Our mission is to revolutionize the way people think about learning.

“People learn best when they are pursuing goals that they really care about and when what they learn helps them attain their goals. The best means of learning has always been experience.” -- Roger Schank

The Problem: What and how schools teach

Why is it that children in the United States go to school for six-plus hours a day for twelve years and the result of the experience is:

• Most of what they learned, other than very basic reading, writing (if that), and math, they never use after high school ends
• They do not know what they want to be when they grow up, not even the general field in many cases
• They are not employable
• If employed, employers report they are not skilled in what is really needed in the work place
• If they go to college, they do not know what they really want to study

Why is it that students ultimately get themselves trained and employed in a wide range of jobs and careers, but for the twelve years they are formally educated, they all study the same set of courses (or very close to it)? Twelve years is a long time; it should be more than adequate to prepare students for next steps in the real world. Students’ long days in school are largely wasted time. We are long overdue for real change, but change in the public schools is difficult to make happen. Therefore, as a starting point, we simply need to provide students with an effective alternative.

There are numerous problems with the way that schools attempt to teach students in the United States and most places around the globe. The most central issues lay within the world of the classroom, namely, what is taught and how it is taught. Many have tried to solve these problems by introducing new ideas into the existing school structure, but the fact is educational systems are resistant to change, and layering new ideas on top of the problematic old ones does not fix anything.

We need an alternative – many alternatives even. We propose a powerful new curriculum and structure, a reconceptualization of education overall, addressing many of the key challenges schools face when it comes to educating students.

The main problem with our national curriculum is that it is based on the goal of having standards, which ultimately render the curriculum irrelevant, outdated, and terribly resistant to change. The creation of today’s primary and secondary school curriculum dates back to 1892, when a meeting of academics from the nation’s top institutions (known as, “The Committee of Ten”) met to determine a uniform national high school curriculum and a set of standards for admission to universities. This idea of developing and enforcing a uniform curriculum was a problem at the outset. John Dewey underscored the senselessness of this approach saying,

Since there is no single set of abilities running throughout human nature, there is no single curriculum which all should undergo. Rather, the schools should teach everything that anyone is interested in learning.

Nevertheless, The National Educational Association decided all schools should teach the same things, so the committee was formed. The chairman of the committee was Charles W. Eliot, President of Harvard University at that time. To make a long, rather interesting story short, the Committee developed a national curriculum with the intent of preparing students to enter Harvard and pass the exams required of Harvard students at that time. These were the subjects of the intellectuals of that day. This national curriculum would be provided to all students regardless of their interests or likely future careers.

Here is what was taught at Harvard in 1892:

So what is wrong with what was taught at Harvard in 1892? The problem is that the subjects that are taught are irrelevant to the concerns and potential careers of the vast majority of today’s students, very few of whom will ever specialize in a field that leverages algebra, history, chemistry, or a foreign language. Worse still, little has changed since 1892; our school system continues to require that the subjects that mattered to intellectuals in 1892 comprise our modern national school curriculum, despite drastic changes and advances in the world around us.

The curriculum established in 1892 does not prepare students for today’s workforce, or even for the universities they will encounter in 2006. Recent public discussion on whether schools are adequately preparing students for the workforce confirms that they are not (e.g., Olson, L., 2006). Students are all too often dropping out of school, finding it tedious and irrelevant. The curriculum does not serve the goal of either students or society.

We aim to fix this problem. We plan to create a curriculum that meets the needs of a broad possible set of interests and potential careers. It will be interesting and relevant to students’ goals. This proposal is for the first step in creating curricula that are relevant, interesting, and demanding.

How schools teach

The problem with tests

Simply choosing a different set of things to teach does not solve the problem of education in and of itself. Typically, as soon as there is something to teach, someone develops a test to find out if students learned it, and that test tests the wrong things. Because tests are the ultimate measure of success for students, and sometimes even for teachers and their school districts, everyone starts to care about the tests.

The tests test the wrong things but everyone cares about the tests, so teachers are encouraged to teach students to pass the tests, and they teach the wrong things. Instead of helping students maneuver in complex, realistic situations in order to achieve relevant and motivating goals, which is what people really do in everyday life, they ask the students to read a bunch of facts and solve a set of problems that look like what the test will ask them to answer. It’s boring for the students and irrelevant to what they need to know to do anything real in the world. Students should be evaluated on how well they can achieve the goals they strived to achieve within a realistic context. Students need to learn to do things, not know things. Expert performance illustrates mastery.

The problem with the role of the teacher

Another issue is the role of the teacher. Teachers cannot be asked to be specialists in every field in which students want to study. They should not have to. Students should learn from field specialists who can mentor them as they do their work and provide critiques of the work products. This was not possible in 1892. Today it is possible. Experts are everywhere and are easily accessible. Teachers, on the other hand, can serve as facilitators of the learning activities and liaisons to mentors and information. They can help to orchestrate many students learning different things, and they can mentor the general skills in which they are experts themselves, such as writing, research, experimentation, etc.

The real world involves complex problem solving and use of various skill sets in an interdependent way, motivated by a rich context and meaningful goals. The way people learn naturally in the real world ( i.e., out of school), whether they are children or adults, is to do whatever they think will work to reach their goals, or find out what to do if they have no intuitions, and then they see what happens and figure out what to do better the next time. They learn by failing and attempting to recover from failure. We remember what we learn when we care about performing better and when we believe that what we have been asked to do is representative of reality. We remember our experiences and what we ourselves have done.

School learning could not be further from natural learning. Courses separate subjects and skills not only from other subjects and skills, but from the contexts in which the subjects and skills are ever used in the real world. Rarely are students given the chance to pursue meaningful goals in personally relevant contexts, and learn in service of achieving the goals.

Education should mean allowing students to try their hands at achieving goals they might actually want to achieve in life, in a wide variety of contexts that might be relevant to them, with help available to them along the way. Education should not mean treating every skill and subject as something to be learned out of its usage context. Instead of courses, schools should have curricula that focus on contexts in which students might find themselves someday, and in which students pursue motivating goals relevant to those contexts, and ideally relevant to potential careers they might someday want to have.

Science courses are among the worst of what is taught in high schools. Students are asked to read textbooks that teach fact after fact that the students will never remember after the tests are over, and that do not remotely relate to what scientists do in the real world. Why do the students need to know the periodic table, or memorize where the spleen is in a fetal pig, and equations for angular momentum? How will they use it?

Real scientists practice science in order to solve real problems. The principles that are taught today were developed years ago during real problem solving situations to help answer critical questions. If we want to teach students science, it has to be for a reason. Students may indeed want to get jobs in fields related to science. They may become doctors, nurses, engineers, chemists…but all these professionals work to solve real problems everyday. We should allow students to work on similar problems and realize they have a need for certain principles to help them diagnose a problem, find a cure, create a design, develop a drug, etc. Show students the contexts and problems for which science is relevant and interesting. That is how it will become appealing and make sense.

The answer

What kind of curriculum can:

• serve the interests of a wide variety of students;
• provide opportunities for students to learn both the academic and soft skills needed in today’s workforce;
• enable teachers/mentors to assess students on their performance of relevant skills in meaningful contexts;
• provide to students experts in the fields in which they are studying to serve as mentors;
• provide realistic experiences working as scientists, learning principles of science in order to solve problems
• enable students to live in various realistic contexts and give them hands-on practice in a number of jobs they might actually pursue post graduation?

Story-Centered Curricula will do all these things, and will provide a carefully scripted and easily accessible (online) structure so that they can be made available to students in a variety of possible learning situations.

The Story-Centered Curricula

The idea behind the Story-Centered Curriculum (SCC) is that a good curriculum should consist of a story in which students play a key role that is related to a real-world job role . These roles are selected to be ones that the graduate of such a program might actually do in real life or might need to know about (because he or she will manage or collaborate with someone who performs that role). Students, typically working in groups, are given detailed information about the simulated company or organization that they are working for, together with detailed and authentic projects. Supporting materials and resources are available for students to access as they wish, and experts and online mentors are available to answer questions and point students in the right direction on an as-needed basis.

The effect of the SCC model is that as students work through the story to achieve the missions the story puts forth, they learn the critical skills they need to successfully accomplish their tasks. The SCC implements true learning-by-doing, integrating salient aspects of real-world tasks, as opposed to teaching skills independently, without context.

An SCC can be delivered entirely online, in person, or as a live/online combination. Student teams can meet as a group face-to-face or using the latest online collaboration tools. Similarly, interactions with mentors can take place in person or via synchronous or asynchronous on-line tools. The approach used is determined by the specific needs of the curriculum, and the geographic proximity of students and mentors.

Read more about our philosophy here:

Extracurriculars as the Curriculum: A Vision of Education for the 21st Century: (35k PDF) An article by Roger Schank and Kemi Jona describing how schools will need to move beyond the traditional classroom model in the coming years.

Engines for Education: A "hyper-book" by Roger Schank and his student Chip Cleary about what's wrong with the education system, how to reform it, and especially, about the role of educational technology in that reform (opens a new browser window for the Engines for Education website).

Educational Technology: The Promise and The Myth: Roger Schank writes about technology as an opportunity to educate the world (from an article he wrote for the World Bank).

Ten Mistakes In Education: School systems are making a great many mistakes; here are Roger Schank's 10 favorites.