We are now moving at warp speed into a new way to educate and assess people. It is now more about communication, process, intuition and cooperation. It is no longer about isolation of the smart from the not so smart. Nor is it about how much knowledge can be poured into a kids’ head and then they get to win, because it is not a competition.
I would even question if what we do can be measured. I remember in Denver Public Schools how we would spend literally tens of thousands of dollars per year writing proficiency tests and giving them and grading them, but even the good tests always felt kind of fake. We are working so hard to quantify learning and I can see how that can be done in math, but not in languages. Not really. Uhhh…..no.
Language acquisition is not about intellectual development or about measurable gains. People process languages in such different ways at such different speeds! Language is far from an intellectual thing, it is much more than that.
Indeed, can the intellect be used to learn a language? Krashen has made a convincing argument that it cannot. He has shown that just the deeper mind can do that magic. So it’s not about what students have attained intellectually, it is about their process. It’s about the how and not the what. The what counted in the last century of language learning, and look what happened. Nobody learned a thing.
The new education is about give and take, and back and forth human sharing. That is what will appear behind the tsunami of data collection and testing that we are in now, when the data tsunami finally crashes in on itself, as it must.
We cannot possibly continue to test kids when most of them are unmotivated in the first place. What is up with that? The kid doesn’t even want to be in the class, his perception of life prevents his being motivated, and yet we test the kid as if he is in fact motivated. I just see that as messed up. In fact, the entire data collection thing is sick. It feels sick because it is sick. It’s the work of robots.
To what conclusions did all the data that Krashen collected – and that is a truckload of data – lead him? They led him straight to the idea that language is a reciprocal and participatory process that is an unconscious one and therefore it can’t be measured. All that work he did for all those years led him to state that the brain orders languages in ways that the analytical mind cannot possibly understand. They led him to explore about how we feel when we learn a language.
This movement away from mind and into the heart was written about by Blaise Pascal when he said, «Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point» (“The heart has its reasons that the mind cannot know.”) I like that line. It gives me hope. I don’t want to live in a world where even my students’ proficiency gains determine my success as a teacher. I want to measure my students’ gains in terms of how many smiles they showed in class that day. I want a smile counter in my classes. That’s my idea of real data gathering. St. Exupery gets evoked at this point in these kinds of discussions..
I think that we may have progressed to the point in our Krashen-based instruction that we can now avoid wasting time with pointless, almost absurd, data collection when anyone with half a brain can just walk into a classroom and, by looking at and listening to the kids, see if anything is going on in their noggins.
Let’s take that a little further. I propose that we now base all our research and our evaluation of teachers and what has been learned and all that stuff not on costly data-gathering systems, but rather on whether the students and the teacher feel that they are accomplishing good things together, whether they would report that their time in class is well spent, and whether they are happy together or not. It’s not such a far-fetched idea.
Now comes the time for Krashen’s ideas to not be crushed by the robotic minds who don’t like what he says anymore. Many teachers and researchers have whined about him long enough and they are starting to look stupid. The book companies are really going to have a hard time with this change. Krashen’s work, though housed in theory and data, points far beyond it to a new way of being human, to a new way of how humans interact, which is a primary function of language.
If we are to reinvent ourselves as a people, and learn the Christ-like qualities of feeling oneness with others, of simple human respect, of opposing poverty as per Krashen, then we must learn to assess our kids in a way that is more grand, more human, more authentic about what is really going on in the classroom.
Conclusion 1: The world is about competition. But in competition some children lose and even those who win end up losing, because they learn by winning that they can put others down, be better than others, and that leads to exploitation of others as adults, and to what we have now. I want to teach cooperation, not competition.
Conclusion 2: We are no longer in an age where the intellect is in charge. In the future we must learn intuition and trust with others. Google has taken care of the need to fill our brains with information. Now we must learn how to interact with others and work from a basis of common trust. I will assess my students’ ability to cooperate and interact with me and it will be part of their grade. I no longer worship the intellect. That’s 20th c. stuff.