WHAT MAKES SCHOOL SO RESISTANT TO CHANGE?The Wittgensteinian approach.

Learning and school are two completely separate and unrelated concepts.

We commonly meet difficulties if we try to base schoolwork on learning.

If we seriously want to make school to change, it is not enough to identify flaws.

It is of key importance to understand WHY the unwanted characteristics do develop in the first place.

The marks and degrees are central. They guide the flow of the students to their higher education, adulthood professions, social relationships and economical status.

The school is intended to create circumstances which are appropriate to determine the marks rather than to learning.

All learning at school is subordinated to this.

Evaluation pays attention predominantly on the adopted facts instead of enthusiasm towards learning.

The students lose their strive for independent thinking but become masters of foretelling how the teachers think.

The best performers of this ”creative thinking” will be priced with good marks.

Co-operation with other students easily lowers the rank of the altruistic ones.

This is why co-operatively intended learning so easily transforms into completely chaotic mess.

Because the best students determine the length of the scale, the typically low ambitiousness of the students does not reflect lack of competition but rather its considerable strength.

School Mark Economics (arvosanatalous in Finnish): The one-dimensional quantity of learning (=school marks) supersedes the multi- or even pan-dimensional quality of learning.

This seriously damages both the student´s and the teacher´s intrinsic motivation and replaces it with superficial learning and teaching strategies.

The students learn how to give an impression as if they were learning.

The same applies to the teachers and teaching.

A radically different way of thinking about learning and the identity of the school is needed (koulukäsitys in Finnish).

Learning is a state of mind. This is not a cliché.

STILL:The expected difficulties in determining the marks are regularly used both to support the conventional class room methodologies as well as to shoot down alternative approaches.

Neither does information and communication technology reach its influence to the way how the school understands its own identity.

An elemental characteristic of a good exam (hence, a good teacher as well) is its ability to assort students.

Therefore, a completely successful teacher would, in fact, not be successful at all.

The notorious curve of Gauss effectively demonstrates how school provides protection against alienation and social segregation.

What the students truly study in a constructivistic manner, proves to be the teachers.The teachers´ constructivism is similarly restricted towards, for example, the matriculation exams.

Creativity is not learned by avoiding mistakes, except, of course, creativity in avoiding mistakes.

Real (high quality) learning becomes (low quality) school learning almost inevitably if the learning results later become targets of exam based scrutiny.

This leads to misunderstanding that to learn is the same as to remember the facts.

The teacher has to combine two incompatible roles of profession: the student´s coach and the controller of the school marks.

The student is supposed to confide to a coach, who in the student´s mind belongs to the opposing team. This carries along a self-supporting bilateral lack of trust.

This, in turn, gives birth to a specific form of learning where the learners learn to keep their weaknesses hidden.

An arms race between the student and the teacher turns hollow all the recommendations about the importance of a deep-oriented learning strategy.

Evaluation motivates its performers because of the feeling of power it arouses. But to seriously hand over the responsibility for evaluation to the students is unthinkable.

The effects of information and communication technologies:1. What used to be cognition has transformed to co-ignition.2. We carry along our networks and the networks we carry are representations of ourselves.

3. Convincing Internet presence, for example a high level Topsy-score, is going to be the degree that will matter for the most.

4. Even the matriculation exams, if needed at all, could very well be organized conveniently on a "drive in basis" on the Internet.

But, information becomes knowledge only after it is processed in ways that makes it a part of the learner´s own inner self.

If disregarding this with the excuse of ICT, we easily bring up empty and hollow students who only by their looks resemble human beings.

It has proven to be difficult to think with pure brain.

I think with concepts. Therefore I am.

This is why the profession of the teacher does not essentially transform according to the media where the information originally is stored.

Because of its co-operational and equitable essence, ICT often makes managing the conventional ways of schoolwork even harder.

Assessment centric school, in contrast with ICT, encourages and requires behaviour that is selfkeeping.

How to unite ICT with school, still largely stays unsolved in the school systems organized around rank-orderism.

ICT, therefore, easily gives birth only to a separate layer of extra work with no proper connections to the regular school life.

Separate and clearly identifiable school subjects with unambiguous borderlines are a pre-requisite of evaluation based on the very existence of these separate school subjects.

This contradicts unpredictability needed for open learning.

The officially justified, constant and prominent attraction to social segregation is an organic part of the school institution´s proper identity.

An essential question emerges: Would there be any identity left if this was removed?

The school does not change by reprogramming the teachers…

…because it is the society as a whole which lacks the mental tools for understanding the pedagogical values of the day.

Therefore, the intellectually poorest are not the only ones who easily lose their educational appetite…

…and the post graduate educators get students who very intensively are selected for the society of the past, instead of being prepared for creative thinking and unconventional problem solving.

The students crystallize the observation into an effectively short sentence: “Are these things going to be asked in the exam?”.

Conclusion 1:It has proven to be impossible to redirect school learning in small steps.

Conclusion 2:The source of the empty and meaningless thinking we so easily tend to perform is residing in the concepts that are not clear. Maybe it would be clearest not to mix school with learning at all.

Conclusion 3:It is not possible to discuss learning and school in the same context in any kind of a sensible manner.

The same is the case, for example, with flowers and electricity.

Oddly, most of the pedagogical research and discussion, even when concerning the so-called hidden curriculum, has down the ages had its foundations on exactly this type of messthinking.

Conclusion 4:This is the central dilemma of the school. And, as dilemmas always tend to be, it is unsolvable.

Conclusion 5:It becomes tempting to conclude that the basis for us to traditionally combine the studies of pedagogy so elementally and especially with teacher education is intellectually wrong.

Although amusing, this is not a joke.

”Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.” (What we cannot speak about we must consign to silence.) Ludwig Wittgenstein

The same laws guide development in all organizations where the criteria of success make School Mark Economics flourish.

Please, substitute the word school for the name of your own organization.

Reshaping a work culture like this is not possible unless admitted that it is not possible.

The article on which this presentation originally is based can be found in its full length on:http://slidesha.re/Zz5mpC

Thank you!Pasi Vilpasmoc.liamg@sapliv.isap(Read from right to the left.)