What does/should Education look like?

Today, I observed another teacher's class, and it reminded me of some concerns I have about education broadly--not just specific to me/my program, but the way schools are structured. So this entry is perhaps to be a bit more philosophical, but I think it's of critical importance, at least to me, as I prepare to take my place in the American education system as we know it.

So, what I observed--I sat in on a 9th grade history class, as they worked on crafting a piece of historical fiction. Students started out the class by thinking about setting, and the class developed into a writing/illustrating (they were making posters to go with their compositions) workshop. Perhaps the students were learning quite a bit by thinking about a realistic, historically accurate character, and perhaps they weren't--it's hard for me to say, based on the single lesson I observed. That's not really the point of my inquiry, though, because what other teachers--English teachers--had to say about his lesson surprised me.

"Is this you fulfilling your long lost dream of being an English teacher?" they joked.

The teacher who led the lesson also offers an elective course called "military history" that investigates the wars in which the US has participated through reading and writing short stories as well as historical texts, which makes sense to me, because it provides a space that is desperately needed and, in my experience, rarely actualized, for content-area reading instruction. Students learn to read history books vs. short stories. He called it a "hybrid" English/History course.

Because of the importance of reading/writing to History (really, to all disciplines), I was really surprised by the English teachers' comments, good-natured as they were, because they revealed a real compartmentalization, even in the minds of educators, of education. But this isn't the first I've seen of this.

My mentor teacher frequently says things like "this is about as math-y as we're going to get in an English class" (when talking about syllogisms and formal logic) and "That looks like shapes and numbers, put it away, you're in English class," to which the student replied, "It's not math, it's physics," to which my mentor replied, "That's even worse, that's math, shapes, and science!" (When a student was working on physics homework during her English class). I'm certainly not saying that she should be more willing to teach math, or that she should let students work on other subjects while in her class--I'm simply pointing out the clear delineation of what "is" and "is not" English, History, Math, Science, etc.

And I was put in mind of some of the comments I heard two weeks ago from students when I was presenting my lesson to introduce them to the Enlightenment and the American Revolution, and I asked them to think of people/ideas/events that they knew of that related to this time period. I remember one student objecting, "Why do we have to do this? We're not in History class! I'm bad at history!"

But History and English are so related! And science and math, too, in various ways, to say nothing of the "non-accademic" disciplines, the arts, music, etc. All of these disciplines inform how we understand the others; without understanding quantifiable methods of determining value, the lists Thoreau makes in Walden mean nothing to us; the idea of Frost's "two roads diverged in a yellow wood...I took the one less traveled by," which asks us to consider the relationships between values of quantity and quality, would be meaningless, and the comparison wouldn't be there; without science, what would "The Birthmark" mean, how could it exist, or how could Frankenstein? So if we can clearly see the way we use information from all disciplines to make sense of the information we're asked to analyze in any one classroom, why do we insist on these delineation's?

Sir Ken Robinson, with the RSA, gives a much more articulate critique of American education than I can do justice. This video is super interesting and really made me think about why our schools are the way they are, why they're structured this way, and how they end up functioning:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

For those of you not watching the video, what he argues is that the American school system is currently set up in the image of industrialization, producing "educated students" in batches, treating students as automatons, and knowledge as a single product that can be given to individual students, and then they simply have it (I think his critique comes close to the "transmission model" of education, where teachers have "truth" and can transmit it to students, eg through lectures and readings).

I think his critiques are really smart, and I think the relationship between the various disciplines--how they rely on one another and overlap--is some of the strongest evidence of the need to change the paradigm of the American school. But I have a really hard time imagining what the alternatives might look like. The closest I can come up with is something more like college, where students are allowed to excel at what they're good at--reading, preforming, calculating, etc--while collaborating with one another to enrich each other's understandings. But how do you group them? Surely you need to group them somehow? Age/grade level? Area in which they excel (which again presents the problem of how you determine/separate subjects/disciplines)? Some totally random/arbitrary grouping, so they have a diversity of peers to collaborate with? I'm at a loss...

So I know things need to change, but I'm also becoming a part of the paradigm, and I'm struggling with how I might challenge it in my classroom, without hurting my students chances in the world which is structured with the understanding of the current paradigm in mind (students have to have grades, for example, and be able to pass tests on grammar/vocab/reading comprehension--otherwise how will they get into college/get hired? Or maybe this doesn't necessarily follow...?)

But, I think what I observed today was the beginning of a slight paradigm shift, even if it's only on a small scale. The lines between two disciplines are being intentionally blurred. So that's a start, right? And I can certainly do that in my classroom by incorporating a variety of texts and allowing students to produce a variety of texts, and to collaborate with one another (and with other classes?). Hopefully these ideas are getting at something valuable--any thoughts?