Every summer, my students and I read David Tyack’s remarkable and groundbreaking book, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education. This book is one of the core texts in a course that I teach, Foundations of Education, in which students learn about and explore the history and philosophy of education. Tyack’s big point is that the search for the one best system – the one best way to educate all students – has ill served public education in general, and particularly urban public education.
This year, my students have noticed that the search for the one best system pervades the field of education. Whether it has to do with curriculum planning, repertoire choices, teacher education, high stakes testing, or education policy, the majority of those in the field refuse to recognize that individual differences matter. Students learn differently. Teachers teach differently. Multiple approaches are more effective because they can reinforce one another, and because they can respond to context and to individual needs.
Right now, we are talking about constructivism in one of my other classes. Constructivism celebrates the individual student’s learning process by supporting and facilitating each student’s construction of his/her understanding. A constructivist pedagogy rails against the notion of following scripts from teacher handbooks, teaching from textbooks, or teaching to the standardized test. It refuses to support the notion of the one best system for promoting student learning.
Western modernist society is obsessed with the notion of the one best system, and this obsession goes far beyond the field of education. Economics, politics, history, technology, psychology, philosophy – these are just a few of the many fields that are plagued by the misguided notion that there is one best system, and our job is to find that system (or create it), and use it.
The arts are certainly not immune from this way of thinking, either, much to my dismay. In music, there are many proposed “best systems” out there – from technique-based methods for various instruments, to approaches to the interpretation of musical works, to characteristics of musical styles, to understandings of music history.
And of course, today, we are plagued by the debates over finding the one best system of health care, the one best system for deficit reduction, the one best system for economic recovery, and so on.
How can the paradigm beneath so many feet and structures be shifted? How can we move away from this obsession with the one best system to a much more productive and meaningful perspective that celebrates individual differences, diverse approaches, and multiple modalities?
