Why Is 'Order' Such a Distasteful Idea in Education?

Why is order such an offensive idea to so many people in education?

I saw an interesting tweet from Alfie Cohen over on X or Twitter today, and he was commenting on how behaviorism has triumphed in practice and Dewey's ideas, John Dewey's ideas, about progressive education have triumphed only as rhetoric and not really as practice in schools.

And it occurred to me that one possible reason for that is that Dewey's ideas were not super realistic and Dewey himself may have not had a very realistic view of students.

He might have had kind of a distorted view of students because he didn't have, you know, your typical population of students.

He had University of Chicago Laboratory School students, and this Chicago Laboratory School was extremely selective.

They did strive to be diverse in multiple ways.

but they were still selective.

And I think anytime you're working with a population of students that is non-representative, it's easy to fall into patterns of thinking that don't work in reality, right?

Like if you only think about your own kids, like imagine you could design a school for your own children.

Well, that school would probably look very different than the schools that actually work in reality because your kids are probably, if they're anything like mine, they're probably not very typical in terms of how they behave and what they're interested in.

And there are all these, ways that that kind of distorted sampling can distort our ideas about what actually works.

And I think one of the things that's really underappreciated in public education is the importance of order.

Like, if you had the privilege of always attending safe, orderly schools where almost everybody was focused on learning almost all the time, you might, in the abstract, think of order as this kind of oppressive thing.

But if you attended a dangerous and chaotic school, you would probably appreciate just how important order is.

So when we hear a lot of new ideas, or perhaps zombie ideas that have always been advocated and have never worked, I think in a lot of cases they're coming from people who have never worked in public schools, who have never worked with the full spectrum of students, and have these kind of unrealistic ideals about how likely students are to behave if there are not policies and procedures in place to keep order, to keep people on track.

And, you know, if you think every student is just intrinsically motivated to be a lifelong learner and to do everything that they would need to do to master all of the content standards, like if you think kids are going to get there on their own, and we don't have to have high expectations, we don't have to have good teaching, we don't have to have clear routines and procedures, we don't have to have good classroom management and administrative support and rules and consequences.

Like if you think all that stuff is silly because you took it for granted as a student, I would encourage you to actually go teach in a public school.

Go sub in a public school for a day and see just how abnormal your vision of what is out there really is.

Because I think there is so much that we can do if we're willing to take responsibility for creating the kind of order that facilitates learning.

But if we get squeamish about that, we're going to put these kind of pie in the sky practices in place that are not going to serve our students.

Let me know what you think.