know, we're thinking about the bird flu, you know, and how might that spread. So there's all of these complex phenomena.
That we're facing and yet we're structured for the Industrial Revolution. So we're structured to create, the educational system is structured to create a workforce that's educated just enough to be able to work in factories and to throw switches and to follow directions and to not think critically, and yet that's not what we need in order to address the issues that we're facing in our society and around the world.
BRODIE: Is this a deficit in schools teaching students like how to learn and how to think?
FLOREZ: So, you know, I'm really glad you, you raised that issue because a lot of people will say, well, schools are teaching kids what to think but not how to think. That's really a very dangerous misconception because we as human beings, like, you know, I walked in here today and you offered me the seat, but I already knew where I needed to sit because what we psychologists call affordances in the environment tell me what to do.
And so if you just look at the structure of schools, they are structured as factories. I talk in the book a lot about separating, sorting and sequencing and go through all the ways that we separate, sort and sequence kids and knowledge and adults in schools that's very artificial and is not related at all to the way we actually live our lives.
And the thing that's kind of troubling about this is all that separating sorting and sequencing, like the idea that we need to have kids in 1st grade, 2nd grade, 3rd grade. There is no evidence from the learning sciences or from developmental science that, that supports kids learning at all. In fact, we have evidence that intergenerational learning and cross-age learning is far more effective than separating, sorting, and then, of course, sequencing through the grades.
So what is going on there and what's going on is that it's structured so that from a very young age we have humans that are used to standing in line, used to going to the bathroom when someone else tells them to, that are used to, you know, just following someone else's directions in a very piecemeal sort of way.
That is teaching how to think, just the experiences. You don't need a textbook, you don't need a curriculum, you actually don't need any education dollars. You just need to structure your days so that it's this sliced and diced experience.
BRODIE: But as you're saying, that doesn't really necessarily teach students how to figure out what to do about water scarcity or how to, as you reference, you know, come up with more housing or more affordable housing.
It sounds like what you're saying is schools are doing a good job of teaching people, teaching kids how to sort of get on in the world and live in the world, but they're not really teaching them how to maybe change the world or how to solve the problems in the world.
FLOREZ: So you're right, and, and schools do an excellent job. You know, you hear a lot of, kind of the, the large sound bite level about how schools are failing, but actually our education system has been phenomenally successful. I would say in excess of 95% of adults that are living, breathing, working right now in the United States went through industrialized education. And it created this workforce.
I mean, the industrial revolution was successful because of that workforce, but it was not always, you know, we can't say that that's always a humane way of educating people, but now we have to grapple with, it's now, it's also now obsolete.
BRODIE: So, if the current model isn't working, what would be a better one?
FLOREZ: Well, there are a lot of examples, for example, the Circle School back in, in Boston, there's Verde Valley School, which is, you know, up in the Verde Valley really close to Sedona. There are lots of examples of these little pockets of doing school in a whole new way.
So I define in my book, in the very first chapter, I say, look, you know, I, I, I wanna just get the reader to be thinking in more open terms. I define school as any place set aside for learning of any kind, for any age of people and usually that's a group, but it could even be an individual. And so as we, if we do that, we start the process of being open to whole new ways of doing school.
And so, you know, if you start to think about schools as places where learning happens, as opposed to, I often talk about, you know, if you sliced the top off of any elementary, middle school or high school, if, if you were flying over in a plane and you slice the top, it would look like an egg crate inside. That's our mindset about what school is and yet it doesn't have to be at all.
BRODIE: As opposed to like going to a museum or going to a farm or it sounds like in your mind going literally anywhere where somebody can learn something.
FLOREZ: Yes, so I specifically talk about how, you know, in this model, museums are schools and Wild Heart Farm, which is, you know, about 2 hours north of, maybe not 2 hours, of Phoenix is a school, you know, and how, you know, a scout troop meeting in somebody's garage could be thought of as a school.
So when we start to think about that, these pockets of education and what our current school buildings could become, you know, when you talked first about blowing up the system, I actually don't want to blow up the system. I do want to blow up, although I don't like the violence of that, but I do want to blow up people's mindsets about what school could be.
BRODIE: I want to ask you about that because just thinking about what you're saying from a parent's perspective, it sounds awfully scary to be the one to sort of send your your student to potentially be a guinea pig at some at a school that in, in a parent's mind might be a little bit outside the box or maybe really outside the box because to your point, it's not what has been done in this country for decades.
FLOREZ: So, I would suggest to you that when you send your children to our current way of doing school, you're sending them to be guinea pigs with what is only a very recent experiment in how people learn, and we have lots of casualties from those experiments. And I, I talk about that in the book, from my own experience and from what I've seen with students, my own kids, but, you know, if you think about, you know, you said, “well, we've been doing this for decades.”
Well, you take decades and you, you know, put that against the long history of humanity and the truth is, is that industrialized education has only been around for a blip, and it is a huge experiment and we are living with a lot of the consequences, which are that people don't know how to think in complex ways.
BRODIE: Well, it sounds like the, the problem that you're identifying and maybe the solution also is really I, I'm gonna say twofold, but it might be more than two, in terms of how do you go from the system we have to the system you're envisioning? And then how do you convince people, parents, students, policymakers that this is the right approach as opposed to the approach that everybody is familiar with and as you pointed out, a lot of us have gone through?
FLOREZ: Well, that transition, I think, is already happening. So, you know, part of the, the what I see as the weaponization of education or making it a wedge issue, you know, when we talk about how funding streams are used for schooling. We see far more people who want school choice, and we immediately ideologically think that that's only a conservative perspective, but that's not, hasn't been my experience.
My experience has been that people across political ideological spectrums want different ways of doing school with their kids, want more flexibility. And so what I see happening, and I do think that this is the way that most change happens, is I see kind of islands of little pockets of these changes coming up and schools learning to to shift.
In, in the beginning of my book I talk about visiting a preschool on Maui where I used to live. And the way that they do school in this Hawaiian language immersion, it's not just Hawaiian language, it's Hawaiian culture, cultural immersion preschool, and they have many of those schools and of course, in the, in the ‘70s when those schools first started early ‘80s, there were just a couple, but now that movement has just really taken off across Hawaii. So I see the same thing happening in different places around the country, like I mentioned some of the schools earlier.
BRODIE: Do you find that these kinds of changes tend to happen sort of from the bottom up, as opposed to policymakers in a city or state or even at the federal level saying, “OK, we're gonna try something a little bit different. Here's some money, go do it.”
FLOREZ: I think it can happen both ways, but, you know, all of the schools that I can think of that, are functioning in this way have come about by groups of parents or it might be, you know, some visionary in a local community organizing things and it catching on and people saying, “oh, wow, I really want my kid to experience that. I want them to be immersed in, in that way of learning and thinking.”
