Minimalism in Education






 * "Less is more." (Frequently used adage. Often stated as, "More is less. Less is more.")


 * “I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter." (Blaise Pascal; French mathematician, physicist, religious philosopher, and prodigy; 1623–1662.)

Introduction
A great many people—and our overall educational system—suffer from information overload. In some sense, this is nothing new. Reading and writing were first developed more than 5,000 years ago to help deal with the steadily growing amount of information. Of course, reading and writing also helped to increase the rate of growth and accumulation of information, and so have been a two-edged sword.

More is Definitely Better, in Terms of Educating More People
Sometimes more is better, and sometimes it isn't. On average, throughout the world, we are living at a time where more and better education definitely is better.

Our steadily growing accumulation of information has contributed to a steadily growing value for people to learn to make use of this information. The 1959 United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child states in Principle 7:


 * The child is entitled to receive education, which shall be free and compulsory, at least in the elementary stages. He shall be given an education which will promote his general culture and enable him, on a basis of equal opportunity, to develop his abilities, his individual judgment, and his sense of moral and social responsibility, and to become a useful member of society.


 * The best interests of the child shall be the guiding principle of those responsible for his education and guidance; that responsibility lies in the first place with his parents.


 * The child shall have full opportunity for play and recreation, which should be directed to the same purposes as education; society and the public authorities shall endeavor to promote the enjoyment of this right.

This is a very important and widely supported statement that "more is better." The more children who get a basic education, the better it will be for our children and for our world.

If one measures the world's success in education by the average level of education of the people of the world, then we are now more successful than at any time in the past. We have achieved this success mainly through the formal education of a larger percentage (that is is, more) of the earth's population and by increasing the average level of this education (more education per person).

Some Other Types of "More" Are Not Necessarily Better
Over the past century or so, the educational system in the United States and in a number of other countries has addressed the information overload problem by steadily increasing the number of years of required education and the amount of content in this required education. In the U.S., we have established local, state, and national standards in an attempt to push the boundaries of what we expect of our students.

We are able to see increases in test scores when we increase the hours of schooling by requiring more hours of schooling per day, requiring more days of schooling per year, and requiring more years of schooling for each student. Individual people add to this "more hours" approach by providing many hours of structured religious studies, music lessons, after-school programs, weekend programs, summer school classes and programs, etc.

These approaches to increasing the total hours of schooling are all based on a "more is better" theory of education. The current "increased accountability through increased assessment" approach being taken on state and national testing is pushing much of this "more" into a relatively few discipline areas that are deemed more important. Reading and math are now considered to be so important that time should be taken from other disciplines in order to try to increase test scores in these two areas.

Thus our current educational philosophy contains a strong component of "more is better," both in terms of school time and in terms of concentrating more educational effort on a very few disciplines.

Many people argue that these two "more" types of approaches are not better in terms of overall goals of education. This IAE-pedia page explores various aspects of a type of minimalism in education that says in a variety of situations "less might well be better."

Totality of Accumulated Information
The totality of collected human knowledge is both huge and is growing quite rapidly. Perhaps you have seen estimates that this total is doubling in ten years or less. Or, perhaps you have seen comments about specific areas such as brain science, with the claim that the total knowledge in the field is doubling every five years.

Other related data is the total size of the Web, or the total amount of data that is being collected and stored on computers each year.

There is far more information added to the Web (including the changes to the current Web content) each day than a person could read in a lifetime. And, as you know, lots of the world's accumulated knowledge is not (yet) available on the Web.

Here are some Web statistics:


 * A January 2008 study indicated that there were 155,583,825 sites on the Web.


 * An August 1, 2008 report indicated that the Web contains more than a trillion pages.


 * The official Google Blog reported on 7/25/08:


 * We've known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we've seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days—when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!

As of 12/13/08, American Educational Research Association Special Interest Group for Communication of Research  lists about 253 open access electronic education journals that are scholarly, peer reviewed, and accessible without cost. These are in a variety of languages, but English dominates. The Directory of Open Access Journals lists 1,330 journals that are searchable at the article level.

The above examples illustrate the rapid growth in information that is available to people via the Web. This explosive growth of information available on the Web will likely continue for many years to come. One can argue that more information (on the Web) is better. However, one can also argue that it both adds to information overload and increases the difficulty a person has in finding the specific information they need or want to find.

For example, what and how much information do we want to make available to students entering the first grade? Many (perhaps most) people would argue that more is not better. Rather, less information—but of higher quality and written at an appropriate reading level—is better. This situation presents a huge challenge to our educational system.

Some Education Background
Bloom's Taxonomy and a Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom, Foresight Scale are key aspects of the discussion presented in the rest of this document. Bloom's Taxonomy was published in 1956. It is a lower-order to higher-order taxonomy of educational objectives with six levels: Knowledge; Comprehension; Application; Analysis; Synthesis; and Evaluation. When Bloom and his colleagues were developing this taxonomy for use in analyzing higher education curriculum, they noted that quite a bit of the curriculum was at the knowledge (memorize and recall data or information) level.

Since Bloom's time, the term Knowledge has been redefined in its general usage, so that the first level (the left end) of the taxonomy is more accurately called the Data & Information level.



Benjamin Bloom's 1956 Taxonomy



Arthur C. Clarke's Cognitive Understanding Scale.

The Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom, Foresight Scale (which I shall henceforth call the Clarke Scale) is a slight expansion of the ideas in the  following quote from Arthur C. Clarke:


 * "Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all." (Arthur C. Clarke; British author, inventor, and futurist; 1917-2008.)

The document you are currently reading argues that our educational system will be considerably improved by placing less emphasis on the lower ends of Bloom's Taxonomy and the Clarke Scale, and gain better insight on how computers can replace much of the current educational emphasis at these lower-order levels. That is, the argument is that less emphasis on the left ends of the two scales given above is better.

Data and Information—and Computers
In everyday conversations, the terms data, information, knowledge, wisdom, are used rather loosely. Sometimes the term information is used to refer to the combination of data, information, and knowledge. Thus, when people talk about information overload, they often mean that they have access to an overwhelming amount of data, information, and knowledge.

Bloom's Taxonomy puts data and information at the bottom of its scale. It describes this type of learning as rote memory with relatively little understanding.

For example, we can have students memorize statements such as, "In 1492, Columbus discovered America." A student can use this memorized information to answer questions such as, "Who discovered America?" and "When did Columbus discover America?" Of course, students have been asked to memorize incorrect information, since in 1492 America was already well populated and the initial process of populating America may well have occurred more than 20,000 years earlier. Also, Columbus was not the first European to sail the Atlantic to reach America. The Vikings had accomplished this about 500 years earlier.

This example suggests the folly of placing heavy emphasis in education on memorizing isolated bits of data and information (that may or may not be correct).

Of course, there is a larger difficulty inherent to an educational system that places a high emphasis on Level 1 of Bloom's Taxonomy. The larger difficulty is the limitations of the human brain. Humans are relatively slow at rote memory, and they tend to forget much of what is memorized unless they use it relatively frequently.

You might ask, "How much data and information has been collected and stored?" It is clear that the total amount of data that people have collected and stored is growing very rapidly. For example, the Large Hadron Collider that first began operation in 2008 is expected to produce about 15 million gigabytes (a gigabyte is a billion bytes) of data per year. If this data were printed into novel-length books, that would be about 15 billion books of data a year.

The Large Hadron Collider data is processed by computers, producing information (facts). An example of such information might be that a particular collision event was detected with an average occurrence rate of once per 14 hours of data collection. Many different "facts" can be extracted from the data being collected.

Human analysis and further computer analysis of such pieces of information may contribute to increased evidence to support or disprove various existing theories, and to the development of new theories. This contributes to the steady accumulation of human knowledge.

The point being made here is that computer systems are very capable at collecting, storing, and processing data. The processing of data can lead to the production of information that can also be stored and processed by computers, and that information can also be processed by humans.

In addition, humans can collect and store data and information from many and varied sources into computers. Thus, the totality of data and information stored in computer systems is both huge and is growing very rapidly. You probably encounter evidence of this from time to time as you use a search engine such as Google to search the Web. It is easy to design searches that come up with millions of hits. This situation in one aspect of Information Overload.

Human and Computer Knowledge
You may have noticed that we are working our way up the Clarke Scale. Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight.

The Christopher Columbus example given earlier contained the four digits 1492. All by itself, 1492 can be considered as a piece of data. It might be a house address, the population of a town, the answer to an arithmetic computation problem, or an identification number for a person participating in an experiment.

Consider the statement, "Christopher Columbus sailed from Europe to America in 1492." This is a statement of some information. In this sentence, 1492 is a piece of data referring to a year in a particular calendar system. It is an incorrect statement if one happens to be using the Chinese calendar.

The Columbus sailing information becomes knowledge as the learner gains insight into a huge range of topics such as the fact that America had been settled probably 20,000 years earlier, that sailing across the Atlantic Ocean was a major and dangerous challenge, that the earth is roughly spherical, that the Gregorian calendar is being used, and so on. Some historians spend their careers learning about what Europe and America were like during the time of Christopher Columbus. Other people spend their careers on topics such as the spread of disease from Europe to America, the gradual improvements in ocean transportation, and so on. That is, there is a huge amount of collected data, information, and knowledge that relates to 1492.

You can see that as we move up Clarke's scale, the complexity or challenge of learning for understanding and critical thinking increases.

Writing and reading (first developed more than 5,000 years ago) are very powerful technological aids to the storage and retrieval of data, information, and knowledge. The development of printing using movable type (by the Chinese between 1041 and 1048, the Koreans in about 1230, and Johannes Gutenberg around 1450) greatly increased the availability and accessibility of collected data, information, and knowledge.

Historically, people believed that gaining, storing, and using knowledge was a special human trait. As computers first became available, they were used to process data and they were considered to be data processing machines.

As data processing machines, they were designed for the input, storage, processing, and retrieval of data. The processing of raw data could produce information that was used in business tasks such as payroll, and in military tasks such as developing firing tables for artillery ammunition and guns.

As the information production powers of computers increased, many Computer Science departments changed their names to Computer and Information Science.

With continuing improvements in computer capabilities and progress in the field of Computer and Information Science, it has become clear that computers can process information to produce knowledge. Now, the frontiers of the field of Computer and Information Science include a number of examples of computer systems analyzing information to produce knowledge that can then be acted upon (used) by computers and by humans. The ACM Special Interest Group on Knowledge and Data Mining was established in 1998. Think about what is happening. In many ways, computers far exceed human capabilities in collecting and processing data. Computers can also store data collected by humans and other non-computer systems. Computers can process data into information. Humans can add information collected by other means. Thus, the total amount of data and information available to computers is both huge and growing rapidly.

Computers are now getting better at processing information into knowledge, and also at storing and making use of knowledge developed by humans. Computer systems are getting better both in processing this knowledge and in making effective use of the knowledge. Here is a brief summary of this discussion of computers and of data, information, and knowledge.


 * Computer systems are getting better at storing, processing, and outputting or making use of data, information, and knowledge.
 * People, non-computers, and computers are adding to the store of data, information, and knowledge, with computers and computerized equipment becoming a larger and larger contributor.
 * The steady improvements in computer hardware and software (for example, computer programs written by people), and underlying theory (such as the fields of artificial intelligence, databases, computer graphics, and networking) are leading to Information and Communication Technology (ICT) systems increasingly intruding on and/or competing with humans.

Wisdom
Here is a definition of wisdom from the Encarta® World English Dictionary © 1999 Microsoft Corporation:


 * The knowledge and experience needed to make sensible decisions and judgments, or the good sense shown by the decisions and judgments made;
 * Accumulated knowledge of life or in a particular sphere of activity that has been gained through experience.

Robert Sternberg is a world class researcher, educator, and writer in the field of intelligence. In recent years, Robert Sternberg has taken the position that wisdom can and should be taught in schools, even at the elementary school level.


 * Sternberg, Robert J. (November 13, 2002). Teaching for Wisdom in Our Schools. Education Week. Accessed 11/15/02: http://www.edweek.com/ew/ewstory.cfm?slug=11sternberg.h22. Quoting from his article:


 * When schools teach for wisdom, they teach students that it is important not just what you know, but how you use what you know--whether you use it for good ends or bad. They are teaching for what the Bush administration referred to recently, in a White House conference, as the "fourth R": responsibility. Smart but foolish and irresponsible people, including, apparently, some who run or have run major businesses in our country, exhibit four characteristic fallacies in their thinking.


 * I define wisdom as the application of intelligence and experience toward the attainment of a common good. This attainment involves a balance among (a) intrapersonal (one's own), (b) interpersonal (other people's), and (c) extrapersonal (more than personal, such as institutional) interests, over the short and long terms. Thus, wise people look out not just for themselves, but for all toward whom they have any responsibility.


 * Sternberg, Robert J. (November 13, 2002). Teaching for Wisdom in Our Schools. Education Week. Accessed 11/15/02: http://www.edweek.com/ew/ewstory.cfm?slug=11sternberg.h22.

These definitions and insights can be helpful as we discuss the extent to which a computer system can have wisdom coming from either or both of the following sources:


 * Through the computer processing data, information, and knowledge to produce wisdom.
 * Through humans representing wisdom in a form that can be input for use by a computer system.

Foresight
We want children to receive an education that will help them to become responsible, caring adults who make wise, insightful, and foresightful decisions in their everyday lives, and as they contribute to helping the world to deal with problems such as sustainability.

One way to think of our informal and formal educational system for children is that it provides a safe environment in which to gain foresight. During one's first 25 (or so) years of life, the brain grows and matures so that it is increasingly capable of foresight. It can think about consequences of simple and quite complex actions and the possible consequences of these actions.

It is highly desirable to protect children in and from very dangerous situations where their foresight is poor and their actions or proposed actions can lead to very bad consequences. However, routine over-protection in less dangerous situations may have a negative impact on their gaining in foresight. It is difficult to be a good parent, and it is easy to see that the foresight issue presents a major challenge to schools.

Some "Minimalism" Educational Examples and Challenges

 * "Try to learn something about everything and everything about something." (Thomas Henry Huxley; English biologist, science educator, and evolutionist; 1825–1895.)


 * "Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it." (Samuel Johnson; English author; 1709–1784.)

Please reread the two quotes and think about them. They are fundamental ideas relevant to our current and future educational systems.

Then, think about some places where we spend a lot of time in our informal and formal educational systems, places where it might be better that we spend a lot less time. For me, script handwriting comes to mind. Suppose that this topic were completely dropped from the curriculum. That is, supposed we minimized this part of the school curriculum down to zero. This is a trend that is currently underway.

The replacement would be learning to hand print, learning to keyboard, and learning to do voice input to computer systems. Eventually, the keyboarding part of this replacement will decrease substantially in importance.

And, of course, cursive handwriting can be taught as an art form, in the same way that calligraphy is taught as an art form today.

Henry Huxley
Each individual seeking an education faces the challenge of what to learn. Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/huxley_thomas_henry.shtml was a British biologist and educator. He was a widely recognized scholar, but even back in Huxley's time, it was no longer possible for a person to learn "everything about something" if "something" refers to a major academic discipline. By narrow specialization and many years of hard work, one could perhaps become one of the world's most knowledgeable people in one very specialized aspect of one discipline.

Now, more than a century after Huxley's death, researchers tend to focus on very narrow specializations in order to get to the research frontiers and advance their field of study. Research suggests that it takes 10,000 hours and 10 years or more of intensive study to come close to reaching one's potential in an academic discipline specialization.

The size of the Web suggests that to "learn something about everything" is also far beyond what a student can hope to achieve through our educational system. However, maybe things are not as impossible as they might seem. For example, think about what you know about medicine. This is a huge discipline, and certainly you know something about it. Now, think of a sub-discipline in medicine, such as neurology. Probably you know that it is a branch of medicine. However, perhaps you don't know it is the branch of medicine that deals with the nervous system.

Or, continue further. How about the specialized nerve called a neuron, and so on. The point is that, as you drill down to finer and finer subdivisions of a discipline, you will reach a point at which the "something" that you know is very limited indeed. You can easily encounter new subdivisions in the field and not even know what larger subdivision they are a part of.

So, who cares? How about changing Huxley's statement to suggest that each person should know something about the things that are relevant to his or her life, should have learned to learn, and is open to new learning?

This is a type of minimalism. It provides a doable substitute for learning something about everything. It also provides an alternative to learning everything about something. Thus, we come to Samuel Johnson's suggestion.

Samuel Johnson
The renowned British author and lexicographer Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Johnson lived and died well before Huxley's time. One of his greatest achievements was his nine years of work resulting in the 1755 publication of The Dictionary of the English Language.

Johnson accepted the fact that no one could "know everything about something, not even – or perhaps especially – the English language." The Preface to his dictionary recognizes that this, the first truly comprehensive dictionary of the English language ever compiled, does not include everything:


 * :In this work, when it shall be found that much is omitted, let it not be forgotten that much likewise is performed."

Johnson recognized that any educational system is faced by the challenge of determining what students should store in their brains and what they should learn to retrieve from libraries, people, and other resources.

The Internet and other Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have provided us with new and powerful aids to retrieving information from virtual libraries and from people and places throughout the world. If Johnson were alive today, perhaps he would be a proponent of the open book, open computer, and open Internet tests.

The idea is simple enough. Once people are out of school, they are free to use books, the Internet, and other aids to retrieving and making use of the accumulated knowledge of the human race. Some people are naturally better at this than others. All students, through appropriate instruction and practice, can become better at this type of open, authentic approach to demonstrating and making use of one's informal and formal education.

This is the argument for a type of minimalism that supports learning less, but using the time saved to become much better at effective communication with people and computer systems, and learning to solve problems and accomplish tasks making use of these aids.

Like any suggested change in education, this is not without difficulties and legitimate opposition. Let's take spelling as an example. Spelling is an important component of written communication. It is also an important aspect of reading, since a reader distinguishes one word from another by a combination of things such as its spelling, context, and possible meanings.

If a language is highly phonetic (spells like it sounds), this helps a lot both in learning to spell and in learning to read. If a language is not particularly phonetic, the learner faces greater challenges in learning to read and write.

But remember, the goal is reading for understanding and writing for effective communication. The goal is not correct spelling. If a good substitute for spelling can be developed, it could be used to decrease the emphasis (minimize the emphasis) on memorizing the spelling of words. This substitute would be more useful to some students than to others, since there are large differences in innate spelling giftedness and in the need to spell correctly.

The good news is, we now have relatively good spelling checker software. Related to this, the grammar checker systems also are gradually getting better, as are the voice input systems. All of this technological progress supports a type of minimalism in teaching and learning certain aspects of written communication.

Let's use math problems for another example. What do we want students to memorize with little understanding, what do we want them to memorize and learn with a higher level of understanding, and what do we want them to learn with a sufficiently high level of understanding so that the understanding remains even after the details are forgotten?

The math situation is that we have a huge and steadily growing collection of accumulated mathematical knowledge. How should we make use of the very limited number of hours of formal schooling that are devoted to math education at the K-12 levels? Remember, a major goal in math education is for students to learn to represent problems mathematically and to solve the types of math problems they encounter in and outside of school.

Here, technology has provided very powerful aids. For more than 20 years we have had software that runs on a computer (indeed, on a powerful calculator) that can solve a very wide range of the types of math problems that students encounter up through the first couple of years of college math. This situation provides the opportunity to rethink the contents of the K-12 math curriculum and of the various other disciplines that make use of math.

The type of minimalism that emerges here is a substantial decrease in the teaching of traditional topics in math and a substantial increase in learning to make effective use of calculators and computers as aids to representing and solving math problems. Our math education system has made some movement toward this type of minimalism. It could well be that there is a very large potential for much more movement.

Personal Story from David Moursund
Many years ago, when I first started teaching teachers, I used to write the following quote on the chalkboard at the beginning of the first class meeting:


 * "The goals of education are to teach some facts and to teach students to think using the facts."

I would then ask the class to try to guess who said that. They would make a variety of guesses, but never came up with "Dave Moursund." This was an enjoyable activity and was a good lead-in to discussing possible goals of the course.

Since those long past days, my minimalist goal statement has been slightly enlarged. Now I say:


 * "The goals of education are to help students learn to learn, help students learn some facts, and help students learn to solve problems and accomplish tasks by making use of these facts and their own learning skills."

I am a "computers in education" person. However, note that my minimalist goals of education do not mention computers, information and communication technology, or the Internet. Indeed, the words reading, writing, and arithmetic are not even used.

I am not trying to advocate a "back to basics" form of education. Rather, I think education would be improved if we increased the focus on the big ideas and reduced the fragmentation into the huge number of little ideas that are related to the big ideas.

Nowadays, I further expand on my minimalist statement by discussing ways to improve education. There is a huge amount of literature on school reform. I have written extensively about ways to improve education. So, what might I say in a minute or two that could possibly make any difference?

Well, think as a minimalist. If you are a politician, you might say:


 * "Make school systems and teachers more accountable. Design and implement an accountability system that rewards those who do well and punishes those who do poorly."

This represents a top down approach to defining and solving the "problem" that our schools are not doing as well as they might be doing. There are strong differences of opinion as to whether this type of approach does much good in improving education.

Many years ago I read a book by Seymour Sarason, The Predictable Failure of Educational Reform: Can We Change Course Before It's Too Late. In this book Sarason talks about the need to empower students and their teachers. These ideas have gradually taken root in my mind. Thus, I now strongly believe:


 * The goals of education are to help students learn to learn, help students learn some facts, and help students learn to solve problems and accomplish tasks by making use of these facts and their learning skills. To achieve these goals we need to empower students and their teachers. Empowerment includes learning to make effective use of the "traditional" basics in education and the emerging ICT aids to teaching, learning, and using one's learning.


 * Empowerment is demonstrated by increasing levels of expertise in solving the problems and accomplishing the tasks that one personally wants to deal with and/or that other stakeholder groups feel are important. Thus, for example the collective wisdom of adults insists that students learn reading, writing, and arithmetic to appropriately empower them for adult life in our society.

Certainly, we empower a student by helping the student to gain a useful level of expertise in reading, writing, and arithmetic. We empower a student by helping the student learn to learn, self-assess, make effective use of ICT tools (such as the Web and email), and so on. Substantially more detail on this topic is provided in the Empowering Teachers and Learners entry in this IAE-pedia.

Covering the Book or the Syllabus</Center>
Teachers at all levels and in all disciplines tend to encounter the situation that a course or time for a particular unit of instruction is rapidly nearing its end, while the book or the syllabus is far from being covered. In some sense, the pace of instruction to that point has been governed by a combination of book, syllabus, knowledge and skills of the teacher, and capabilities and interests of the students.

Then a switch occurs. The goal becomes one of coverage rather than one of learning. Less thought is given as to whether students are learning with understanding and in a manner that promotes effective use and long-term retention.

One of the reasons that this is a frequent event in teaching is that the curriculum tends to be too full. The "more is better" philosophy has led to having more and more detail in the standards to be met and the syllabus to be covered. This is a widespread example of where "more is less". There is not enough time to effectively teach the unit, book, or course, and then some of the time is squandered in a relatively useless "coverage" effort.

Some Public Education Network Thoughts
Minimalism is illustrated is in the following quoted material from the 8/17/07 Public Education Network:

SCHOOLS ADVISED TO NARROW FOCUS TO CRUCIAL LESSONS'</Center>
 * Oregon should stop asking schools to teach a laundry list of facts and skills in every subject and instead encourage teachers to focus on crucial lessons with lasting value, a new study recommends. WestEd, a nonprofit research center that specializes in state academic standards and tests, spent nine months examining Oregon's academic standards for every subject and grade plus every question on state tests. The state paid WestEd $350,000 to find weaknesses in its tests and standards and recommend fixes. In its final report, the think tank concluded Oregon should join a new national movement toward "less is more" in curriculum mandates. The state should direct schools, teachers and students toward the most important content for students to master, rather than requiring schools to cover the waterfront, the study recommends. Oregon's current approach to teaching and testing, for instance, calls on fourth-grade teachers to instill 105 new reading and writing skills, including 47 covered on state tests. Those range from "determine the meaning of words from context and structural clues" to "correctly write possessive plural nouns." Nothing signals teachers which of the myriad skills it is most essential for students to learn well, reports Betsy Hammond for The Oregonian. That approach is why U.S. schools have been criticized for a curriculum that is a mile wide but an inch deep, particularly compared to other nations' approach to teaching math and science, said Stanley Rabinowitz, lead author of the WestEd study. It is easy for state curriculum committees to make a long list of what teachers should cover each year, Rabinowitz said. It takes a lot more thought and debate to decide what content is most important -- and Oregon should think carefully about which people get to help make that call, he said. Oregonians, including teachers, employers, parents, college officials and principals, should be at the table, he said.

Minimalism and Back to Basics
We are all familiar with the concept that formal education includes some "basics" such as reading, writing, and arithmetic. An educational minimalist might say that reading, writing, and arithmetic are the minimal set of areas where we should set goals for student learning and understanding. This is the model for the "back to basics" movement in education. Not only do hard core back to basics people want to cut out all of the so-called "frills," they often want the teaching methods to be those that were used many, many years ago.

Even in a back to basics model, however, there is still the issue of the specific goals or standards that might be set for students. State educational systems take reading, writing, and arithmetic and develop goals, standards, benchmarks, or other representations that they feel are appropriate for all students. The number of benchmarks for these three areas may well total in the hundreds. This tends to lead to the careful examination of proposed textbooks and other curriculum materials to make sure that every benchmark is covered. In place of a gestalt, we have a fragmentation.

This, in turn, leads to curriculum that is designed to "cover" the material. Every topic in the book—every benchmark topic—must be explicitly taught. Teacher tests, regional tests, and national tests must be designed to assess student learn in a huge number of different small parts of the discipline.

In brief summary, the goals, standards, benchmarks, and so on set by each state's educational system, and the accompanying textbooks, lesson plans, and so on, are a far cry from minimalism. Rather, they seem to be pushing the envelope in the opposite direction as far as is reasonably possible.

In some cases this pushing the envelope is resulting in outright antagonism between the two camps. In math education, for example, the Math Education Wars have been going on for quite some time. This so-called "war" is a struggle over differences of opinion between math education reformers and the back to basics group.

We are now beginning to see support for a different kind of minimalism in math education. The recent Focal Point work of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics provides a good example. Three focal points are identified for each grade level, K-8. Quoting from the website:


 * The Curriculum Focal Points are the most important mathematical topics for each grade level. They comprise related ideas, concepts, skills, and procedures that form the foundation for understanding and lasting learning.

This minimalist approach focuses on covering fewer topics, but teaching them for much deeper understanding. It is an approach to dealing with the problem that many people see when they describe the current math curriculum as being "a mile wide and an inch deep."

Minimalism and Web Search Engine Hits
When you do a Web search, how many hits do you want to get? An answer depends, of course, on what you are trying to accomplish by the search. If I have a very precise problem or question in mind, I would be pleased to get exactly one hit that answers my question or solves my problem in a manner that best suits my needs.

Aha! I want to retrieve information that does a good job of fitting my needs. Before I formulate my search, I think about my needs. I then try to describe my needs in a few words.

Suppose, for example, I am a passenger in a car driving down the highway, and I want us to stop at a McDonalds drive-in for some lunch. My Google search of the expression McDonalds returns over 21 million hits. That is not very helpful.

However, the search engine has the "intelligence" to guess that perhaps I am interested in a McDonalds near my location. Thus, it provides me with the opportunity to key in a U.S. city name or zip code. In essence, the search engine "knows" that, in this case, less is more.

So, here is another aha! As I formulate a search, keeping in mind that a small number of really relevant hits is much better than a huge number of mostly irrelevant hits, I use my brain. I think about ways to more accurately describe the information I want to retrieve. I spend more time thinking, but then I spend much less time deciding which of the hits are worth browsing, and thus reduce the time spent browsing.

There is a clear educational message here. Help students learn to more precisely describe the information they are looking for when they do a Web search. Help them gain the knowledge and skills to take advantage of the "less is more" characteristics of a carefully crafted search.

Empowering Students and Teachers

 * "With great power comes great responsibility." (Stan Lee: Uncle Ben, talking to Peter Parker in a Spiderman movie.)

It is commonly agreed that knowledge is one type of power. Movement in the minimalism direction can empower both teachers and their students. Minimalism presents big ideas as unifying and recurring themes. These ideas and themes can be learned relatively early on in one's education, and then can be built upon throughout one's life.

Minimalism can give more choices to students and help them learn to take more responsibility for their own education. Quoting from Moursund (2008, 2009):


 * This 96-page book has an 8th grade reading level and is written specifically for young teenagers. Its goal is to help such students learn to take more responsibility for their own education. By age 12, many students are beginning to have the mental maturity to take a major role in their own education. Preservice teachers, inservice teachers, and parents will also find the book useful. For example, parents may want to read the book along with their young teen-age children, and use the reading to facilitate “serious” educational conversations with their children.

Many people consider our current educational system to be too top heavy. It is not designed to empower students or their teachers. A top-down approach to the design and implementation of education does not function well as more and more very powerful tools become available to students. Rather, such a system leads to a schism between the capabilities of students and the out-of-date beliefs and understandings of those who currently hold the power to set the curriculum and who are working to hold onto this power.

From the point of view of politicians, it is scary to give more power to students and their teachers. Thus, the groundwork has been laid for a "Top Down versus Bottom Up" educational war.

Links to Other IAE Resources
This is a collection of IAE publications related to the IAE document you are currently reading. It is not updated very often, so important recent IAE documents may be missing from the list.

IAE Blog
All IAE Blog Entries

Alfie Kohn’s ideas about improving education.

Children will learn to do what they want to do.

Developing suitable levels of expertise in multiple areas.

Game of Jeopardy: Computer versus humans.

[http://i-a-e.org/iae-blog/entry/in-problem-solving-think-before-you-act.html In problem solving, think before you act. Above all, first understand the problem.]

Knowing a little about a lot and a lot about a little.

Learning is tied to the situation in which it occurs and to intrinsic motivation.

Living in a world of black boxes, opaque boxes, and somewhat clearer boxes.

Shorter is often better—in grant writing and in teaching.

Teaching teachers and students via training and education.

IAE Newsletter
Dealing with information overload by use of newsletters that give very brief summaries of articles of potential interest to you.

[http://i-a-e.org/newsletters/IAE-Newsletter-2009-16.html Learning on your own. "They know enough who know how to learn."]

Using computers as an aid to retrieving and processing trustworthy and untrustworthy information.

Using your brain to retrieve and process trustworthy and untrustworthy information.

IAE-pedia (IAE's Wiki)
Math Education Quotations.

Information Underload and Overload.

Using Humor to Maximize Learning.

I-A-E Books and Miscellaneous Other
David Moursund's Free Books.

David Moursund's Learning and Leading with Technology editorials.

Author or Authors
The initial version of this page was developed by David Moursund.