The Argument for Those on the Margins

The argument that education is designed to meet the needs of the largest population of students by targeting the average is a false reality. While the average may seem like the easiest way to reach the majority of individuals, who is the one determining the average? What guidelines tell us that average is taking geometry in ninth grade and passing biology with a C is sufficient to graduate high school?

The idea of “average” came about years before anyone could imagine the impact it would have in the educational system today. Todd Rose, in his book, “The End of Average”, shares that when the army was designing the first-ever cockpit in 1926, engineers measured physical dimensions of male pilots and used these numbers to standardize the dimensions of the cockpit (2016). Females were not even considered in the equation of being a pilot let alone taken into account when designing a cockpit.

There’s an extensive list of examples where the average is the gold standard. While I spare the details in this post (and put in an unsolicited plug for the incredible book by Rose), I will challenge you to think about what in your life do you use the average to measure. Isn’t the average just a lot of numbers that, when manipulated one way or another, can still lead to the same end result? Doesn’t that mean there are multiple paths between two points and the journey you travel is your’s to determine?

My argument is this: account for those in the margins and reach everyone in between. From the perspective of an educator, there is a principle called Universal Design for Learning (UDL), that reaches everyone. I am a huge proponent of UDL, not only for the way it doesn’t separate students out and label them as different, it is backed by neuroscience research. As a scientist, I love data. That’s for a later post, though.

For now, I argue that a shift in the approach to curriculum might be a way to upend K-12 education. It might help with higher education too but I’ll tackle one piece of this puzzle at a time. Maybe, instead of placing students in imaginary buckets that can (supposedly) guide educators in lesson planning, we should remove labels and buckets and instead, plan for the margins.