The Responsibility of Change
Finding Equilibrium between Individualism and Collectivism for Change
To set the scene, a sign was posted on several walls around our school, stating "You can't change others, you can only change yourself."
It has been troubling me ever since.
It is certainly true that coercion or manipulation are generally not good approaches to effecting change in others. You can’t force your beliefs upon people, and most people only accept improvements related to changes when they recognize the benefits of such for themselves.
Nevertheless, the reluctance or refusal to at least try to improve circumstances beyond our personal insular worlds is unacceptable in education. Giving up on friends and colleagues or fellow students who resist even the thought of considering changes when it is clear that improvements are necessary and possible — albeit difficult — seems lazy and defeatist. More importantly, the refusal to promote and participate in broader change by focusing only on “being all you yourself can be” should be considered a core flaw of both education and modern society. We need to be better than this.
Centering on oneself in an educational environment hurts the broader community and is also self-limiting; it rejects the potential of interplay between individuals and their environment, the latent transformative potential that is inherent in many collaborative human experiences, the perceptual input from beyond us that we receive regularly through our senses, and the discerning capacity that allows us to selectively process and incorporate these external stimuli into our personal and collective identities.
Far too often, awareness of these factors is limited to the individual. Every effort must be made to encourage change for the betterment of entire groups, communities, and humanity in general. There is no better time nor place than in our schools to begin the process of enlightening entire societies —one class at a time — of not only the benefits but also the obligations of teamwork and collaboration.
Improve. Change. Be all you can be, yes, but that’s just the starting point, not the finish line.
In many educational settings, the emphasis has long been on the individual learning of each student. This often results in improved outcomes for many students, a definite plus for all academic stakeholders. Unfortunately, an unrelated and destructive tangent was conflated into the concept of individual learning, namely the pitting of students against classmates as opponents in a race to the top with the winner taking all the spoils. Over time, this produced counterproductive ranking systems and rabid competition, both of which hinder social stability by replacing enjoyment with stress and anxiety, making rivals out of classmates, and potentially thwarting growth for all but the winners, the latter being those who then receive most of the encouragement, all of the accolades, and ultimately monopolize the best opportunities moving forward in a system that perpetuates inequality.
Conversely, those who require the most guidance and support are often marginalized prematurely as under-performers and soon begin to receive even fewer resources rather than more. In this scenario, winning supersedes collaboration, thereby contributing to compassionless, envious, uncooperative, and intolerant learning institutions, and ultimately, societies. Yes, it starts early in the education cycle, long before many students are even aware that they are being rated and ranked against their friends rather than only their ability to successfully complete assignments.
When personal outcomes become the most important aspect of education, many incorrectly believe that “the end justifies the means.” The “better” students tend to be the ones who master prevalent assessment methods (i.e., they’re better standardized test-takers, better essay writers or public speakers, etc.) They’re also usually slightly ahead with certain types of material and are comfortable studying alone. However, when students are isolated into individual learning units and then separated by distinct achievement levels, those who need the most help immediately lose one of the most important conduits to learning for young minds: collaboration with their peers. As thus, the chasm begins to widen further and far too early.
The immediate counter argument from some is that students can’t be forced to help their peers, and the preference for many families and their children is to have them excel personally. In other words, “beat” the rest of the students, classmates be damned. It’s true, many people are indeed that self-centered, and we see the negative effects of this attitude every day on the streets, at intersections, in bank lineups, in group meetings, political debates, race struggles, international wars, aggressive corporate takeovers, and most news broadcasts. The sense of community has been waning for generations. Personal success combined with the freedoms and liberty it supposedly provides has long supplanted the goal of working toward the greater good of our communities, but this can still be corrected. Hard work? Sure. Impossible? No, and just because a new approach might take generations to flush out stale ideas doesn’t mean it shouldn’t start immediately.
Any approach whereby students are treated as competing individuals and then further isolated into groups based on skill level to make it easier to teach homogenous groups of similarly capable learners has the negative side-effect of blinding both students and teachers to the importance and goals of the learning process itself. Looking far down the line, it creates young adults who believe that they can achieve anything they want just by being best in class even though history has proven that it takes far more than mastery of one or more isolated skills to lead and call all the shots. Further, it ignores thousands of years of evidence of how human beings have chosen to co-exist most successfully and fails to recognize the social models that ultimately produced the happiest, fairest, and most effective communities.
In the real world where we all spend most of our lives, people are not islands. It is imperative that we pivot toward the promotion of learning as a collaborative journey wherein the growth of individual learners is intrinsically linked to the collective advancement of the group.
It should be noted that neither I nor anybody else in education is suggesting that individuals should not be encouraged to excel. Far from it. Individual achievements are one cornerstone of all strong communities. The problem lies in our collective failure to acknowledge other forms of accomplishment that bring more benefits to more people. It is also important to remember that many societal breakdowns occur when personal excellence is misappropriated and abused against the best interests of a community. Groups do a much better job of providing checks and balances against misbehavior than individuals. The preparation for this must start today.
One needs only to witness the fractured state of so many modern societies to recognize the damage created by promoting individual success over community well-being. Dated education systems are partially to blame through inflexible content delivery and overly competitive assessment models that classify students prematurely into intelligence tiers, not unlike archaic caste systems from which it is very difficult to escape.
Instead, students must be motivated and encouraged to participate in the progress of their peers, thereby shifting beyond the paradigm of competitive individualism. Individual and group goals do not have to be mutually exclusive. The power to effect changes then rests not only in improving oneself but also extends to sincere, compassionate collaboration toward the improvement of others. This is easily achieved through the creation of environments that encourage cooperation among individuals sharing similar learning interests, such as a particular subject of study or activity where one of the students’ greatest assets quickly becomes each other.
Simultaneously, we cannot abandon the necessity of tailoring educational pathways to suit the unique needs and capabilities of each student, thus enabling each one to contribute meaningfully and confidently to the collective learning experience.
Evaluation criteria should extend beyond individual progress to encompass the advancement of the group as a whole. Additionally, empowering students to focus on specific aspects of their studies that can contribute and enhance group learning without compromising the acquisition of the core foundational knowledge of specific subject matter can instill confidence and pride in their abilities, improve engagement, and develop the skills to work independently toward common goals while also enabling students to serve as educators to their peers. All of the above becoming essential building blocks in their own right.
Maintaining harmonious equilibrium between individual and collective learning is imperative. In the contemporary educational landscape, the latter often languishes due to the lack of requisite definition and emphasis. Nevertheless, in the 21st century, the ability to effect change in both oneself and others through collaborative learning and teaching is and always will be a paramount skill. Its cultivation hinges on the understanding that an individual's self-perception and growth are intrinsically connected to external stimuli, such as the nurturing environment at home, interactions with nature, collaboration with colleagues, and rewarding social participation.
As educators, it is incumbent upon us to underscore the importance of this delicate balance. By fostering a sense of communal growth and unity, we as a society can progress. No task or person exists in isolation. We must instill a sense of belonging to the human race in general and to numerous intertwined social constructs simultaneously, even if it requires us to transcend artificial divisions and obstacles that struggling societies tend to throw at us along the way.
In sum, we must recognize that the power to effect change in both oneself and others is not the prerogative of any isolated individual but is, in fact, a collective endeavor that demands the involvement of an entire community.
As Hilary Clinton once wrote, "It Takes a Village." Indeed it does.
Isabel Perez
Linkedln: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isabel-perez999999/
Article link: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/responsibility-change-isabel-perez (September 2023)