Failure to educate: The Boston school system is churning out illiterate students whose only skills are to pass predictable standard tests
By Junia Yearwood | November 8, 2010
I DID not attend a graduation ceremony in 25 years as a Boston public high school teacher. This was my silent protest against a skillfully choreographed mockery of an authentic education — a charade by adults who, knowingly or unwittingly, played games with other people’s children.
I knew that most of my students who walked across the stage, amidst the cheers, whistles, camera flashes, and shout-outs from parents, family, and friends, were not functionally literate. They were unable to perform the minimum skills necessary to negotiate society: reading the local newspapers, filling out a job application, or following basic written instructions; even fewer had achieved empowering literacy enabling them to closely read, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate text.
However, they were all college bound — the ultimate goal of our school’s vision statement — clutching knapsacks stuffed with our symbols of academic success: multiple college acceptances, a high school diploma; an official transcript indicating they had passed the MCAS test and had met all graduation requirements; several glowing letters of recommendation from teachers and guidance counselors; and one compelling personal statement, their college essay.
They walked across the stage into a world that was unaware of the truth that scorched my soul — the truth that became clear the first day I entered West Roxbury High School in 1979 (my first assignment as a provisional 12th grade English teacher): the young men and women I was responsible for coaching the last leg of their academic journey could not write a complete sentence, a cohesive paragraph, or a well-developed essay on a given topic. I remember my pain and anger at this revelation and my struggle to reconcile the reality before me with my own high school experience, which had enabled me to negotiate the world of words — oral and written — independently, with relative ease and confidence.
For the ensuing 30-plus years, I witnessed how the system churned out academically unprepared students who lacked the skills needed to negotiate the rigors of serious scholarship, or those skills necessary to move in and up the corporate world.
We instituted tests and assessments, such as the MCAS, that required little exercise in critical thinking, for which most of the students were carefully coached to “pass.’’ Teachers, instructors, and administrators made the test the curriculum, taught to the test, drilled for the test, coached for the test, taught strategies to take the test, and gave generous rewards (pizza parties) for passing the test. Students practiced, studied for, and passed the test — but remained illiterate.
I also bear witness to my students’ ability to acquire a passing grade for mediocre work. A’s and B’s were given simply for passing in assignments (quality not a factor), for behaving well in class, for regular attendance, for completing homework assignments that were given a check mark but never read.
In addition, I have been a victim of the subtle and overt pressure exerted by students, parents, administrators, guidance counselors, coaches, and colleagues to give undeserving students passing grades, especially at graduation time, when the “walk across the stage’’ frenzy is at its peak.
When all else failed, there were strategies for churning out seemingly academically prepared students. These were the ways around the official requirements: loopholes such as MCAS waivers; returning or deftly transferring students to Special Needs Programs — a practice usually initiated by concerned parents who wanted to avoid meeting the regular education requirements or to gain access to “testing accommodations’’; and, Credit Recovery, the computer program that enabled the stragglers, those who were left behind, to catch up to the frontrunners in the Race to the Stage. Students were allowed to take Credit Recovery as a substitute for the course they failed, and by passing with a C, recover their credits.
Nevertheless, this past June, in the final year of my teaching career, I chose to attend my first graduation at the urgings of my students — the ones whose desire to learn, to become better readers and writers, and whose unrelenting hard work earned them a spot on the graduation list — and the admonition of a close friend who warned that my refusal to attend was an act of selfishness, of not thinking about my students who deserved the honor and respect signified by my presence.
At the ceremony I chose to be happy, in spite of the gnawing realization that nothing had changed in 32 years. We had continued playing games with other people’s children.
Junia Yearwood, a guest columnist, is a retired Boston Public Schools teacher who taught at English High for 25 years.
© Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
08 November 2010
07 November 2010
Ravitch review of Waiting for Superman
Worth reading: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-charter-schools/?pagination=false
05 October 2010
Good question...
http://pureparents.org/index.php?blog/show/Will_parents_be_next_to_get_reformers__broom
Worth reading a couple of times...
http://www.truth-out.org/when-generosity-hurts-bill-gates-public-school-teachers-and-politics-humiliation63868
02 August 2010
...just in case anyone fails to see the irony (I know...hard to believe):
A superintendent and his board chair steadily lose support on the board and in the community.
They threaten an outspoken opponent privately. He takes it public and it blows up in their faces.
In the annual election of officers, they lose control of the board. They latch on to sunshine laws as an excuse to derail the process...supremely ironic in itself...
...except the laws don't actually say that...
...and nobody the sunshine laws are meant to protect has complained...
...and the election was conducted following policy and laws to the letter.
So finally, they produce an undated, unsigned "complaint" from the loser of the election, only after the superintendent has tried to get the school lawyer to say the election was invalid and is presented instead with a weak response that to be "conservative" maybe something should be done, but only if someone complains...
...but damn...nobody else has complained! How embarrassing!
To add to the problem, there's the inconvenient fact that there is no process allowed in the policy manual to remove a chair you absolutely cannot imagine working with until your retirement.
Still, where's a lawyer who will say the original election was invalid? Trouble is, boards all over the state elect officers the same way and nobody has EVER complained. What to do?
...suggest if there's any question there will be nobody to sign bonds!...and conveniently sidestep the fact that the only question that has been raised has come from you...then have the old chair who clearly can't win step aside and run someone else you can tolerate.
...and after you vote again with signed ballots? Oops, the only people interested in who voted for the upstart turns out to be the old chair and the superintendent. How inconvenient and messy! The reporters just go home.
But it worked!...or did it?
You can tell it must finally unravel when outrage turns to laughter or mockery. There is no good defense against laughter, and it has never been more justified.
They threaten an outspoken opponent privately. He takes it public and it blows up in their faces.
In the annual election of officers, they lose control of the board. They latch on to sunshine laws as an excuse to derail the process...supremely ironic in itself...
...except the laws don't actually say that...
...and nobody the sunshine laws are meant to protect has complained...
...and the election was conducted following policy and laws to the letter.
So finally, they produce an undated, unsigned "complaint" from the loser of the election, only after the superintendent has tried to get the school lawyer to say the election was invalid and is presented instead with a weak response that to be "conservative" maybe something should be done, but only if someone complains...
...but damn...nobody else has complained! How embarrassing!
To add to the problem, there's the inconvenient fact that there is no process allowed in the policy manual to remove a chair you absolutely cannot imagine working with until your retirement.
Still, where's a lawyer who will say the original election was invalid? Trouble is, boards all over the state elect officers the same way and nobody has EVER complained. What to do?
...suggest if there's any question there will be nobody to sign bonds!...and conveniently sidestep the fact that the only question that has been raised has come from you...then have the old chair who clearly can't win step aside and run someone else you can tolerate.
...and after you vote again with signed ballots? Oops, the only people interested in who voted for the upstart turns out to be the old chair and the superintendent. How inconvenient and messy! The reporters just go home.
But it worked!...or did it?
You can tell it must finally unravel when outrage turns to laughter or mockery. There is no good defense against laughter, and it has never been more justified.
You have two choices...
This was a posting on the Parents United for Responsible Education web site (linked above):
Arne the Horrible?
I used to read Old Norse sagas when I was in graduate school, and one of my favorite quotes from the old Viking marauders was, "You have one of two choices," which usually meant that you either surrendered immediately or you got cloven in two with a great big sword (which usually had a name like "The Biter").
Well, we may have to begin calling Fed Ed Head Duncan "Arne the Horrible" - he seems to be giving us only one of two choices.
Either we accept his privatization plans with more charters and testing, or we get stuck with the "status quo."
This sounds so much like the choices Paul Vallas gave us: social promotion or retention, standardized test or "no accountability."
If these guys are so smart, why can't they think of more than two things? How about three choices, guys? How about your idea, the old way, and something that might actually work?
Arne the Horrible?
I used to read Old Norse sagas when I was in graduate school, and one of my favorite quotes from the old Viking marauders was, "You have one of two choices," which usually meant that you either surrendered immediately or you got cloven in two with a great big sword (which usually had a name like "The Biter").
Well, we may have to begin calling Fed Ed Head Duncan "Arne the Horrible" - he seems to be giving us only one of two choices.
Either we accept his privatization plans with more charters and testing, or we get stuck with the "status quo."
This sounds so much like the choices Paul Vallas gave us: social promotion or retention, standardized test or "no accountability."
If these guys are so smart, why can't they think of more than two things? How about three choices, guys? How about your idea, the old way, and something that might actually work?
Parent involvement...
This is quoted from the document linked above (click on the title):
"It is not enough to 'welcome input' from parents, or to invite parents to the table to help choose from a predetermined list of options for their schools. We want to help create a new vision for our schools."
"It is not enough to 'welcome input' from parents, or to invite parents to the table to help choose from a predetermined list of options for their schools. We want to help create a new vision for our schools."
letter to Quenten...
Here is the letter I wrote to Quenten July 31 and copied to the entire Board and the Irregular:
OK, Quenten. That was fun while it lasted, but back to reality:
You claimed last week you were responding to a complaint from Mike. This week your task is to prove that what you did July 29 was legal.
You did not find a lawyer who would say the original vote was invalid. You have not produced a law stating written ballots for officers are illegal under sunshine laws...admittedly a gray area in existing law which has never been tested but cannot be written by school lawyers on the fly. All you have is our policy in effect which we followed to the letter July 15 and the inconvenient fact that we have no policy for the removal of a sitting chair after an election at our first meeting in July. That's the bottom line. We can do no more than follow the letter of the law as it stood on July 15, which we indeed did...that is until July 29.
I did not resign and still have not resigned. I do not intend to do so as long as I am in good health.
You suggested there was some shadowy financial reason we needed another vote, but that did not rise to the level of law, and certainly has had no effect on all the other districts in the state that follow this same voting policy. Your communications with Drummond Woodsum laid out a course of action we could take to be "conservative," but they did not address the thorny issue that a different voting outcome from the original could not be endorsed under our existing policy. The original vote was, after all, legal by all accounts, and that history cannot be rewritten for convenience...or to be "conservative." Your charge was to remove any doubt that we were in compliance with sunshine laws.
The burden of proof now is upon you to show that Judy could replace me as chair where there is no such provision in either our policy or Maine law.
I'm sure Judy would make a fine chair. In fact, I nominated her and she declined that first night because of her frequent absences...but, the Board elected another chair that night, and that person is still chair until you prove otherwise.
Until you can get a definitive answer to this question---one that could stand up in court, as it may well have to---I suggest Judy run meetings with her title undefined and you schedule meetings only when she will be present. There will be no more need for meeting theatrics until this is settled since Judy is either chair or vice chair under either outcome and thus legal for running meetings. If she has to do that all year, so be it.
I can be patient, but I cannot stand by while you create new laws, new interpretations, and new Board policy to suit each purpose. The Board is bound by laws which are changed only by legislatures and courts, and if you wish to change Board policies, there is a procedure for that, too. Our laws and policies July 15 were clear and were not changed July 29.
--apm
OK, Quenten. That was fun while it lasted, but back to reality:
You claimed last week you were responding to a complaint from Mike. This week your task is to prove that what you did July 29 was legal.
You did not find a lawyer who would say the original vote was invalid. You have not produced a law stating written ballots for officers are illegal under sunshine laws...admittedly a gray area in existing law which has never been tested but cannot be written by school lawyers on the fly. All you have is our policy in effect which we followed to the letter July 15 and the inconvenient fact that we have no policy for the removal of a sitting chair after an election at our first meeting in July. That's the bottom line. We can do no more than follow the letter of the law as it stood on July 15, which we indeed did...that is until July 29.
I did not resign and still have not resigned. I do not intend to do so as long as I am in good health.
You suggested there was some shadowy financial reason we needed another vote, but that did not rise to the level of law, and certainly has had no effect on all the other districts in the state that follow this same voting policy. Your communications with Drummond Woodsum laid out a course of action we could take to be "conservative," but they did not address the thorny issue that a different voting outcome from the original could not be endorsed under our existing policy. The original vote was, after all, legal by all accounts, and that history cannot be rewritten for convenience...or to be "conservative." Your charge was to remove any doubt that we were in compliance with sunshine laws.
The burden of proof now is upon you to show that Judy could replace me as chair where there is no such provision in either our policy or Maine law.
I'm sure Judy would make a fine chair. In fact, I nominated her and she declined that first night because of her frequent absences...but, the Board elected another chair that night, and that person is still chair until you prove otherwise.
Until you can get a definitive answer to this question---one that could stand up in court, as it may well have to---I suggest Judy run meetings with her title undefined and you schedule meetings only when she will be present. There will be no more need for meeting theatrics until this is settled since Judy is either chair or vice chair under either outcome and thus legal for running meetings. If she has to do that all year, so be it.
I can be patient, but I cannot stand by while you create new laws, new interpretations, and new Board policy to suit each purpose. The Board is bound by laws which are changed only by legislatures and courts, and if you wish to change Board policies, there is a procedure for that, too. Our laws and policies July 15 were clear and were not changed July 29.
--apm
Communications with lawyers...
I've copied below the complete set of communications with school lawyers which Quenten shared with the Board, plus Mike's complaint in its entirety. Nothing else was given to the Board.
Here's Quenten's original query to the lawyer on the morning of July 16, the day after my election as chair:
************************
Bruce
The school board has a policy that says they will use a written ballot to elect officers if there are two or more nominees. We used a written ballot last night to elect a chairperson. There have been articles in the Lewiston Sun that this may not be legal. Is it? If not do we need to do anything about it at this point.
The policy is attached.
Quenten
************************
...the response July 20:
Quenten,
We have given school boards the opinion that officer elections, like any other action, must be done in public. Your policy provides for written ballots, although it does not explicitly call for “secret” ballots. If you have the ballots and the identity of the members casting each ballot, you could simply make that vote public by including the tally in the minutes. If not, the conservative thing to do would be to vote again, in public, at the next meeting. Alternatively, you could do nothing and wait and see if anyone challenges it. I know that as a matter of practice, a number of boards use secret ballots to elect officers, and nobody challenges the practice. Of course, the Lewiston Sun may change that.
Bruce
******************************
On the morning of July 22:
Bruce
The person who was chairman last year is challenging the election results. He also contends that the entire meeting was invalid and we need to revote every action that the board took during the last meeting.
So the questions are:
1. Do we really need to revote every action?
2. If we need to hold a revote do we follow the usual procedure where I open the meeting and chair it until a chairman is elected?
3. Do we need to re-elect the vice chairperson who was elected by a show of hands?
4 Or, does the vice chairperson chair the meeting until a chairman is elected?
Quenten
*********************
This was "Mike's" entire complaint. The note was not signed or dated. The name was typed in, as below.
To Whom It May Concern,
I, Gerald Pond Jr., would like to officially contest the Maine School Administrative District #58 vote for School Board Chair held at Mt. Abram High School on July 15, 2010.
Respectfully Submitted,
Gerald Pond Jr.
*************************
At 2 pm on the 29th:
Attached is the letter from Drummond Woodsum regarding the election of a chairperson. In order to comply with the Policy and the law you should vote by written ballot but the ballots should be signed so that your votes are not secret. You may want to consider changing the policy as a written ballot that is not secret does not seem useful. If there is no objection Judy should open the meeting.
Quenten
----- Original Message -----
Attached is a letter to you from Peter Felmly. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us. Thank you.
Paige Folsom
Legal Assistant to E. William Stockmeyer, Daniel J. Rose and Peter C. Felmly
DrummondWoodsum
...
July 29, 2010
Via Electronic and U.S. Mail
Quenten K. Clark Superintendent of Schools
M.S.A.D. No. 58 1401 Rangeley Road
Phillips, ME 04966
Dear Superintendent Clark:
I am writing in response to your inquiry concerning whether the school board must revisit each of the votes taken during the July 15, 2010 board meeting because the board chairperson was elected by a secret, written ballot. In addition, you requested some guidance on who should preside over the meeting scheduled for this evening until the board elects a new chairperson.
I understand that, on July 15, 2010, the school board met to elect officers and subsequently conducted a typical school board meeting. During the public meeting, the school board initially elected (by a 5-4 vote) a chairperson by secret ballot and then elected a vice chairperson by a show of hands. This latter vote was unanimous. Thereafter, the board proceeded to hear a number of reports from administrators and to address the action items on the agenda, which had been prepared in advance of the meeting. The action items included (a) approval of the minutes of an earlier board meeting; (b) approval of student handbooks for the high school and elementary school; (c) authorizing the Superintendent to arrange a short-term borrowing of up to $1 million; (d) approval of the Superintendent’s nomination for a special education teacher; and (e) conducting an executive session pursuant to 1 M.R.S. §405 (6)(A) to evaluate your performance as Superintendent.
Initially, it is my understanding that Bruce Smith previously recommended to you that the conservative approach would be to have a second election for the chairperson position. For the reasons you and Bruce discussed, we would recommend that the new election be conducted in public session, and not by secret ballot.
Although we believe that the board should conduct a new election of the chairperson, we do not believe it is necessary to revisit all of the subsequent votes. There is no reason an election of the chair by secret ballot would invalidate subsequent votes by the board. As reflected in the board minutes from the July 15 meeting, the votes were unanimous were not shielded from public scrutiny. It is therefore our opinion that the board does not need to take another vote on any matter other than the selection of board chair. Although the vote to authorize a short-term borrowing was proper, please note that state law requires that a properly elected chairperson must sign any bonds or notes issued in connection with such borrowing. Thus, the chairperson elected at tonight’s public meeting should be the one to sign any documents in connection with the short-term borrowing.
Finally, with respect to the process for this evening’s meeting, we would recommend that the vice chairperson conduct the meeting until a new board chairperson is elected.
I hope that the above has been responsive to your inquiry. If I can be of further assistance, please do not hesitate to call.
Sincerely, Peter C. Felmly
Here's Quenten's original query to the lawyer on the morning of July 16, the day after my election as chair:
************************
Bruce
The school board has a policy that says they will use a written ballot to elect officers if there are two or more nominees. We used a written ballot last night to elect a chairperson. There have been articles in the Lewiston Sun that this may not be legal. Is it? If not do we need to do anything about it at this point.
The policy is attached.
Quenten
************************
...the response July 20:
Quenten,
We have given school boards the opinion that officer elections, like any other action, must be done in public. Your policy provides for written ballots, although it does not explicitly call for “secret” ballots. If you have the ballots and the identity of the members casting each ballot, you could simply make that vote public by including the tally in the minutes. If not, the conservative thing to do would be to vote again, in public, at the next meeting. Alternatively, you could do nothing and wait and see if anyone challenges it. I know that as a matter of practice, a number of boards use secret ballots to elect officers, and nobody challenges the practice. Of course, the Lewiston Sun may change that.
Bruce
******************************
On the morning of July 22:
Bruce
The person who was chairman last year is challenging the election results. He also contends that the entire meeting was invalid and we need to revote every action that the board took during the last meeting.
So the questions are:
1. Do we really need to revote every action?
2. If we need to hold a revote do we follow the usual procedure where I open the meeting and chair it until a chairman is elected?
3. Do we need to re-elect the vice chairperson who was elected by a show of hands?
4 Or, does the vice chairperson chair the meeting until a chairman is elected?
Quenten
*********************
This was "Mike's" entire complaint. The note was not signed or dated. The name was typed in, as below.
To Whom It May Concern,
I, Gerald Pond Jr., would like to officially contest the Maine School Administrative District #58 vote for School Board Chair held at Mt. Abram High School on July 15, 2010.
Respectfully Submitted,
Gerald Pond Jr.
*************************
At 2 pm on the 29th:
Attached is the letter from Drummond Woodsum regarding the election of a chairperson. In order to comply with the Policy and the law you should vote by written ballot but the ballots should be signed so that your votes are not secret. You may want to consider changing the policy as a written ballot that is not secret does not seem useful. If there is no objection Judy should open the meeting.
Quenten
----- Original Message -----
Attached is a letter to you from Peter Felmly. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us. Thank you.
Paige Folsom
Legal Assistant to E. William Stockmeyer, Daniel J. Rose and Peter C. Felmly
DrummondWoodsum
...
July 29, 2010
Via Electronic and U.S. Mail
Quenten K. Clark Superintendent of Schools
M.S.A.D. No. 58 1401 Rangeley Road
Phillips, ME 04966
Dear Superintendent Clark:
I am writing in response to your inquiry concerning whether the school board must revisit each of the votes taken during the July 15, 2010 board meeting because the board chairperson was elected by a secret, written ballot. In addition, you requested some guidance on who should preside over the meeting scheduled for this evening until the board elects a new chairperson.
I understand that, on July 15, 2010, the school board met to elect officers and subsequently conducted a typical school board meeting. During the public meeting, the school board initially elected (by a 5-4 vote) a chairperson by secret ballot and then elected a vice chairperson by a show of hands. This latter vote was unanimous. Thereafter, the board proceeded to hear a number of reports from administrators and to address the action items on the agenda, which had been prepared in advance of the meeting. The action items included (a) approval of the minutes of an earlier board meeting; (b) approval of student handbooks for the high school and elementary school; (c) authorizing the Superintendent to arrange a short-term borrowing of up to $1 million; (d) approval of the Superintendent’s nomination for a special education teacher; and (e) conducting an executive session pursuant to 1 M.R.S. §405 (6)(A) to evaluate your performance as Superintendent.
Initially, it is my understanding that Bruce Smith previously recommended to you that the conservative approach would be to have a second election for the chairperson position. For the reasons you and Bruce discussed, we would recommend that the new election be conducted in public session, and not by secret ballot.
Although we believe that the board should conduct a new election of the chairperson, we do not believe it is necessary to revisit all of the subsequent votes. There is no reason an election of the chair by secret ballot would invalidate subsequent votes by the board. As reflected in the board minutes from the July 15 meeting, the votes were unanimous were not shielded from public scrutiny. It is therefore our opinion that the board does not need to take another vote on any matter other than the selection of board chair. Although the vote to authorize a short-term borrowing was proper, please note that state law requires that a properly elected chairperson must sign any bonds or notes issued in connection with such borrowing. Thus, the chairperson elected at tonight’s public meeting should be the one to sign any documents in connection with the short-term borrowing.
Finally, with respect to the process for this evening’s meeting, we would recommend that the vice chairperson conduct the meeting until a new board chairperson is elected.
I hope that the above has been responsive to your inquiry. If I can be of further assistance, please do not hesitate to call.
Sincerely, Peter C. Felmly
19 July 2010
manipulation
This is from an online guide to seeking consensus. It describes techniques for manipulating or hijacking a democratic process:
"Exhibiting stress, anxiety or grave worry is a common way for manipulators to exert influence, since most of us are conditioned to want to help someone in distress, and we may be so eager to do so that we will overlook other priorities just to ease the discomfort as quickly as possible. By appearing fretful at the possibility that something might not get done or put upon by having to do so much himself, a de-facto leader can galvanize people to act without attention to previously agreed-upon parameters. Similarly, acting hurt, shocked, or giving the appearance that one is seething with righteous indignation in the face of a concern that has been raised is a quick way to silence inconvenient dissent.
"The group's most common reaction to a faction or individual who seeks to sway the collective's will is not, as one would hope, calling the authoritarian manipulators to task, but gratitude that someone is taking on the difficult work of running the group and its activities. These members become complicit in the power-grabbing tactics of the self-appointed leader(s). Oftentimes, collective members actually offer these self-appointed elites their loyal support and become openly distrustful or disdainful of those who question the actions or authority of the leadership. At this point, the group is not only no longer operating collectively or by consensus, it has effectively become a private club."
"Exhibiting stress, anxiety or grave worry is a common way for manipulators to exert influence, since most of us are conditioned to want to help someone in distress, and we may be so eager to do so that we will overlook other priorities just to ease the discomfort as quickly as possible. By appearing fretful at the possibility that something might not get done or put upon by having to do so much himself, a de-facto leader can galvanize people to act without attention to previously agreed-upon parameters. Similarly, acting hurt, shocked, or giving the appearance that one is seething with righteous indignation in the face of a concern that has been raised is a quick way to silence inconvenient dissent.
"The group's most common reaction to a faction or individual who seeks to sway the collective's will is not, as one would hope, calling the authoritarian manipulators to task, but gratitude that someone is taking on the difficult work of running the group and its activities. These members become complicit in the power-grabbing tactics of the self-appointed leader(s). Oftentimes, collective members actually offer these self-appointed elites their loyal support and become openly distrustful or disdainful of those who question the actions or authority of the leadership. At this point, the group is not only no longer operating collectively or by consensus, it has effectively become a private club."
18 June 2010
Nine Assumptions of Schooling (and 21 facts...) by John Taylor Gatto
NINE ASSUMPTIONS OF SCHOOLING -
and Twenty-one Facts the Institution Would Rather Not Discuss
by John Taylor Gatto
I'll start off bluntly by giving you some data I'd be shocked if you already know. A few simple facts, all verifiable, which by their existence call into question the whole shaky edifice of American government compulsion schooling from kindergarten through college and its questionable connection with the job market. The implications of this data are quite radical so I'm going to take pains to ground it in the most conservative society on earth, the mountain world of Switzerland. You all remember Switzerland: that's where people put their money when they really want it to be really safe.
The Swiss just like us believe that education is the key to their national success, but that's where our similarity ends. In 1990 about 60% of American secondary school graduates enrolled in college, but only 22% did in Switzerland; in America almost l00% of our kids go to high school or private equivalents, but only a little over a fifth of the Swiss kids do. And yet the Swiss per capita income is the highest of any nation in the world and the Swiss keep insisting that virtually everyone in their country is highly educated!
What on earth could be going on? Remember it's a sophisticated economy which produces the highest per-capita paycheck in the world we're talking about, high for the lightly-schooled as well as for the heavily schooled, higher than Japan's, Germany's or our own. No one goes to high school in Switzerland who doesn't also want to go to college, three-quarters of the young people enter apprenticeships before high school. It seems the Swiss don't make the mistake that schooling and education are synonyms.
If you are thinking silently at this point that apprenticeships as a substitute for classroom confinement isn't a very shocking idea and it has the drawback of locking kids away from later choice of white collar work, think again. I wasn't only talking about blue-collar apprenticeships - although the Swiss have those, too - but white-collar apprenticeships in abundance. Many of the top management of insurance companies, manufacturing companies, banks, etc., never saw the inside of a high school, let alone a college.
Is that possible? The highest per capita income in the world and every single citizen also trusted by government to own dangerous weapons. [I forgot to tell you that the largely unschooled Swiss (by our standards) also demand universal gun ownership.] Ownership. If it puzzles you what connection I might be drawing between great prosperity, freedom from forced schooling where it is clearly inappropriate, and a profound mutuality, you think about it.
Well, shocking is the word for it, isn't it? I mean here you are putting away your loot in a Swiss bank because it's safe over there and not so safe here and now I've told you the bank president may only have a sixth grade schooling. Just like Shakespeare did.
As long as we're playing "did you know?", did you know that in Sweden, a country legendary for its quality of life and a nation which beats American school performance in every academic category, a kid isn't allowed to start school before the age of 7? The hard-headed Swedes don't want to pay for the social pathologies attendant on ripping a child away from his home and mother and dumping him into a pen with strangers. Can you remember the last time you worried about a Swedish Volvo breaking down prematurely or a Swedish jet engine failing in the air? Did you know that the entire Swedish school sequence is only 9 years long, a net 25% time and tax savings over our own 12-year sequence?
Exactly in whose best interest do you think it is that the New York Times or every other element of journalism, for that matter, doesn't make information like this readily accessible? How can you think clearly about our own predicament if you don't have it?
Did you know that Hong Kong, a country with a population the size of Norway's, beats Japan in every scientific and mathematical category in which the two countries compete? Did you know that Hong Kong has a school year ten and one half weeks shorter than Japan's? How on earth do they manage that if longer school years translate into higher performance? Why haven't you heard about Hong Kong, do you suppose? You've heard enough about Japan, I'm sure.
But I'll bet you haven't heard this about Japan. I'll bet you haven't heard that in Japan a recess is held after every class period.
Or did you know that in Flemish Belgium with the shortest school year in the developed world that the kids regularly finish in the top three nations in the world in academic competition? Is it the water in Belgium or what? Because it can't be the passionate commitment to government forced schooling, which they don't seem to possess.
Did you know that three British Prime Ministers in this century including the current one didn't bother to go to college? I hope I've made the point. If you trust journalism or the professional educational establishment to provide you with data you need to think for yourself in the increasingly fantastic socialist world of compulsion schooling, you are certainly the kind of citizen who would trade his cow for a handful of colored beans.
-2-
Shortly into the 20th century American schooling decided to move away from intellectual de-velopment or skills training as the main justification for its existence and to enter the eerie world of social engineering, a world where "socializing" and "psychologizing" the classroom preempted attention and rewards. Professionalization of the administrative/ teaching staff was an important preliminary mechanism to this end, serving as a sieve to remove troublesome interlopers and providing lucrative ladders to reward allies and camp followers.
Non-intellectual, non-skill schooling was supported by a strange and motley collection of fellow travelers: from unions, yes, but also from the ranks of legendary businessmen like Carnegie and Rockefeller, Ford and Astor; there were genuine ideologues like John Dewey, yes, but many academic opportunists as well, like Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia; prominent colleges like Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago took a large hand in the deconstruction of American academic schooling as well as a powerful core of private foundations and think tanks. Whether they did this out of conviction, for the advantage of private interests, or any hybrid of these reasons and more I'll leave for the moment to others for debate. What is certain is that the outcomes aimed for had little to do with why parents thought children were ordered into schools; such alien outcomes as socialization into creatures who would no longer feel easy with their own parents, or psychologization into dependable and dependent camp followers. Of what field general it wasn't clear except to say that whoever could win undisputed control of hiring and curriculum in a school district would have a clear hand in selecting and arranging the contents of children's minds.
In those early years of the 20th century a radical shift was well under way, transforming a society of farmers and craftspeople, fishermen and small entrepreneurs into the disciplined work-force of a corporate state, one in which ALL the work was being sucked into colossal governments, colossal institutions and colossal business enterprises - a society whose driving logic was comfort, security, predictability and consensus rather than independence, originality, risk-taking and uncompromising principle. In the gospels of social engineering this transformation was leading to a future utopia of welfare capitalism. With the problem of "production" solved, the attention of professional intellectuals and powerful men of wealth turned to controlling distribution so that a "rational" society, defined as a stable state without internal or external conflicts, could be managed for nations, regions and eventually the entire planet. In such a system, if you behave, you get a share of the divvy and if you don't, your share is correspondingly reduced. Keep in mind that a small farmer, a carpenter, a fisherman, seamstress or Indian fighter never gave undue attention to being well-behaved and you will begin to see how a centralized economy and centralized schooling box human behavior into a much narrowed container than what it normally would occupy and you will begin to see why intellectual development for all its theoretical desirability can never really be a serious goal for a society seeking comfort, security, predictability and consensus. Indeed, such a fate must be actively avoided.
Anyway, once this design was in place - and it was firmly in place by 1917 - all that remained to reach the target was a continual series of experiments on public schoolchildren, some modest in scope, many breathtakingly radical like "IQ tests" or "kindergartens", and a full palette of intermediate colors like "multiculturalism", "rainbow" curricula and "universal self esteem". Each of these thrusts has a real behavioral purpose which is part of the larger utopia envisioned, yet each is capable of being rhetorically defended as the particular redress of some current "problem".
But the biggest obstacle to a planned society is parents. Parents have their own plans for their own kids; most often they love their kids, so their motivations are self-reinforcing, unlike those of schoolpeople who do it for a pay-check, and unless held in check even a few unhappy parents can disrupt the conduct of an educational experiment. The second biggest obstacle to a planned society are religious sects, each of which maintains that God has a plan for all human beings, including children. And the third biggest obstacle is local values and ethnic cultures which also provide serious maps for growing up.
Each of these three is an external force bidding for the loyalty of children against the directions of the political State which owns the schools. One final obstacle - and a colossal one - is the individual nature of each particular child. John Locke pulled a whopper when he maintained that children are blank slates waiting to be written upon. He should have asked a few mothers about that. The fact is that if you watch children closely in controlled conditions as I did for 30 years as a school-teacher, you can hardly fail to conclude that each kid has a private des-tiny he or she is pulling toward wordlessly, a destiny frequently put out of reach by schoolteachers, school executives or project officers from the Ford Foundation.
In a planned society individuality, cultural identity, a relationship with God or a close-knit family are all elements which must be suppressed if they cannot be totally extinguished. The Soviet Union was an object lesson in this utopian undertaking and the United States has been going down the same road, albeit with more hesitations, at least since the end of the first world war. To accomplish such a complex transformation of nature into mechanism the general public must be led to agree to certain apparently sensible assumptions - such as the assumption, for instance, that a college degree is necessary for a high-status ca reer - even though Swiss corporations and the British government are often run by managers without college training. The security of the school institution de-pends on many such assumptions, some which by adroit concealments worthy of a card sharp seem to link schooling and future responsibility, and some which serve to exalt the political State, diminish essential human institutions like the family or define human nature as mean, violent and brutish. I'd like to pass nine specimens drawn from these latter categories of assumption in front of your minds to allow each of you to gauge which ones you personally accept, and to what degree.
-3-
Nine Assumptions of Schooling
1. Social cohesion is not possible through other means than government schooling; school is the main defense against social chaos.
2. Children cannot learn to tolerate each other unless first socialized by government agents.
3. The only safe mentors of children are certified experts with government-approved conditioning; children must be protected from the uncertified, including parents.
4. Compelling children to violate family, cultural and religious norms does not interfere with the development of their intellects or characters.
5. In order to dilute parental influence, children must be disabused of the notion that mother and father are sovereign in morality or intelligence.
6. Families should be encouraged to expend concern on the general education of everyone but discouraged from being unduly concerned with their own children's education.
7. The State has predominant responsibility for training, morals and beliefs. Children who escape state scrutiny will become immoral.
8. Children from families with different beliefs, backgrounds and styles must be forced together even if those beliefs violently contradict one another. Robert Frost, the poet, was wrong when he maintained that "good fences make good neighbors."
9. Coercion in the name of liberty is a valid use of state power.
-4-
These assumptions and a few others associated with them lead directly to the shape, style and exercise of school politics. And these primary assumptions generate secondary assumptions which fuel the largely phony school debate played out in American journalism, a debate where the most important questions like "What is the end that justifies these means?" are never asked. I once had dinner in Washington at the same table as Fred Hechinger, education editor of the New York Times. When I raised the possibility that the Times framed its coverage to omit inconvenient aspects of school questions (such as challenging the presumed connection between quantity of money spent and quality of education) Mr. Hechinger became very angry and contemptuously dismissed my contention; almost the same thing happened on a different occasion, also in Washington, when I had dinner at the Council for Basic Education at the same table with Albert Shanker of the AFT. With that history of failure in opening a dialogue with some of the powers and principalities of institutional education (and I could add Lamar Alexander, Bill Bennett, Joe Fernandez, Diane Ravitch, Checker Finn and many other luminaries who seemed to hear me with impatience) I've been driven to trying to catch the ear of the general public in meeting the assumptions schools rely upon with contradictory facts open to formal verification - or the informal variety grounded in common sense. What follows are 21 of these disturbing contradictions raised for your contemplation:
21 Facts About Schooling
1. There is no relationship between the amount of money spent on schooling and "good" results as measured by parents of any culture. This seems to be because "education" is not a commodity to be purchased but an enlargement of insight, power, understanding and self-control almost completely outside the cash economy. Education is almost overwhelmingly an internally generated effort. The five American states which usually spend least per capita on schooling are the five which usually have the best test results (although Iowa which is about 30th in spending sometimes creeps into the honored circle).
2. There is no compelling evidence to show a positive relationship between length of schooling and accomplishment. Many countries with short school years outperform those with long ones by a wide margin.
3. Most relationships between test scores and job performance are illegitimate, arranged in advance by only allowing those testing well access to the work. Would you hire a newspaper reporter because he had "A"s in English? Have you ever asked your surgeon what grade he got in meat-cutting? George F. Kennan, intellectual darling of the Washington élite some while ago - and the author of our "containment" policy against the Soviet Union - often found his math and science grades in secondary school below 60, and at Princeton he had many flunks, "D"s and "C"s. "Sometimes," he said, "it is the unadjusted student struggling to forge his own standards who develops within himself the thoughtfulness to comprehend." Dean Acheson, Harry Truman's Secretary of State, graduated from Groton with a 68 average. The headmaster wrote his mother, "He is...by no means a pleasant boy to teach." Einstein, we all know, was considered a high-grade moron, as were Thomas Edison and Benjamin Franklin. Is there anybody out there who really believes that grades and test scores are the mark of the man? Then what exactly are they, pray tell? Q.E.D.
4. Training done on the job is invariably cheaper, quicker, and of much higher quality than training done in a school setting. If you wonder why that should be, you want to start, I think, by understanding that education and training are two different things, one largely residing in the development of good habits, the other in the development of vision and understanding, judgment and the like. Education is self-training; it calls into its calculations mountains of personal data and experience which are simply unobtainable by any schoolteacher or higher pedagogue. That simple fact is why all the many beautifully precise rules on how to think produce such poor results.
Schools can be restructured to teach children to develop intellect, resourcefulness and independence, but that would lead, in short order, to structural changes in the old economy so profound it is not likely to be allowed to happen because the social effects are impossible to clearly foretell.
5. In spite of relentless propaganda to the contrary, the American economy is tending strongly to require less knowledge and less intellectual ability of its employees, not more. Scientists and mathematicians currently exist in numbers far exceeding any global demand for them or any national demand - and that condition should grow much worse over the next decade, thanks to the hype of pedagogues and politicians. Schools can be restructured to teach children to develop intellect, resourcefulness and independence, but that would lead, in short order, to structural changes in the old economy so profound it is not likely to be allowed to happen because the social effects are impossible to clearly foretell.
6. The habits, drills and routines of government schooling sharply reduce a person's chances of possessing initiative or creativity - furthermore the mechanism of why this is so has been well understood for centuries.
7. Teachers are paid as specialists but they almost never have any real world experience in their specialties; indeed the low quality of their training has been a scandal for 80 years.
8. A substantial amount of testimony exists from highly regarded scientists like Richard Feynman, the recently deceased Nobel laureate, or Albert Einstein and many others that scientific discovery is negatively related to the procedures of school science classes.
9. According to research published by Christopher Jencks, the famous sociologist, and others as well, the quality of school which any student attends is a very bad predictor of later success, financial, social or emotional; on the other hand the quality of family life is a very good predictor. That would seem to indicate a national family policy directly spending on the home, not the school.
10. Children learn fastest and easiest when very young; general intelligence has probably developed as far as it will by the age of four. Children are quite capable of reading and enjoying difficult material by that age and also capable of performing all the mathematical operations skillfully and with pleasure. Whether kids should do these things or not is a matter of philosophy or cultural tradition, not a course dictated by any scientific knowledge about the advisability of the practice.
11. There is a direct relationship between heavy doses of teaching and detachment from reality with subsequent flights into fantasy. Many students so oppressed lose their links with past and present, present and future. And the bond with "now" is substantially weakened.
12. Unknown to the public virtually all famous remedial programs have failed. Programs like Title I/Chapter I survive by the goodwill of political allies, not by results.
13. There is no credible evidence that racial mixing has any positive effect on student performance, but a large body of suggestive data is emerging that the confinement of children from subcultures with children of a dominant culture does harm to the weaker group.
14. Forced busing has accelerated the disintegration of minority neighborhoods without any visible academic benefit as trade-off.
15. There is no reason to believe that any existing educational technology can significantly improve intellectual performance; on the contrary, to the extent that machines establish the goals and work schedules, ask the questions and monitor the performances, the already catastrophic passivity and indifference created by forced confinement schooling only increases.
16. There is no body of knowledge inaccessible to a motivated elementary student. The sequences of development we use are hardly the product of "science" but instead are legacies of unstable men like Pestalozzi and Froebel, and the military government of 19th century Prussia from which we imported them.
17. Delinquent behavior is a direct reaction to the structure of schooling. It is much worse than the press has reported because all urban school districts conspire to suppress its prevalence. Teachers who insist on justice on behalf of pupils and parents are most frequently intimidated into silence. Or dismissed.
18. The rituals of schooling remove flexibility from the mind, that characteristic vital in adjusting to different situations. Schools strive for uniformity in a world increasingly less uniform.
19. Teacher-training courses are widely held in contempt by practicing teachers as well as by the general public because expensive research has consistently failed to provide guidance to best practice.
20. Schools create and maintain a caste system, separating children according to irrelevant parameters. Poor, working class, middle class and upper middle class kids are constantly made aware of alleged differences among themselves by the use of methods not called for by the task at hand.
21. Efforts to draw a child out of his culture or his social class has an immediate effect on his family relationships, friendships and the stability of his self-image.
Well, there you have them: nine assumptions and twenty-one assertions I think can be documented well enough to call facts. How are we all as a society going to get to a better place in schools than the one we've gotten to at the moment? The only way I can see after spending 35 years in and around the institution (53 if I count my own time as inmate) is to put full choice squarely back into the hands of parents, let the marketplace redefine schooling - a job the special interests are incapable of - and encourage the development of as many styles of schooling as there are human dreams. Let people, not bureaucrats, work out their own destinies. That's what made us a great country in the first place.
and Twenty-one Facts the Institution Would Rather Not Discuss
by John Taylor Gatto
I'll start off bluntly by giving you some data I'd be shocked if you already know. A few simple facts, all verifiable, which by their existence call into question the whole shaky edifice of American government compulsion schooling from kindergarten through college and its questionable connection with the job market. The implications of this data are quite radical so I'm going to take pains to ground it in the most conservative society on earth, the mountain world of Switzerland. You all remember Switzerland: that's where people put their money when they really want it to be really safe.
The Swiss just like us believe that education is the key to their national success, but that's where our similarity ends. In 1990 about 60% of American secondary school graduates enrolled in college, but only 22% did in Switzerland; in America almost l00% of our kids go to high school or private equivalents, but only a little over a fifth of the Swiss kids do. And yet the Swiss per capita income is the highest of any nation in the world and the Swiss keep insisting that virtually everyone in their country is highly educated!
What on earth could be going on? Remember it's a sophisticated economy which produces the highest per-capita paycheck in the world we're talking about, high for the lightly-schooled as well as for the heavily schooled, higher than Japan's, Germany's or our own. No one goes to high school in Switzerland who doesn't also want to go to college, three-quarters of the young people enter apprenticeships before high school. It seems the Swiss don't make the mistake that schooling and education are synonyms.
If you are thinking silently at this point that apprenticeships as a substitute for classroom confinement isn't a very shocking idea and it has the drawback of locking kids away from later choice of white collar work, think again. I wasn't only talking about blue-collar apprenticeships - although the Swiss have those, too - but white-collar apprenticeships in abundance. Many of the top management of insurance companies, manufacturing companies, banks, etc., never saw the inside of a high school, let alone a college.
Is that possible? The highest per capita income in the world and every single citizen also trusted by government to own dangerous weapons. [I forgot to tell you that the largely unschooled Swiss (by our standards) also demand universal gun ownership.] Ownership. If it puzzles you what connection I might be drawing between great prosperity, freedom from forced schooling where it is clearly inappropriate, and a profound mutuality, you think about it.
Well, shocking is the word for it, isn't it? I mean here you are putting away your loot in a Swiss bank because it's safe over there and not so safe here and now I've told you the bank president may only have a sixth grade schooling. Just like Shakespeare did.
As long as we're playing "did you know?", did you know that in Sweden, a country legendary for its quality of life and a nation which beats American school performance in every academic category, a kid isn't allowed to start school before the age of 7? The hard-headed Swedes don't want to pay for the social pathologies attendant on ripping a child away from his home and mother and dumping him into a pen with strangers. Can you remember the last time you worried about a Swedish Volvo breaking down prematurely or a Swedish jet engine failing in the air? Did you know that the entire Swedish school sequence is only 9 years long, a net 25% time and tax savings over our own 12-year sequence?
Exactly in whose best interest do you think it is that the New York Times or every other element of journalism, for that matter, doesn't make information like this readily accessible? How can you think clearly about our own predicament if you don't have it?
Did you know that Hong Kong, a country with a population the size of Norway's, beats Japan in every scientific and mathematical category in which the two countries compete? Did you know that Hong Kong has a school year ten and one half weeks shorter than Japan's? How on earth do they manage that if longer school years translate into higher performance? Why haven't you heard about Hong Kong, do you suppose? You've heard enough about Japan, I'm sure.
But I'll bet you haven't heard this about Japan. I'll bet you haven't heard that in Japan a recess is held after every class period.
Or did you know that in Flemish Belgium with the shortest school year in the developed world that the kids regularly finish in the top three nations in the world in academic competition? Is it the water in Belgium or what? Because it can't be the passionate commitment to government forced schooling, which they don't seem to possess.
Did you know that three British Prime Ministers in this century including the current one didn't bother to go to college? I hope I've made the point. If you trust journalism or the professional educational establishment to provide you with data you need to think for yourself in the increasingly fantastic socialist world of compulsion schooling, you are certainly the kind of citizen who would trade his cow for a handful of colored beans.
-2-
Shortly into the 20th century American schooling decided to move away from intellectual de-velopment or skills training as the main justification for its existence and to enter the eerie world of social engineering, a world where "socializing" and "psychologizing" the classroom preempted attention and rewards. Professionalization of the administrative/ teaching staff was an important preliminary mechanism to this end, serving as a sieve to remove troublesome interlopers and providing lucrative ladders to reward allies and camp followers.
Non-intellectual, non-skill schooling was supported by a strange and motley collection of fellow travelers: from unions, yes, but also from the ranks of legendary businessmen like Carnegie and Rockefeller, Ford and Astor; there were genuine ideologues like John Dewey, yes, but many academic opportunists as well, like Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia; prominent colleges like Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago took a large hand in the deconstruction of American academic schooling as well as a powerful core of private foundations and think tanks. Whether they did this out of conviction, for the advantage of private interests, or any hybrid of these reasons and more I'll leave for the moment to others for debate. What is certain is that the outcomes aimed for had little to do with why parents thought children were ordered into schools; such alien outcomes as socialization into creatures who would no longer feel easy with their own parents, or psychologization into dependable and dependent camp followers. Of what field general it wasn't clear except to say that whoever could win undisputed control of hiring and curriculum in a school district would have a clear hand in selecting and arranging the contents of children's minds.
In those early years of the 20th century a radical shift was well under way, transforming a society of farmers and craftspeople, fishermen and small entrepreneurs into the disciplined work-force of a corporate state, one in which ALL the work was being sucked into colossal governments, colossal institutions and colossal business enterprises - a society whose driving logic was comfort, security, predictability and consensus rather than independence, originality, risk-taking and uncompromising principle. In the gospels of social engineering this transformation was leading to a future utopia of welfare capitalism. With the problem of "production" solved, the attention of professional intellectuals and powerful men of wealth turned to controlling distribution so that a "rational" society, defined as a stable state without internal or external conflicts, could be managed for nations, regions and eventually the entire planet. In such a system, if you behave, you get a share of the divvy and if you don't, your share is correspondingly reduced. Keep in mind that a small farmer, a carpenter, a fisherman, seamstress or Indian fighter never gave undue attention to being well-behaved and you will begin to see how a centralized economy and centralized schooling box human behavior into a much narrowed container than what it normally would occupy and you will begin to see why intellectual development for all its theoretical desirability can never really be a serious goal for a society seeking comfort, security, predictability and consensus. Indeed, such a fate must be actively avoided.
Anyway, once this design was in place - and it was firmly in place by 1917 - all that remained to reach the target was a continual series of experiments on public schoolchildren, some modest in scope, many breathtakingly radical like "IQ tests" or "kindergartens", and a full palette of intermediate colors like "multiculturalism", "rainbow" curricula and "universal self esteem". Each of these thrusts has a real behavioral purpose which is part of the larger utopia envisioned, yet each is capable of being rhetorically defended as the particular redress of some current "problem".
But the biggest obstacle to a planned society is parents. Parents have their own plans for their own kids; most often they love their kids, so their motivations are self-reinforcing, unlike those of schoolpeople who do it for a pay-check, and unless held in check even a few unhappy parents can disrupt the conduct of an educational experiment. The second biggest obstacle to a planned society are religious sects, each of which maintains that God has a plan for all human beings, including children. And the third biggest obstacle is local values and ethnic cultures which also provide serious maps for growing up.
Each of these three is an external force bidding for the loyalty of children against the directions of the political State which owns the schools. One final obstacle - and a colossal one - is the individual nature of each particular child. John Locke pulled a whopper when he maintained that children are blank slates waiting to be written upon. He should have asked a few mothers about that. The fact is that if you watch children closely in controlled conditions as I did for 30 years as a school-teacher, you can hardly fail to conclude that each kid has a private des-tiny he or she is pulling toward wordlessly, a destiny frequently put out of reach by schoolteachers, school executives or project officers from the Ford Foundation.
In a planned society individuality, cultural identity, a relationship with God or a close-knit family are all elements which must be suppressed if they cannot be totally extinguished. The Soviet Union was an object lesson in this utopian undertaking and the United States has been going down the same road, albeit with more hesitations, at least since the end of the first world war. To accomplish such a complex transformation of nature into mechanism the general public must be led to agree to certain apparently sensible assumptions - such as the assumption, for instance, that a college degree is necessary for a high-status ca reer - even though Swiss corporations and the British government are often run by managers without college training. The security of the school institution de-pends on many such assumptions, some which by adroit concealments worthy of a card sharp seem to link schooling and future responsibility, and some which serve to exalt the political State, diminish essential human institutions like the family or define human nature as mean, violent and brutish. I'd like to pass nine specimens drawn from these latter categories of assumption in front of your minds to allow each of you to gauge which ones you personally accept, and to what degree.
-3-
Nine Assumptions of Schooling
1. Social cohesion is not possible through other means than government schooling; school is the main defense against social chaos.
2. Children cannot learn to tolerate each other unless first socialized by government agents.
3. The only safe mentors of children are certified experts with government-approved conditioning; children must be protected from the uncertified, including parents.
4. Compelling children to violate family, cultural and religious norms does not interfere with the development of their intellects or characters.
5. In order to dilute parental influence, children must be disabused of the notion that mother and father are sovereign in morality or intelligence.
6. Families should be encouraged to expend concern on the general education of everyone but discouraged from being unduly concerned with their own children's education.
7. The State has predominant responsibility for training, morals and beliefs. Children who escape state scrutiny will become immoral.
8. Children from families with different beliefs, backgrounds and styles must be forced together even if those beliefs violently contradict one another. Robert Frost, the poet, was wrong when he maintained that "good fences make good neighbors."
9. Coercion in the name of liberty is a valid use of state power.
-4-
These assumptions and a few others associated with them lead directly to the shape, style and exercise of school politics. And these primary assumptions generate secondary assumptions which fuel the largely phony school debate played out in American journalism, a debate where the most important questions like "What is the end that justifies these means?" are never asked. I once had dinner in Washington at the same table as Fred Hechinger, education editor of the New York Times. When I raised the possibility that the Times framed its coverage to omit inconvenient aspects of school questions (such as challenging the presumed connection between quantity of money spent and quality of education) Mr. Hechinger became very angry and contemptuously dismissed my contention; almost the same thing happened on a different occasion, also in Washington, when I had dinner at the Council for Basic Education at the same table with Albert Shanker of the AFT. With that history of failure in opening a dialogue with some of the powers and principalities of institutional education (and I could add Lamar Alexander, Bill Bennett, Joe Fernandez, Diane Ravitch, Checker Finn and many other luminaries who seemed to hear me with impatience) I've been driven to trying to catch the ear of the general public in meeting the assumptions schools rely upon with contradictory facts open to formal verification - or the informal variety grounded in common sense. What follows are 21 of these disturbing contradictions raised for your contemplation:
21 Facts About Schooling
1. There is no relationship between the amount of money spent on schooling and "good" results as measured by parents of any culture. This seems to be because "education" is not a commodity to be purchased but an enlargement of insight, power, understanding and self-control almost completely outside the cash economy. Education is almost overwhelmingly an internally generated effort. The five American states which usually spend least per capita on schooling are the five which usually have the best test results (although Iowa which is about 30th in spending sometimes creeps into the honored circle).
2. There is no compelling evidence to show a positive relationship between length of schooling and accomplishment. Many countries with short school years outperform those with long ones by a wide margin.
3. Most relationships between test scores and job performance are illegitimate, arranged in advance by only allowing those testing well access to the work. Would you hire a newspaper reporter because he had "A"s in English? Have you ever asked your surgeon what grade he got in meat-cutting? George F. Kennan, intellectual darling of the Washington élite some while ago - and the author of our "containment" policy against the Soviet Union - often found his math and science grades in secondary school below 60, and at Princeton he had many flunks, "D"s and "C"s. "Sometimes," he said, "it is the unadjusted student struggling to forge his own standards who develops within himself the thoughtfulness to comprehend." Dean Acheson, Harry Truman's Secretary of State, graduated from Groton with a 68 average. The headmaster wrote his mother, "He is...by no means a pleasant boy to teach." Einstein, we all know, was considered a high-grade moron, as were Thomas Edison and Benjamin Franklin. Is there anybody out there who really believes that grades and test scores are the mark of the man? Then what exactly are they, pray tell? Q.E.D.
4. Training done on the job is invariably cheaper, quicker, and of much higher quality than training done in a school setting. If you wonder why that should be, you want to start, I think, by understanding that education and training are two different things, one largely residing in the development of good habits, the other in the development of vision and understanding, judgment and the like. Education is self-training; it calls into its calculations mountains of personal data and experience which are simply unobtainable by any schoolteacher or higher pedagogue. That simple fact is why all the many beautifully precise rules on how to think produce such poor results.
Schools can be restructured to teach children to develop intellect, resourcefulness and independence, but that would lead, in short order, to structural changes in the old economy so profound it is not likely to be allowed to happen because the social effects are impossible to clearly foretell.
5. In spite of relentless propaganda to the contrary, the American economy is tending strongly to require less knowledge and less intellectual ability of its employees, not more. Scientists and mathematicians currently exist in numbers far exceeding any global demand for them or any national demand - and that condition should grow much worse over the next decade, thanks to the hype of pedagogues and politicians. Schools can be restructured to teach children to develop intellect, resourcefulness and independence, but that would lead, in short order, to structural changes in the old economy so profound it is not likely to be allowed to happen because the social effects are impossible to clearly foretell.
6. The habits, drills and routines of government schooling sharply reduce a person's chances of possessing initiative or creativity - furthermore the mechanism of why this is so has been well understood for centuries.
7. Teachers are paid as specialists but they almost never have any real world experience in their specialties; indeed the low quality of their training has been a scandal for 80 years.
8. A substantial amount of testimony exists from highly regarded scientists like Richard Feynman, the recently deceased Nobel laureate, or Albert Einstein and many others that scientific discovery is negatively related to the procedures of school science classes.
9. According to research published by Christopher Jencks, the famous sociologist, and others as well, the quality of school which any student attends is a very bad predictor of later success, financial, social or emotional; on the other hand the quality of family life is a very good predictor. That would seem to indicate a national family policy directly spending on the home, not the school.
10. Children learn fastest and easiest when very young; general intelligence has probably developed as far as it will by the age of four. Children are quite capable of reading and enjoying difficult material by that age and also capable of performing all the mathematical operations skillfully and with pleasure. Whether kids should do these things or not is a matter of philosophy or cultural tradition, not a course dictated by any scientific knowledge about the advisability of the practice.
11. There is a direct relationship between heavy doses of teaching and detachment from reality with subsequent flights into fantasy. Many students so oppressed lose their links with past and present, present and future. And the bond with "now" is substantially weakened.
12. Unknown to the public virtually all famous remedial programs have failed. Programs like Title I/Chapter I survive by the goodwill of political allies, not by results.
13. There is no credible evidence that racial mixing has any positive effect on student performance, but a large body of suggestive data is emerging that the confinement of children from subcultures with children of a dominant culture does harm to the weaker group.
14. Forced busing has accelerated the disintegration of minority neighborhoods without any visible academic benefit as trade-off.
15. There is no reason to believe that any existing educational technology can significantly improve intellectual performance; on the contrary, to the extent that machines establish the goals and work schedules, ask the questions and monitor the performances, the already catastrophic passivity and indifference created by forced confinement schooling only increases.
16. There is no body of knowledge inaccessible to a motivated elementary student. The sequences of development we use are hardly the product of "science" but instead are legacies of unstable men like Pestalozzi and Froebel, and the military government of 19th century Prussia from which we imported them.
17. Delinquent behavior is a direct reaction to the structure of schooling. It is much worse than the press has reported because all urban school districts conspire to suppress its prevalence. Teachers who insist on justice on behalf of pupils and parents are most frequently intimidated into silence. Or dismissed.
18. The rituals of schooling remove flexibility from the mind, that characteristic vital in adjusting to different situations. Schools strive for uniformity in a world increasingly less uniform.
19. Teacher-training courses are widely held in contempt by practicing teachers as well as by the general public because expensive research has consistently failed to provide guidance to best practice.
20. Schools create and maintain a caste system, separating children according to irrelevant parameters. Poor, working class, middle class and upper middle class kids are constantly made aware of alleged differences among themselves by the use of methods not called for by the task at hand.
21. Efforts to draw a child out of his culture or his social class has an immediate effect on his family relationships, friendships and the stability of his self-image.
Well, there you have them: nine assumptions and twenty-one assertions I think can be documented well enough to call facts. How are we all as a society going to get to a better place in schools than the one we've gotten to at the moment? The only way I can see after spending 35 years in and around the institution (53 if I count my own time as inmate) is to put full choice squarely back into the hands of parents, let the marketplace redefine schooling - a job the special interests are incapable of - and encourage the development of as many styles of schooling as there are human dreams. Let people, not bureaucrats, work out their own destinies. That's what made us a great country in the first place.
School For a Post-Industrial Society
The Sudbury Valley School
"School For a Post-Industrial Society"
by Dan Greenberg
Three hundred years ago, if somebody had ventured the opinion it is possible to create a country in which people from all walks of life, all persuasions, nationalities, and backgrounds could live together in freedom, peace, and harmony, could live happy lives, could realize their personal dreams - a country in which people showed each other mutual respect, in which people treated each other with complete equality, and in which all decisions were made by the mutual consent of the governed, people would have considered that person a crazy utopian and would have brought all the experience of human history from the dawn of time as witness to the impossibility of such a dream. They would have said, "People just don't live that way. It doesn't work. It can't happen."
Happily for us sitting here today, two centuries ago our founding fathers did not treat that dream as utopian and instead found a way to make it possible to put it into practice. They did something unique in the history of the human race. They had before them the task of creating a new country, a new form of government. And they set about this task not by revising existing forms of government, not by starting from the models that they had around them and tinkering with them and adding a little here and a little there, but by sitting together and spending a tremendous amount of time and thought on "zero-base planning", on creating a government from scratch, starting from no assumptions other than those that they were willing to make explicitly at the moment. We have records of their deliberations, and many writings that reveal what they thought and how they came to their conclusions. They proceeded by examining the condition of the human race, the na-ture of the human animal, and the social and cultural conditions of the world into which the country they were founding was going to be born.
The founders of Sudbury Valley School, beginning in 1965, did much the same thing when it came to education. We too were dissatisfied - dissatisfied with the models of schools that we had available to us at the time, and we had a deep conviction that there was more at stake than just the proper curriculum or the right pedagogical methodology or the right mix of social and emotional and psycholog-ical factors that had to be applied to the educational scene. We were convinced that the time had come for complete reexamination of what it is that a school had to be about if it were to serve as an appropriate agent of society in this country in the late 2Oth century and beyond the year 2000. So we spent several years working on this, trying to gain an understanding of what school is for and how the goals of schools can best be realized.
Now, it's pretty much generally agreed that there are two major roles that a school fills. One is to provide an environment in which children can grow to maturity, from a state of formativeness and de-pendence to a state of independence as adults who have found their unique way of personal expression in life. The second goal is social rather than individ-ual. The school has to be the environment in which the culture prepares itself for its continuation from generation to generation. This is a goal that a community requires of its educational system if it wants its way of life to survive.
There is no guarantee that the social goal and the individual goal will mesh. In an authoritarian society, for example, where the lives of every single individual are controlled by some central authority, the social goal promulgating the authoritarian system is in clear conflict with any primacy given to the individual goals of the people in that society. One of the functions of a school in an authoritarian society must therefore be to subject the individual to severe restraints in order to force that individual to meet the needs of society as a whole. The educational systems of highly authoritarian regimes play down individual variation and individual freedom and effec-tively try to eliminate them.
On the other hand, in anarchistic educational systems, the individual is focused on, almost entirely to the exclusion of society. The individual is elevated above all else and modes of social interaction and cultural survival are given very little attention.
When we started thinking about Sudbury Valley School, we had no way of knowing whether there would be any way of harmonizing individual needs and social needs in the United States today. We started by examining the social side because it was clear to us that no school could possibly survive if it didn't meet the needs of modern American society. It might survive as a fringe school for some few discontented people who perhaps wanted a different way of life in this country. But as an institution that was meaningful to the mainstream of American society, there was no hope for it to survive unless it could tie into the deep needs of American culture in this era. So we set about asking ourselves, "What is it really that the society wants today in order to flourish?"
The key to the answer to this question was the realization that the United States is fundamentally a free market economy in which personal freedom is maximized on a social level. Ours is a society which, as a community, extols personal freedoms for its individual members and has social ways of guaranteeing these freedoms through the grant of rights and redress to individuals. In addition, the United States, in 1965, was clearly entering an economic era which was a novelty on the world scene - namely, the post-industrial economic era, which was beginning to be recognized as a reality. Today, of course, the image of a post-industrial society is commonplace. The key concept which differentiates a post-industrial economy from an industrial economy is the realization that in a post-industrial society, in principle, every task that can be defined by a set routine can be taken out of human hands and put into the hands of some sort of information processing machine. The main difference between an industrial and a post-industrial society lies not in the presence or absence of produced goods, but in the means by which those goods are produced. In an industrial society it is essential to have a virtual ARMY of human beings who are fit somehow into the mechanism of the overall industrial machine, who play an integrated role in the production process as parts of the machine.
The strength of the industrial society was that by using machines, it could magnify many, many thousandfold the ability of the society to produce material benefits for its members. But the machines couldn't do this alone. The machines were not sophisticated enough to carry out this process unaided. In order to make it happen what was needed was human intervention and human help. Human and machine became as one, something that probably has never been better illustrated than in the great classic film "Modern Times" that Charlie Chaplin produced over fifty years ago.
The deal that was made by various societies, one after the other, when they chose to enter the industrial era was to agree to forfeit much of their humanity, much of their freedom as individuals, in order to benefit as a society from the wealth and prosperity that the industrial era promised. This isn't an altogether ridiculous deal by any means. It's perfectly understandable that human societies that for thousands of years had accepted as inevitable the grinding poverty and deprivation and misery of the overwhelming majority of people - it's not surprising that such societies, when faced with the promise that miraculously and with incredible suddenness virtually the entire population could raise its standard of living and survive in a relatively comfortable manner, chose, one after another, to sacrifice willingly some of their personal freedoms, many of which were illusory anyway, to achieve that goal.
The post-industrial era is of a different nature, however. The post-industrial era ask no sacrifice of the material benefits that the industrial era provided. On the contrary, the development of sophisticated, computer-driven machines and information processing systems has promised an even greater degree of national wealth and diversity. But the demands on the individual are now completely different. In the post-industrial society there is essentially no place for human beings who are not able to function independently. There is no room for people trained to be cogs in a machine. Such people have been displaced permanently from the economic system. The needs of a post-industrial society, regardless of the governmental structure, are for people who can be independent, entrepreneurial producers of economic benefits. People have to take initiatives, to think for themselves, to create for themselves, to become productive for themselves. In a post-industrial society, there is no longer a mass of predetermined slots into which to fit people. The economic demands of post-industrial America are something that you hear from personnel directors in every industry and company today, small or large. The demands are for creative people with initiative, self-starters, people who know how to take responsibility, exercise judgment, make decisions for themselves.
This meant to us that a school in post-industrial America, in order to serve the culture, has to have the following features: It has to allow for a tremendous amount of diversity. It has to allow for people to become, on their own, selfstarters, initiators, entrepreneurs. And, at the same time, it has to allow children to grow up completely at home with the cultural values of our country, especially such essential values as tolerance, mutual respect, and self-government.
We then looked at the requirements for individual realization. These too had undergone a rather interesting change of perspective through the work of psychologists and developmental theorists. The commonly accepted model of the human had been that of a tabula rasa, a clean slate, born as infants with basically nothing in their heads and therefore growing up to be what other people have written on that slate. That's a model that put a tremendous responsibility on the people around the child who write on that child's slate. In a sense, that model was the utter negation of the individual as an independent being, and the subjugation of the individual will to the influences of those around it who impose their wills and their intellects on it from infancy onwards.
But Aristotle, 2,000 years ago, and developmental psychologists in recent times, developed other models that seemed to us, when we were creating Sudbury Valley School, to be much more realistic and much more in line with what we saw to be the nature of the human species. These people considered children from birth as being naturally curious, as being active participants in the learning process - not born with blank minds but, on the contrary, born with information processing systems in their brains which require of them, demand of them, by nature, to reach out, to explore, to seek to understand the world and make sense of it, using their sensory interactions and their agile brains to build pictures of reality - world views - in their minds that enable them to function in the world. In our view there was no such thing as a passive child. Every child is active. Every child we had ever seen, certainly in early infancy, was devoured with curiosity, was energetic, was able to overcome almost every barrier, was courageous, persistent, and constantly seeking to meet every challenge that came their way. And these are traits that we saw continuing year after year in children as long as it wasn't forced out of them by some crunching outside intervention.
So it seemed clear to us that the ideal environment for children to attain the full realization of their inherent intellectual, emotional, and spiritual potentials had to be one which, subject only to constraints imposed by safety, is totally open for exploration, free of restraints, free of external impositions; a place where each individual child would be granted the freedom to reach out everywhere and anywhere they wished so that they could follow through on all of their curious probing.
This realization came upon us like a thunderclap because we saw such a beautiful fit between the needs of society today and the needs of the individual. Both society and the individual in modern post-industrial America require that schools be an environment in which children are FREE, and in which children can LEARN HOW TO USE FREEDOM, how to be self-governing, how to live together as free people in peace and harmony and mutual respect. Not an environment in which one group dominated, or exercised power over another. Not an environment in which children were put into any sort of externally imposed track, or forced to think about prescribed subjects. But an environment in which children and adults alike work together to guarantee free accessibility to the world, to the greatest extent possible, for each and every child And that, in effect, is what Sudbury Valley school is about.
If you come to Sudbury Valley, the first impression you get is that of a regular school in recess. You notice children, outdoors and indoors, freely going on and off campus, freely walking about, moving from room to room, changing from group to group, talking, interacting, reading, playing. So much playing! More than anything else, the children at Sudbury Valley School, of all ages, play. The better they are at playing, the better they are at fashioning new models with which to understand the world. Play is the greatest teacher of all. Every innovative adult who has ever written about the creative process has talked about the extent to which he or she played with new ideas, moving freely in and out of new, original conceptions of the world without being hampered by preconceived notions of reality. The children at Sudbury Valley know how to play. They know how to take their play seriously. They know how to play with intensity and with focus.
Sudbury Valley is a community governed by itself. Every child in Sudbury Valley has a vote in every matter that pertains to the school. The school is governed by a School Meeting in which four-year-olds have the same vote as adults. Every decision in the school is made by that School Meeting. The budget, the hiring and firing of staff, the letting of contracts. In the Sudbury Valley community, no adult wields any particular power over any child, nor does any child wield power over any other child. All decisions are made in the School Meeting or delegated by the School Meeting to people elected on a temporary basis to fill a particular need. Our community is a model of democratic governance, much like the New England communities that we serve.
The children at Sudbury Valley, from age four and up, by being free, learn how to function as free people in a free society. They learn how to find their own pursuits. They learn how to occupy themselves. They learn how to create their own environments. They learn how to respect each other. They learn how to cooperate. They learn how to use the School Meeting to legislate community rules, and to forge compromises when there are mutually exclusive demands made on property, or on places, or on activities. They learn how to meet challenges. They learn how to overcome failure since there is nobody there to shield them from failure. They learn how to try something and relish success, and they learn how to try something and fail at it - and try again. All of this takes place in an environment in which there is absolutely NO outside intervention of curriculum, of guidance, of grading, of testing, of evaluation, of segregation by age, or of the imposition of arbitrary outside authority.
The school has now been running for 24 years. It has in it children of all ages. We have 125 students now and we have an incredible record of fiscal success as well as educational success. When we first started, people looking in from the outside said that if children have a real say in financial matters, their inexperience will lead them to squander the resources of the school in a profligate manner. They'll buy candy. They'll waste their money on trivialities. The facts speak otherwise. The ability of children to govern themselves is in no way less impressive than that of adults. Our school has never received one cent of government subsidy, endowment, foundation money, or any other outside funds. It is totally tuition-based. The tuition in 1968 was on a par with the public school expenditures in the schools around us - $900 per pupil. Today, 24 years later, at a time when educational costs have soared in other schools, and when all we hear is that not enough money is being spent on education, Sudbury Valley School costs about $3000 per pupil, less than half the per pupil costs of the local public schools. And that's the whole cost, including capital expenses and including all the other hidden costs that other schools write on different sets of books. The tremendous efficiency of our fiscal operation is due entirely to the manner in which decisions are made by the entire school community, and due to the extraordinarily modest expenditures required by students who are eagerly and intensely pursuing their passionate interests.
Educationally, the Sudbury Valley School has had a remarkable record. The students are bright-eyed, intelligent, articulate, and are equally comfortable conversing about ideas, climbing trees, hanging out with children ten years older or ten years younger - even with adults. They have mastered pursuits as varied as calculus, photography, French horn, skateboarding, pottery, poetry, bookkeeping, pathology, backwoods survival, leather-working, carpentry - the list is almost as long as the number of people who have been enrolled. Despite the fact that when we started people said that our students who wanted to go on to college would never be admitted because they had no grades, no transcripts, no school recommendations, our record has been an unbroken one. We have a 100 percent rate of acceptance into colleges, trade schools, art schools and the like for every single student who has ever wanted to continue their formal education. Our students present themselves to college Admissions Officers as people who are self-contained, who know why they want to go on with their studies, who understand who they are, and who have figured out how they want to carry on with their lives. The Sudbury Valley graduate has a degree of self-knowledge, self esteem and an awareness of his or her own strengths that is unexcelled in schools today for people of comparable age.
We feel that Sudbury Valley is a superb model of an educational environment for post-industrial America. The joy, happiness, pleasantness, friendliness, and warmth that extend to anyone who is part of the school community is palpable. Trust, too, is everywhere, and everywhere to be seen. Belongings lie unguarded, doors unlocked, equipment unprotected and available to all. We have open admission - everyone can attend. And by walking across the threshold, become, in an instant, part of the warmth and trust that is the school.
Sudbury Valley School is a true democratic republic of children and adults working together. Does it sound utopian? It may, but no less utopian than the United States of America sounded when people first heard about it in the rest of the world. Our school, we feel, is indeed a utopia that is as real as the country of which it is a part.
Thank you.
"School For a Post-Industrial Society"
by Dan Greenberg
Three hundred years ago, if somebody had ventured the opinion it is possible to create a country in which people from all walks of life, all persuasions, nationalities, and backgrounds could live together in freedom, peace, and harmony, could live happy lives, could realize their personal dreams - a country in which people showed each other mutual respect, in which people treated each other with complete equality, and in which all decisions were made by the mutual consent of the governed, people would have considered that person a crazy utopian and would have brought all the experience of human history from the dawn of time as witness to the impossibility of such a dream. They would have said, "People just don't live that way. It doesn't work. It can't happen."
Happily for us sitting here today, two centuries ago our founding fathers did not treat that dream as utopian and instead found a way to make it possible to put it into practice. They did something unique in the history of the human race. They had before them the task of creating a new country, a new form of government. And they set about this task not by revising existing forms of government, not by starting from the models that they had around them and tinkering with them and adding a little here and a little there, but by sitting together and spending a tremendous amount of time and thought on "zero-base planning", on creating a government from scratch, starting from no assumptions other than those that they were willing to make explicitly at the moment. We have records of their deliberations, and many writings that reveal what they thought and how they came to their conclusions. They proceeded by examining the condition of the human race, the na-ture of the human animal, and the social and cultural conditions of the world into which the country they were founding was going to be born.
The founders of Sudbury Valley School, beginning in 1965, did much the same thing when it came to education. We too were dissatisfied - dissatisfied with the models of schools that we had available to us at the time, and we had a deep conviction that there was more at stake than just the proper curriculum or the right pedagogical methodology or the right mix of social and emotional and psycholog-ical factors that had to be applied to the educational scene. We were convinced that the time had come for complete reexamination of what it is that a school had to be about if it were to serve as an appropriate agent of society in this country in the late 2Oth century and beyond the year 2000. So we spent several years working on this, trying to gain an understanding of what school is for and how the goals of schools can best be realized.
Now, it's pretty much generally agreed that there are two major roles that a school fills. One is to provide an environment in which children can grow to maturity, from a state of formativeness and de-pendence to a state of independence as adults who have found their unique way of personal expression in life. The second goal is social rather than individ-ual. The school has to be the environment in which the culture prepares itself for its continuation from generation to generation. This is a goal that a community requires of its educational system if it wants its way of life to survive.
There is no guarantee that the social goal and the individual goal will mesh. In an authoritarian society, for example, where the lives of every single individual are controlled by some central authority, the social goal promulgating the authoritarian system is in clear conflict with any primacy given to the individual goals of the people in that society. One of the functions of a school in an authoritarian society must therefore be to subject the individual to severe restraints in order to force that individual to meet the needs of society as a whole. The educational systems of highly authoritarian regimes play down individual variation and individual freedom and effec-tively try to eliminate them.
On the other hand, in anarchistic educational systems, the individual is focused on, almost entirely to the exclusion of society. The individual is elevated above all else and modes of social interaction and cultural survival are given very little attention.
When we started thinking about Sudbury Valley School, we had no way of knowing whether there would be any way of harmonizing individual needs and social needs in the United States today. We started by examining the social side because it was clear to us that no school could possibly survive if it didn't meet the needs of modern American society. It might survive as a fringe school for some few discontented people who perhaps wanted a different way of life in this country. But as an institution that was meaningful to the mainstream of American society, there was no hope for it to survive unless it could tie into the deep needs of American culture in this era. So we set about asking ourselves, "What is it really that the society wants today in order to flourish?"
The key to the answer to this question was the realization that the United States is fundamentally a free market economy in which personal freedom is maximized on a social level. Ours is a society which, as a community, extols personal freedoms for its individual members and has social ways of guaranteeing these freedoms through the grant of rights and redress to individuals. In addition, the United States, in 1965, was clearly entering an economic era which was a novelty on the world scene - namely, the post-industrial economic era, which was beginning to be recognized as a reality. Today, of course, the image of a post-industrial society is commonplace. The key concept which differentiates a post-industrial economy from an industrial economy is the realization that in a post-industrial society, in principle, every task that can be defined by a set routine can be taken out of human hands and put into the hands of some sort of information processing machine. The main difference between an industrial and a post-industrial society lies not in the presence or absence of produced goods, but in the means by which those goods are produced. In an industrial society it is essential to have a virtual ARMY of human beings who are fit somehow into the mechanism of the overall industrial machine, who play an integrated role in the production process as parts of the machine.
The strength of the industrial society was that by using machines, it could magnify many, many thousandfold the ability of the society to produce material benefits for its members. But the machines couldn't do this alone. The machines were not sophisticated enough to carry out this process unaided. In order to make it happen what was needed was human intervention and human help. Human and machine became as one, something that probably has never been better illustrated than in the great classic film "Modern Times" that Charlie Chaplin produced over fifty years ago.
The deal that was made by various societies, one after the other, when they chose to enter the industrial era was to agree to forfeit much of their humanity, much of their freedom as individuals, in order to benefit as a society from the wealth and prosperity that the industrial era promised. This isn't an altogether ridiculous deal by any means. It's perfectly understandable that human societies that for thousands of years had accepted as inevitable the grinding poverty and deprivation and misery of the overwhelming majority of people - it's not surprising that such societies, when faced with the promise that miraculously and with incredible suddenness virtually the entire population could raise its standard of living and survive in a relatively comfortable manner, chose, one after another, to sacrifice willingly some of their personal freedoms, many of which were illusory anyway, to achieve that goal.
The post-industrial era is of a different nature, however. The post-industrial era ask no sacrifice of the material benefits that the industrial era provided. On the contrary, the development of sophisticated, computer-driven machines and information processing systems has promised an even greater degree of national wealth and diversity. But the demands on the individual are now completely different. In the post-industrial society there is essentially no place for human beings who are not able to function independently. There is no room for people trained to be cogs in a machine. Such people have been displaced permanently from the economic system. The needs of a post-industrial society, regardless of the governmental structure, are for people who can be independent, entrepreneurial producers of economic benefits. People have to take initiatives, to think for themselves, to create for themselves, to become productive for themselves. In a post-industrial society, there is no longer a mass of predetermined slots into which to fit people. The economic demands of post-industrial America are something that you hear from personnel directors in every industry and company today, small or large. The demands are for creative people with initiative, self-starters, people who know how to take responsibility, exercise judgment, make decisions for themselves.
This meant to us that a school in post-industrial America, in order to serve the culture, has to have the following features: It has to allow for a tremendous amount of diversity. It has to allow for people to become, on their own, selfstarters, initiators, entrepreneurs. And, at the same time, it has to allow children to grow up completely at home with the cultural values of our country, especially such essential values as tolerance, mutual respect, and self-government.
We then looked at the requirements for individual realization. These too had undergone a rather interesting change of perspective through the work of psychologists and developmental theorists. The commonly accepted model of the human had been that of a tabula rasa, a clean slate, born as infants with basically nothing in their heads and therefore growing up to be what other people have written on that slate. That's a model that put a tremendous responsibility on the people around the child who write on that child's slate. In a sense, that model was the utter negation of the individual as an independent being, and the subjugation of the individual will to the influences of those around it who impose their wills and their intellects on it from infancy onwards.
But Aristotle, 2,000 years ago, and developmental psychologists in recent times, developed other models that seemed to us, when we were creating Sudbury Valley School, to be much more realistic and much more in line with what we saw to be the nature of the human species. These people considered children from birth as being naturally curious, as being active participants in the learning process - not born with blank minds but, on the contrary, born with information processing systems in their brains which require of them, demand of them, by nature, to reach out, to explore, to seek to understand the world and make sense of it, using their sensory interactions and their agile brains to build pictures of reality - world views - in their minds that enable them to function in the world. In our view there was no such thing as a passive child. Every child is active. Every child we had ever seen, certainly in early infancy, was devoured with curiosity, was energetic, was able to overcome almost every barrier, was courageous, persistent, and constantly seeking to meet every challenge that came their way. And these are traits that we saw continuing year after year in children as long as it wasn't forced out of them by some crunching outside intervention.
So it seemed clear to us that the ideal environment for children to attain the full realization of their inherent intellectual, emotional, and spiritual potentials had to be one which, subject only to constraints imposed by safety, is totally open for exploration, free of restraints, free of external impositions; a place where each individual child would be granted the freedom to reach out everywhere and anywhere they wished so that they could follow through on all of their curious probing.
This realization came upon us like a thunderclap because we saw such a beautiful fit between the needs of society today and the needs of the individual. Both society and the individual in modern post-industrial America require that schools be an environment in which children are FREE, and in which children can LEARN HOW TO USE FREEDOM, how to be self-governing, how to live together as free people in peace and harmony and mutual respect. Not an environment in which one group dominated, or exercised power over another. Not an environment in which children were put into any sort of externally imposed track, or forced to think about prescribed subjects. But an environment in which children and adults alike work together to guarantee free accessibility to the world, to the greatest extent possible, for each and every child And that, in effect, is what Sudbury Valley school is about.
If you come to Sudbury Valley, the first impression you get is that of a regular school in recess. You notice children, outdoors and indoors, freely going on and off campus, freely walking about, moving from room to room, changing from group to group, talking, interacting, reading, playing. So much playing! More than anything else, the children at Sudbury Valley School, of all ages, play. The better they are at playing, the better they are at fashioning new models with which to understand the world. Play is the greatest teacher of all. Every innovative adult who has ever written about the creative process has talked about the extent to which he or she played with new ideas, moving freely in and out of new, original conceptions of the world without being hampered by preconceived notions of reality. The children at Sudbury Valley know how to play. They know how to take their play seriously. They know how to play with intensity and with focus.
Sudbury Valley is a community governed by itself. Every child in Sudbury Valley has a vote in every matter that pertains to the school. The school is governed by a School Meeting in which four-year-olds have the same vote as adults. Every decision in the school is made by that School Meeting. The budget, the hiring and firing of staff, the letting of contracts. In the Sudbury Valley community, no adult wields any particular power over any child, nor does any child wield power over any other child. All decisions are made in the School Meeting or delegated by the School Meeting to people elected on a temporary basis to fill a particular need. Our community is a model of democratic governance, much like the New England communities that we serve.
The children at Sudbury Valley, from age four and up, by being free, learn how to function as free people in a free society. They learn how to find their own pursuits. They learn how to occupy themselves. They learn how to create their own environments. They learn how to respect each other. They learn how to cooperate. They learn how to use the School Meeting to legislate community rules, and to forge compromises when there are mutually exclusive demands made on property, or on places, or on activities. They learn how to meet challenges. They learn how to overcome failure since there is nobody there to shield them from failure. They learn how to try something and relish success, and they learn how to try something and fail at it - and try again. All of this takes place in an environment in which there is absolutely NO outside intervention of curriculum, of guidance, of grading, of testing, of evaluation, of segregation by age, or of the imposition of arbitrary outside authority.
The school has now been running for 24 years. It has in it children of all ages. We have 125 students now and we have an incredible record of fiscal success as well as educational success. When we first started, people looking in from the outside said that if children have a real say in financial matters, their inexperience will lead them to squander the resources of the school in a profligate manner. They'll buy candy. They'll waste their money on trivialities. The facts speak otherwise. The ability of children to govern themselves is in no way less impressive than that of adults. Our school has never received one cent of government subsidy, endowment, foundation money, or any other outside funds. It is totally tuition-based. The tuition in 1968 was on a par with the public school expenditures in the schools around us - $900 per pupil. Today, 24 years later, at a time when educational costs have soared in other schools, and when all we hear is that not enough money is being spent on education, Sudbury Valley School costs about $3000 per pupil, less than half the per pupil costs of the local public schools. And that's the whole cost, including capital expenses and including all the other hidden costs that other schools write on different sets of books. The tremendous efficiency of our fiscal operation is due entirely to the manner in which decisions are made by the entire school community, and due to the extraordinarily modest expenditures required by students who are eagerly and intensely pursuing their passionate interests.
Educationally, the Sudbury Valley School has had a remarkable record. The students are bright-eyed, intelligent, articulate, and are equally comfortable conversing about ideas, climbing trees, hanging out with children ten years older or ten years younger - even with adults. They have mastered pursuits as varied as calculus, photography, French horn, skateboarding, pottery, poetry, bookkeeping, pathology, backwoods survival, leather-working, carpentry - the list is almost as long as the number of people who have been enrolled. Despite the fact that when we started people said that our students who wanted to go on to college would never be admitted because they had no grades, no transcripts, no school recommendations, our record has been an unbroken one. We have a 100 percent rate of acceptance into colleges, trade schools, art schools and the like for every single student who has ever wanted to continue their formal education. Our students present themselves to college Admissions Officers as people who are self-contained, who know why they want to go on with their studies, who understand who they are, and who have figured out how they want to carry on with their lives. The Sudbury Valley graduate has a degree of self-knowledge, self esteem and an awareness of his or her own strengths that is unexcelled in schools today for people of comparable age.
We feel that Sudbury Valley is a superb model of an educational environment for post-industrial America. The joy, happiness, pleasantness, friendliness, and warmth that extend to anyone who is part of the school community is palpable. Trust, too, is everywhere, and everywhere to be seen. Belongings lie unguarded, doors unlocked, equipment unprotected and available to all. We have open admission - everyone can attend. And by walking across the threshold, become, in an instant, part of the warmth and trust that is the school.
Sudbury Valley School is a true democratic republic of children and adults working together. Does it sound utopian? It may, but no less utopian than the United States of America sounded when people first heard about it in the rest of the world. Our school, we feel, is indeed a utopia that is as real as the country of which it is a part.
Thank you.
17 April 2010
Who owns the school board?
The enabling legislation which created school boards clearly enshrined a conflict of responsibilities. If this was not intentional, it was a brilliant accident in that it forced boards forever into a state of creative compromise.
There are at least eight constituencies a board member must represent beyond his/her own interests and opinions. Although the enabling legislation did not attempt to rank them, I will here in order of my personal views, from most important to least. You will notice that the lower you go on the list, the bigger the club each constituency carries. That has a lot to do with my ranking: assuming the school board has a great responsibility to balance the playing field between the players. The players nearest the top need the most help in having their voices heard.
Bear in mind also that within each category, board members must balance the needs of their nearest neighbors with those of the most distant. While directors must give a voice to constituents from their own town, they must often act against those interests if the good of the whole district conflicts: a balancing act within a balancing act.
1. Far and away the most important group is the kids. This group has virtually no legal rights and precious little ability to speak for itself, but it is the one for which the board has ultimate moral responsibility. The group must often be protected from assaults by all the other groups. The board member must do much soul-searching about the rights and needs of children, since each other constituency loudly protests how children must be treated, but suggestions and laws put forth often reflect more benefit to other constituencies than to children themselves. It is very difficult to really listen to children or really see them, but that is the director's first responsibility.
2. Parents can speak loudly, but their legal rights are minimal. They have strong and wildly varying opinions about how their children should be raised. Each parent is informed by different values and convictions. Some are sensitive to their children and others are criminally insensitive, yet they have a huge moral presence since they are ultimately the only people intimately concerned with the welfare of their children, from birth to adulthood. They are there before and long after the schools are involved with their children, and must be offered a megaphone to make their views known. They must be protected from schools' incursions into family territory.
3. Teachers have a huge influence on children, yet no real long-term responsibilities. Their views toward raising children, in an ideal world, should be informed by knowledge of child development and education theory, but often are buffeted by personal baggage, political winds, and orders from administrators and bureaucrats who really have far less a clue what is actually happening in the classroom and in children's lives. Teachers have some voice within the school, but are too often silenced by perceived or real threats to their jobs. They are the first to admit that they stand up for children far less than they would in a perfect world.
4. Schools and their administrators might appear to be in the same constituency as teachers, but that is not the reality. There is a tremendous amount of power politics in a school building. In many respects, the professional teachers in a school become just another class of children in a teachers' meeting. There is a culture of power in schools where the same tactics used by teachers to control kids are used on teachers by those "above" them. While those who have never experienced this personally might find it hard to understand, teachers must be protected from the power of the district because they form the second line of defense (after parents) for the rights and needs of children.
5. Unfortunately, the majority of the board's time is occupied in a dance with the superintendent. Legally, the board supervises the superintendent, but the reality is too often the opposite. Since board members have limited hours to spend on school issues, they rely on the superintendent to act as their eyes, ears, and often brain. The superintendent explains requirements and laws, steers the board toward his/her objectives, and strengthens his/her authority through manipulation. In the best of worlds, this is not a struggle of power and personality but a collaboration for the best interest of other stakeholders on this list, but that is unfortunately rare. A superintendent recently admitted in public that he spends the bulk of his time "chasing around managing the school board." While he was admitting something which is more the norm than the exception, this stands the law on its head.
The board hires the superintendent to manage the schools. There is constant tension surrounding what this means. Clearly the board cannot overreach and step on the superintendent's toes. The top administrator must have freedom to manage day-to-day operations and supervise staff. That is not the business of the board beyond its option to fire the superintendent when these functions are not performed to its liking. The board is completely within its rights, however, to insist on defining goals, values, and general direction for the district. To do this effectively, the board must have an overview of district operations not filtered through the superintendents eyes, and therein lies the conflict between necessary delegation and potential micro-management. This is never clear territory.
The fashion recently is to run schools like private corporations. The expectation under that model is the CEO has near total dictatorial control--but schools are not businesses. The board cannot ever forget that it sets the agenda, it evaluates the superintendent every year within strict guidelines, and the superintendent is just one voice among many. If it becomes the superintendent's rubber stamp, it might as well stay home and admit it no longer serves its other constituents.
6. Towns like to think of themselves as the prime constituents of the directors they elect, but they are way down the list. Board members must listen seriously to towns' concerns since the town supports the school financially, provides a context for education, is the seat of values not only of families with children but also of the childless and grandparents....and the town elects and fires directors. Directors may not always make the towns happy, but their towns must trust they will do what they think best for the kids, and thus for the future of the town. The director's responsibility for making education the best it can be conflicts regularly with the need to be fiscally responsible, and this becomes a huge issue for the town since the school budget is its largest expense.
7. The State provides the legal framework for the existence of the board, and exacts in payment a promise that the board will uphold the interests of the State. This is frequently in conflict, though, with the rights and needs of the children and their families, so the directors must walk a fine line. On its side, the State wields laws as clubs, and offers money to those who cooperate and fines to those who don't. The local board can rejoice when the State's interests coincide with local needs, and resist when they don't. There will always be a tension here between the top of this list and the bottom, however, because State and corporate needs for a compliant population are at direct odds with an intelligent individual's right to make up his/her own mind and decide the best course for a happy, rewarding life.
(8. The feds are another level on top of the state, but really exert no direct influence on school boards....only through the states. Still, Washington makes its wishes known in myriad ways, and is a force to be reckoned with.)
There are at least eight constituencies a board member must represent beyond his/her own interests and opinions. Although the enabling legislation did not attempt to rank them, I will here in order of my personal views, from most important to least. You will notice that the lower you go on the list, the bigger the club each constituency carries. That has a lot to do with my ranking: assuming the school board has a great responsibility to balance the playing field between the players. The players nearest the top need the most help in having their voices heard.
Bear in mind also that within each category, board members must balance the needs of their nearest neighbors with those of the most distant. While directors must give a voice to constituents from their own town, they must often act against those interests if the good of the whole district conflicts: a balancing act within a balancing act.
1. Far and away the most important group is the kids. This group has virtually no legal rights and precious little ability to speak for itself, but it is the one for which the board has ultimate moral responsibility. The group must often be protected from assaults by all the other groups. The board member must do much soul-searching about the rights and needs of children, since each other constituency loudly protests how children must be treated, but suggestions and laws put forth often reflect more benefit to other constituencies than to children themselves. It is very difficult to really listen to children or really see them, but that is the director's first responsibility.
2. Parents can speak loudly, but their legal rights are minimal. They have strong and wildly varying opinions about how their children should be raised. Each parent is informed by different values and convictions. Some are sensitive to their children and others are criminally insensitive, yet they have a huge moral presence since they are ultimately the only people intimately concerned with the welfare of their children, from birth to adulthood. They are there before and long after the schools are involved with their children, and must be offered a megaphone to make their views known. They must be protected from schools' incursions into family territory.
3. Teachers have a huge influence on children, yet no real long-term responsibilities. Their views toward raising children, in an ideal world, should be informed by knowledge of child development and education theory, but often are buffeted by personal baggage, political winds, and orders from administrators and bureaucrats who really have far less a clue what is actually happening in the classroom and in children's lives. Teachers have some voice within the school, but are too often silenced by perceived or real threats to their jobs. They are the first to admit that they stand up for children far less than they would in a perfect world.
4. Schools and their administrators might appear to be in the same constituency as teachers, but that is not the reality. There is a tremendous amount of power politics in a school building. In many respects, the professional teachers in a school become just another class of children in a teachers' meeting. There is a culture of power in schools where the same tactics used by teachers to control kids are used on teachers by those "above" them. While those who have never experienced this personally might find it hard to understand, teachers must be protected from the power of the district because they form the second line of defense (after parents) for the rights and needs of children.
5. Unfortunately, the majority of the board's time is occupied in a dance with the superintendent. Legally, the board supervises the superintendent, but the reality is too often the opposite. Since board members have limited hours to spend on school issues, they rely on the superintendent to act as their eyes, ears, and often brain. The superintendent explains requirements and laws, steers the board toward his/her objectives, and strengthens his/her authority through manipulation. In the best of worlds, this is not a struggle of power and personality but a collaboration for the best interest of other stakeholders on this list, but that is unfortunately rare. A superintendent recently admitted in public that he spends the bulk of his time "chasing around managing the school board." While he was admitting something which is more the norm than the exception, this stands the law on its head.
The board hires the superintendent to manage the schools. There is constant tension surrounding what this means. Clearly the board cannot overreach and step on the superintendent's toes. The top administrator must have freedom to manage day-to-day operations and supervise staff. That is not the business of the board beyond its option to fire the superintendent when these functions are not performed to its liking. The board is completely within its rights, however, to insist on defining goals, values, and general direction for the district. To do this effectively, the board must have an overview of district operations not filtered through the superintendents eyes, and therein lies the conflict between necessary delegation and potential micro-management. This is never clear territory.
The fashion recently is to run schools like private corporations. The expectation under that model is the CEO has near total dictatorial control--but schools are not businesses. The board cannot ever forget that it sets the agenda, it evaluates the superintendent every year within strict guidelines, and the superintendent is just one voice among many. If it becomes the superintendent's rubber stamp, it might as well stay home and admit it no longer serves its other constituents.
6. Towns like to think of themselves as the prime constituents of the directors they elect, but they are way down the list. Board members must listen seriously to towns' concerns since the town supports the school financially, provides a context for education, is the seat of values not only of families with children but also of the childless and grandparents....and the town elects and fires directors. Directors may not always make the towns happy, but their towns must trust they will do what they think best for the kids, and thus for the future of the town. The director's responsibility for making education the best it can be conflicts regularly with the need to be fiscally responsible, and this becomes a huge issue for the town since the school budget is its largest expense.
7. The State provides the legal framework for the existence of the board, and exacts in payment a promise that the board will uphold the interests of the State. This is frequently in conflict, though, with the rights and needs of the children and their families, so the directors must walk a fine line. On its side, the State wields laws as clubs, and offers money to those who cooperate and fines to those who don't. The local board can rejoice when the State's interests coincide with local needs, and resist when they don't. There will always be a tension here between the top of this list and the bottom, however, because State and corporate needs for a compliant population are at direct odds with an intelligent individual's right to make up his/her own mind and decide the best course for a happy, rewarding life.
(8. The feds are another level on top of the state, but really exert no direct influence on school boards....only through the states. Still, Washington makes its wishes known in myriad ways, and is a force to be reckoned with.)
14 April 2010
Carl Rogers
Note: These excerpts are from two essays in a book titled "Freedom to Learn" published in 1969.
Personal Thoughts on Teaching and Learning (1952)
I wish to present some very brief remarks, in the hope that if they bring forth any reaction from you, I may get some new light on my own ideas.
a) My experience is that I cannot teach another person how to teach. To attempt it is for me, in the long run, futile.
b) It seems to me that anything that can be taught to another is relatively inconsequential and has little or no significant influence on behavior.
c) I realize increasingly that I am only interested in learnings which significantly influence behavior.
d) I have come to feel that the only learning which significantly influence behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning.
e) Such self-discovered learning, truth that has been personally appropriated and assimilated in experience, cannot be directly communicated to another.
f) As a consequence of the above, I realize that I have lost interest in being a teacher.
g) When I try to teach, as I do sometimes, I am appalled by the results, which seems a little more than inconsequential, because sometimes the teaching appears to succeed. When this happens I find that the results are damaging. It seems to cause the individual to distrust his own experience, and to stifle significant learning. Hence, I have come to feel that the outcomes of teaching are either unimportant or hurtful.
h) When I look back at the results of my past teaching, the real results seem the same - either damage was done - or nothing significant occurred. This is frankly troubling.
i) As a consequence, I realize that I am only interested in being a learner, preferably learning things that matter, that have some significant influence on my own behavior.
j) I find it very rewarding to learn, in groups, in relationships with one person as in therapy, or by myself.
k) I find that one of the best, but most difficult, ways for me to learn is to drop my own defensiveness, at least temporarily, and to try to understand the way in which his experience seems and feels to the other person.
l) I find that another way of learning for me is to state my own uncertainties, to try to clarify my puzzlements, and thus get closer to the meaning that my experience actually seems to have.
m) This whole train of experiencing, and the meanings that I have thus far discovered in it, seem to have launched me on a process which is both fascinating and at times a little frightening. It seems to mean letting my experiences carry me on, in a direction which appears to be forward, toward goals that I can but dimly define, as I try to understand at least the current meaning of that experience. The sensation is that of floating with a complex stream of experience, with the fascinating possibility of trying to comprehend its ever-changing complexity.
I am almost afraid I may seem to have gotten away from any discussion of learning, as well as teaching. Let me again introduce a practical note by saying that by themselves these interpretations of my experience may sound queer and aberrant, but not particularly shocking. It is when I realize the implications that I shudder a bit at the distance I have come from the commonsense world that everyone knows is right. I can best illustrate this by saying that if the experiences of others had been the same as mine, and if 1 had discovered similar meanings in it, many consequences would be implied:
a.) Such experience would imply that we would do away with teaching. People would get together if they wished to learn.
b.) We would do away with examinations. They measure the inconsequential type of learning.
c.) We would do away with grades and credits for the same reason.
d.) We would do away with degrees as a measure of competence partly for the same reason. Another reason is that a degree marks an end or a conclusion of something, and a learner is only interested in the continuing process of learning.
e.) We would do away with the exposition of conclusions, for we would realize that no one learns significantly from conclusions.
I think I had better to stop here. I do not want to become too fantastic. I want to know primarily whether anything in my inward thinking, as I have tried to describe it, speaks to anything in your experience of the classroom as you have lived it, and if so, what the meanings are that exist for you in your experience.
************************************
Regarding Learning and Its Facilitation (1969)
How does a person learn? How can important learnings be facilitated? What basic theoretical assumptions are involved?
Here are a number of the principles which can, I believe, be abstracted from current experience and research related to this newer approach:
Learning
1) Human beings have a natural potentiality for learning.
2) Significant learning takes place when the subject matter is perceived by the student as having relevance for his own purposes.
3) Learning which involves a change in self organization - in the perception of oneself - is threatening and tends to be resisted.
4) Those learning which are threatening to the self are more easily perceived and assimilated when external threats are at a minimum.
5) When threats to the self is low, experience can be perceived in differentiated fashion and learning can proceed.
6) Much significant learning is acquired through doing.
7) Learning is facilitated when the student participates responsibly in the learning process.
8) Self-initiated learning which involves the whole person of the learner - feelings as well as intellect - is the most lasting and pervasive.
9) Independence, creativity, and self-reliance are all facilitated when self-criticism and self-evaluation are basic and evaluation by others is of secondary importance.
10) The most socially useful learning in the modern world is the learning of the process of learning, a continuing openness to experience and incorporation into oneself of the process of change.
Facilitation
1) The facilitator has much to do with setting the initial mood or climate of the group or class experience.
2) The facilitator helps to elicit and clarify the purposes of the individuals in the class as well as the more general purposes of the group.
3) He relies upon the desire of each student to implement those purposes which have meaning for him, as the motivational force behind significant learning.
4) He endeavours to organize and make easily available the widest possible range of resources for learning.
5) He regards himself as a flexible resource to be utilized by the group.
6) In responding to expressions in the classroom group, he accepts both the intellectual content and the emotionalized attitudes, endeavouring to give each aspect the approximate degree of emphasis which it has for the individual or the group.
7) As the acceptant classroom climate becomes established, the facilitator is able increasingly to become a participant learner, a member of the group, expressing his views as those of one individual only.
8) He takes the initiative in sharing himself with the group - his feelings as well as his thoughts - in ways which do not demand nor impose but represent simply a personal sharing which students may take or leave.
9) Throughout the classroom experience, he remains alert to the expression indicative of deep or strong feelings.
10) In his functioning as a facilitator of learning, the leader endeavours to recognize and accept his own limitations.
Personal Thoughts on Teaching and Learning (1952)
I wish to present some very brief remarks, in the hope that if they bring forth any reaction from you, I may get some new light on my own ideas.
a) My experience is that I cannot teach another person how to teach. To attempt it is for me, in the long run, futile.
b) It seems to me that anything that can be taught to another is relatively inconsequential and has little or no significant influence on behavior.
c) I realize increasingly that I am only interested in learnings which significantly influence behavior.
d) I have come to feel that the only learning which significantly influence behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning.
e) Such self-discovered learning, truth that has been personally appropriated and assimilated in experience, cannot be directly communicated to another.
f) As a consequence of the above, I realize that I have lost interest in being a teacher.
g) When I try to teach, as I do sometimes, I am appalled by the results, which seems a little more than inconsequential, because sometimes the teaching appears to succeed. When this happens I find that the results are damaging. It seems to cause the individual to distrust his own experience, and to stifle significant learning. Hence, I have come to feel that the outcomes of teaching are either unimportant or hurtful.
h) When I look back at the results of my past teaching, the real results seem the same - either damage was done - or nothing significant occurred. This is frankly troubling.
i) As a consequence, I realize that I am only interested in being a learner, preferably learning things that matter, that have some significant influence on my own behavior.
j) I find it very rewarding to learn, in groups, in relationships with one person as in therapy, or by myself.
k) I find that one of the best, but most difficult, ways for me to learn is to drop my own defensiveness, at least temporarily, and to try to understand the way in which his experience seems and feels to the other person.
l) I find that another way of learning for me is to state my own uncertainties, to try to clarify my puzzlements, and thus get closer to the meaning that my experience actually seems to have.
m) This whole train of experiencing, and the meanings that I have thus far discovered in it, seem to have launched me on a process which is both fascinating and at times a little frightening. It seems to mean letting my experiences carry me on, in a direction which appears to be forward, toward goals that I can but dimly define, as I try to understand at least the current meaning of that experience. The sensation is that of floating with a complex stream of experience, with the fascinating possibility of trying to comprehend its ever-changing complexity.
I am almost afraid I may seem to have gotten away from any discussion of learning, as well as teaching. Let me again introduce a practical note by saying that by themselves these interpretations of my experience may sound queer and aberrant, but not particularly shocking. It is when I realize the implications that I shudder a bit at the distance I have come from the commonsense world that everyone knows is right. I can best illustrate this by saying that if the experiences of others had been the same as mine, and if 1 had discovered similar meanings in it, many consequences would be implied:
a.) Such experience would imply that we would do away with teaching. People would get together if they wished to learn.
b.) We would do away with examinations. They measure the inconsequential type of learning.
c.) We would do away with grades and credits for the same reason.
d.) We would do away with degrees as a measure of competence partly for the same reason. Another reason is that a degree marks an end or a conclusion of something, and a learner is only interested in the continuing process of learning.
e.) We would do away with the exposition of conclusions, for we would realize that no one learns significantly from conclusions.
I think I had better to stop here. I do not want to become too fantastic. I want to know primarily whether anything in my inward thinking, as I have tried to describe it, speaks to anything in your experience of the classroom as you have lived it, and if so, what the meanings are that exist for you in your experience.
************************************
Regarding Learning and Its Facilitation (1969)
How does a person learn? How can important learnings be facilitated? What basic theoretical assumptions are involved?
Here are a number of the principles which can, I believe, be abstracted from current experience and research related to this newer approach:
Learning
1) Human beings have a natural potentiality for learning.
2) Significant learning takes place when the subject matter is perceived by the student as having relevance for his own purposes.
3) Learning which involves a change in self organization - in the perception of oneself - is threatening and tends to be resisted.
4) Those learning which are threatening to the self are more easily perceived and assimilated when external threats are at a minimum.
5) When threats to the self is low, experience can be perceived in differentiated fashion and learning can proceed.
6) Much significant learning is acquired through doing.
7) Learning is facilitated when the student participates responsibly in the learning process.
8) Self-initiated learning which involves the whole person of the learner - feelings as well as intellect - is the most lasting and pervasive.
9) Independence, creativity, and self-reliance are all facilitated when self-criticism and self-evaluation are basic and evaluation by others is of secondary importance.
10) The most socially useful learning in the modern world is the learning of the process of learning, a continuing openness to experience and incorporation into oneself of the process of change.
Facilitation
1) The facilitator has much to do with setting the initial mood or climate of the group or class experience.
2) The facilitator helps to elicit and clarify the purposes of the individuals in the class as well as the more general purposes of the group.
3) He relies upon the desire of each student to implement those purposes which have meaning for him, as the motivational force behind significant learning.
4) He endeavours to organize and make easily available the widest possible range of resources for learning.
5) He regards himself as a flexible resource to be utilized by the group.
6) In responding to expressions in the classroom group, he accepts both the intellectual content and the emotionalized attitudes, endeavouring to give each aspect the approximate degree of emphasis which it has for the individual or the group.
7) As the acceptant classroom climate becomes established, the facilitator is able increasingly to become a participant learner, a member of the group, expressing his views as those of one individual only.
8) He takes the initiative in sharing himself with the group - his feelings as well as his thoughts - in ways which do not demand nor impose but represent simply a personal sharing which students may take or leave.
9) Throughout the classroom experience, he remains alert to the expression indicative of deep or strong feelings.
10) In his functioning as a facilitator of learning, the leader endeavours to recognize and accept his own limitations.
11 April 2010
Aki Kurose
Aki Kurose, Seattle, Washington...This was copied from an interview by Studs Terkel in 1995, when Kurose was 70 (printed in his book Coming of Age). Aki Kurose died in 1998, after a 17 year struggle with cancer, and soon thereafter was honored by having a Seattle middle school named after her.
She is a Nisei, born and raised in Seattle.
As a sixteen-year-old, shortly after World War II was declared, she and her family, among scores of thousands of Japanese Americans, were arrested and sent off to internment camps.
“Horse Stalls and pigpens were converted to shelters for many of us. Our family of six was assigned to one room. They gave us burlap bags. We were told to stuff straw in them and they would be our mattresses...There were machine-gun towers in the parking lot. The guns were aimed inside, at us. People would drive around in cars, calling us names. You'd feel like an animal in the zoo.
“Everything was so surreal. The assignment one teacher in camp gave us was: 'Write why you are proud to be and American.' [Laughs softly.] We had to salute the flag every day and sing the national anthem.”
Around 1965, I was a Head Start volunteer. I got turned on to working with young people, so after my children were raised, I went back to school. I got my master's degree in early childhood education when I was fifty-six years old.
I started teaching in the early '70s and have been doing so ever since. I teach six-year olds, first grade. I've taught kindergarten and preschool, as well. I teach mathematics, science, and peace.
How does one teach peace? Well, I immediately say to them, “If you're not at peace with yourself, with your neighbor, with your community, you can't really learn very much. We have to get rid of all this garbage, this angry, competitive feeling. Then we'll all get along.”
We'd go outside and do these exercises in the morning to invigorate ourselves. We pretend that we're taking all the anger out of our bodies, getting rid of our anxieties and throwing them all into outer space. We're not polluting the space, because what we're throwing out is just being disintegrated. So we talk about environment that way also.
I tell them: When you're in school, no one is going to be sent to the principal, and nobody's going to be turned bad. If something unpleasant happens, we're going to resolve our own conflicts. When trouble may start, I tell them to stop, rest awhile, let's talk things over, because we need a cooling-off period. What happens in our classroom has to be a win-win situation for everybody. We don't have a winner and a loser.
Under no circumstances will they be punished. I tell them that making a mistake is the most natural thing to do. Everybody makes mistakes. The thing to do is to learn from our mistakes. The more mistakes you make, the more you're learning, so don't worry about that.
At my school, they didn't quite know what to do about me. The principal called me and said we were to attend a community meeting. I said, “Fine. Are the other teachers coming, too?” He said, “No. You'll be meeting with parents and you must be prepared to tell them how you're going to teach their privileged children.”
When I walked in, there were forty parents already seated. They had met an hour before, getting all their questions organized. They immediately wanted to know where I had been educated. I told them I had been to the University of Washington and was just about to get my master's degree.
They wanted to know if their children would pick up my Japanese accent. I told the, “I'm sorry, but this is a Seattle public school accent. I was born in this city.” They were so very anxious and worried. “you've been teaching poor children all these years. How will you deal with our children, who have had lots of preschool and are very advanced? Can you meet the challenge of these children?” I said I could meet the challenge of any child. “It's the challenge of the parents that may be more difficult.” They were quite shocked. [Laughs softly.] Two parents monitored my classroom every day for a month.
Here is a very affluent neighborhood of ambitious parents who don't know quite what to do with this Asian woman who is so outspoken. After a month of monitoring, they decided that I could teach. Eventually, these parents became more supportive of me than the staff did. They were the ones who recommended me for the Teacher for Excellence Award. Some of their attitudes were at first condescending, but that changed and it was wonderful.
The staff had a very hard time of it when I first came there. Remember, I had displaced a white teacher, who was transferred to the central area. They were naturally feeling sorry for the other woman and said, in so many words, that it wasn't fair that I should get all the breaks because I was of the minority. They felt it was a real privilege for me to come here to teach white children. Referring to my old school, they'd say, “Oooh, how did you stand it?” I said I loved it down there. I said, “Actually, I feel it's an inconvenience for me to come here. At the old place, I could walk to school. Now I have to drive all the way out there.”
One teacher asked me, “Who are you?”
I'm Aki Kurose”
“Well, you know what I mean.”
“No, I'm not sure, though I suspect I know what you mean.”
“What are you?”
“Oh, I'm a teacher.”
Finally, she said, “Well, where do you come from?”
“Oh. I come from Madrona.” (That's the area where I live in Seattle.)
“Well, no---you know what I mean.”
“I think I do.”
“What kind of name in Kurose?”
“That's my husband's name.”
She was getting quite angry with me. Finally, I said, “Are you asking my ethnicity?”
She said, “Yes. Are you Chinese or Japanese?”
“I am Japanese and proud of it. Why is it so important to you?”
Then she said some of her friends got killed in World War II. I said, “I'm very sorry, but I don't think I'm responsible for it. I'm against war, so please don't regard me as your enemy.” For many years, on December 7, they'd bring up Pearl Harbor: “Your people...” They'd want to talk to the students about it. I'd argue with them that that kind of history isn't what it's about. I always tell my students that war is the enemy, so you can't name people as the enemy.
It's changed a lot in the nineteen years I've been there. Because our busing is no longer mandatory, it's starting to get sterile again. We've lost a lot of black students. Oh, it was a challenge and hard at the beginning. I think the problem had more to do with money than color. You send these kids to a neighborhood with Porsches, Volvos, Mercedes, and mothers who are constantly at school to see to the needs of their own children. The whole lifestyle is so different from these bused kids, usually of single parents or working ones who can't participate. The PTAs there are like pink teas in beautiful homes. What working parent can go to a PTA meeting at ten o'clock in the morning?
The kids in my class were wonderful and starting to get along with each other. I said, “We're not going to compete.” Many of the parents in these affluent neighborhoods are so anxious for their kids to be at the top of the class. I said, “I'm sorry, in my classroom there's nobody at the top of the class, nobody in the middle, and nobody at the bottom. We work cooperatively. No grades in my class.”
At first, the parents didn't like it. They love to have their Susie first in line, top in math or top reader. I said I don't give tests that way. I give them problem-solving activities where they work cooperatively. Nobody's answer is wrong. We try to justify the answer. If they say, “Four plus three equals eight,” I say, “Let's see if we can justify that statement.” So the children work in groups of four and think about it. Each may come up with a different answer. So they rethink it. This one little boy who had four beans and three beans had to justify the total of eight. He suddenly realized something. He then broke one bean in half and said, “Four plus two plus the two halves of the seventh bean equal eight.” He thought it through.
When I first began teaching, I thought I had to have lots of knowledge that I could share with my students, so they could memorize all these things. That's not what education is about. We need to teach them that the planet earth is here for us to cherish and share with everybody. We have to stop this possessive approach, especially with young children. I realize as they grow up, they may have to compete. But at the low-elementary level, they need to build up their self-esteem and self-worth and, above all, learn to think.
I remember a letter from a college student who'd been one of my kids. “You made me interested in math and science. They have been among my favorites ever since. I know that not only does 5+6=11. So does 6+5. But the foremost part of your curriculum was peace. It has made the big difference in my life.” Teaching them the skill of living on this earth in a peaceful manner is what education should be about.
It's so sad to hear teachers saying, “I can't wait to retire. I can't wait for the school year to be over. I can't wait until three-thirty when the kids will be out of my classroom.” If you've lost that spirit, I don't think you should be teaching.
Some of them are burnt out because the classes are so large or because they can't deal with the anger of the kids. When busing started, most of the black kids were out in the hallway or being sent to the principal's office. I protested: this gives the wrong message. The other kids, the whites, se them in the hallways or in the principal's office and think they're all bad kids.
I said we don't need to punish kids this way. So I've been working with communtiy people, trying to get a peace curriculum passed through the legislature, because if you can't get along with one another, what;s the use of having a Ph.D.?
I have four kids at each of six tables. Every morning, I have a bouquet of flowers on each table so the students may enjoy its beauty---and learn the botanical names. In this way, they learn to spell rhododendron, azalea, chrysanthemum. They put a flower picture book together. On the back, they write a poem about the flowers they've come to know. In learning botany, they learn math as well---how the leaves are attached, how they are spaced, they count the petals. When the petals fall, they don't throw them away, they study them. You'll see children treasuring the stems, with the petals gone. It is not learning how to memorize, but how to see them as beautiful parts of their lives.
We grow salmon in the classroom. I take the children to the fish hatchery at the University of Washington. We see the spawning salmon. They allow us to squeeze the eggs out, which we bring back to the classroom.. We have an aquarium with refrigeration. And we grow the salmon eggs. We raise salmon! [Laughs delightedly.] Part of our curriculum is the life cycle of a salmon. The children learn a song about these fish. We release the little fingerlings back into the fresh streams, where they can hide under the rocks and gradually finish their lives, going back into the sea. Then we all sing “Bon Voyage, Bon Voyage.”
Every morning, we go outside to exercise. My bused-in-children, especially, don't need to be thrown into a classroom immediately. They need to get some of that energy out. We make a big circle, we study the clouds, the motion of the sun. While they exercise, they count by fives, by tens, “higher, higher.” All this time they're learning multiplication.
As we observe the clouds, they come up with these fantastic things: “Mrs. Kurose, you're talking about these cirrus clouds, but why do we see the cumulus?” They use these words not by rote, but because they connect with them what they experience at that moment. It's so exciting! I realize I'm learning so much from my students.
I encourge them to write constantly. They keep a journal and they write their thoughts. I don't say, “Spell it right,” certainly not at the beginning. They do inventive spelling and their stories are so exciting. I'm pretty good now at deciphering their spelling. But they know from the beginning what they've written. They share it with the group. So the observing and the writing are relevant to their day.
They know all the phases of the moon. My students tell their parents about a waxing, gibbous moon. A number of mothers and fathers there have told me, “We didn't know what a gibbous moon was until our first graders came home and told us.. We're learning astronomy from your students.”
I was honored as Teacher of the Year for the Seattle area. My name was submitted by the parents. The following year, the National Science Center gave me the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science and Mathematics. There was one winner from each state.
Bush was president. It was very ironic because under him the teachers have been damned with fewer benefits, and the students with fewer services. At the Rose Garden, some of the teachers were so excited about Bush. One said, “I'm never going to wash my hands.” I said, “Ughh!”
Bush came up to me, smiling: “Hi, would you like to take a picture with me?” I just couldn't help myself and said, “No, you're not my favorite president.” He just looked. I don't think he was even listening. I said, “You're supposed to be our 'education president,' but you don't show it. You're allotting all this money to the military, when all these children need education.” I added, “One stealth bomber would pay for the salary of hundreds of teachers. Two stealth bombers would probably supply many good school districts. You need to change your priorities.”
He just stood there with his plastic smile and he said, “Okay,” as he put his arms around me and had this person take a picture of us. He didn't hear a word I said.
I was thrilled to be in Washington. I was thrilled to see the White House. But I was sad because things just didn't fit. I had borrowed a dress from my friend because I didn't have any formal gown to wear. I put “Peace” buttons all the way across. I wear these buttons every day, on every garment. When my grandchildren come over, the first thing they say is, “Okay, you have them on.” My students love it.
During our Curriculum Night, the parents are invited. We have to explain what we teach. I said, “I want you to know that peace is the most important part of my curriculum. I teach science and math, but if a child is not at peace with himself or herself, with the neighbors, with the community, true learning cannot take place.”
On this night, one man said, “That's none of your business. I want you to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. That's why I'm sending my kid to school, to learn the three Rs. What's all this nonsense you're handing out about atomic bombs, Sadako, or whatever?” I said, “Yes, I do tell them about Sadako and the thousand cranes because I think it's a wonderful children's story.”
Sadako was a twelve-year-old girl who was an A-bomb victim and was dying of leukemia. There was a Japanese legend that if you fold a thousand paper cranes, you can have good luck and a long life. She made 650 cranes and then she died. I thought children could relate to this.
I siad to this man, “Please , take this book home and read it. It's not controversial, it's not subversive.” e took it but he wasn't very happy. I said, “If you have any problem, you can always call me at home. Or I'll stay after school. Or I can come to see you. I'm interested in the parents as well as the children. I work hard and I want you to know I will deal with any of your concerns.”
This was in September. That was the last I heard from him---until November. I got this call, “Mrs. Kurose, I'd like an appointment with you. Can I drop in after school?” I said, “Of course.” I was nervous, had no idea what he was going to say. He said, “I want to tell you a story.” I thought: Uh oh. “My son is reading so beautifully His math is wonderful, and he treats his younger brother so nicely. He's no a mean kid anymore. And he likes to talk things out. I offered him a set of G.i. Joes, but he said to me, 'Dad, Mrs. Kurose would be very upset. That's a war toy. I would rather have a microscope.'” He was delighted. He said, “Mrs. Kurose, if you have any tax problems or whatever, I'd be happy to do your taxes for free.” He was an accountant.
Another parent who came said, “Boy, were our faces red! My wife and I were yelling at each other, and our little daughter said, 'Stop, stop! You're supposed to cool off and talk things out.'” The child was in my class.
Is my teaching today better than when I was younger? Absolutely. My face gets red when I think of the first day I taught. “All right, children, let's pass out the workbook.” Ridiculous. Aside from the classes I take, the children are teaching me how to discover things. You can tell a child that mixing vinegar with baking soda is going to fizz, but it won't make an impression unless they do it themselves. We do little magic things, too. I take a boiled egg and put it on top of a bottle. It won't go in no matter how we push it. We put a match inside, burn out the carbon monoxide [sic], and pretty soon the egg plops in. I ask them why it did so. They have to think things out. How can we get it out? You try to shake it, you try to suck it, it won't come out. You blow into it and the egg pops up so dramatically. The kids go “Wow!” They see it.
Some of the teachers don't like my methods. They're very regimented and feel that my children are too free moving. One complained, “Why are you taking them outside for exercise? They get enough exercise on the bus.” I said, “I'm not only doing it for my bus children, I'm doing it for myself as well. I get inspired.”
I can understand some of these young teachers with families. It's a full-time job, so they lead a difficult double life. They spend so much time on paperwork, xeroxing, and dittoes. And these SATs are so meaningless. It's an insult to the intelligence of young people. You don't need paper and pencil. You can count beans, multiply them, grown them. All this is magic and so is learning.
I have a science club from kindergarten through the fifth grade. I have a cross-grade teaching: big kids work with little kids. They love it.
The most important thing I learned was to respect children. You hear lots of complaints about how young kids aren't respecting us anymore. Are we respecting them? Respect begets respect. Children are very perceptive. If you are not valuing them, they know it immediately.
I wonder if we don't really ruin kids in school, cause them to lose respect for themselves. I think the biggest crime is to have a kid sent down to the office. I see that all the time. I see them constantly getting expelled. Why would you expel a kid? Let's face the truth: somewhere along the line, we have failed in our teaching.
In our state, we just passed “Three Strikes and You're Out” legislation. Three crimes and you're incarcerated forever, or something. Won't we ever learn that punished children become punitive people? If you wallop them, that;s the only thing they're going to know, so the wallop others. Treat them as human beings and they'll act that way.
Edward was eight years old. His fourteen-year-old brother was shot in a playground, a gangland situation. The mother was homeless. “Can I take him home?” I asked her. She said, “It's up to you.” So I brought him home, bought him some clean clothes. I bought him three pairs of socks and three pairs of shorts. He was so proud. “Do I got to give these to my brother?” His brother was still in the hospital. I said, “No, these are for you.” He thought I'd given him gold bullion. His eyes were like big marbles. “I get to keep these?” I thought I was a do-gooder, but he did more for me than I did for him. I was impressed with his sudden pride.
I said, “Now we're going to eat.” He said, “We get to go to McDonald's?” I said, “No, we're going to buy a trout, with a head and tail and everything. You're going to cook it. We're going to practice science and have a great meal at the same time.” We brought it home. He examined it. We washed it. I let him look at the flesh, study it, salt and pepper it, put it in the oven, and watch it change. As he saw the flesh grow firmer, he shouted excitedly, It's changing!”
We put it on a platter. I said, “Okay, this is going to be your dinner. But let's de=bone it.” So we did it together, put the skeleton to the side and he examined the bones. He kept shouting, “Wow!” He got to take the skeleton to school the next day to his great delight. I put out the goblets with milk in one, juice in the other, and water in the third. At different levels, I said, “Take your spoon and hit those.” He hit the glasses and cried out, “I'm making music!”
I took him outside to look at the sky. I said, “There's Orion's belt and there's the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia.” I explained it to him. Now, he always talks about that night and his discovery of the sky.
Then I said it was time to go to bed. And when he saw the bed in a room of his own, he couldn't believe it. He had never slept in a bed by himself, let alone a room of his own. The next morning, he made his bed very carefully.
When I took him to school, during the creative writing time, he said, “I got a story.” He told it to me: “It's about stars that came down to Garfield to play football.” Garfield High is where his brother got shot. “When the stars realized they had no hands, no eyes and no legs, they went back up to the sky and made their own formations. The made Cassiopeia, the Big Dipper, and Orion.
At our school, he's been punished, suspended. This same kid. He's got the potential. He loves learning, but we're ruining him. The pity of it is the waste. Unless we stop this punitive mentality, we're going to lose a lot of kids. We've got to teach them how to deal with their anger, but we can't do it unless we learn how to deal with our own anger.
Every time he saw me, he'd say, “Peace, Mrs. Kurose.” He'd be at the playground fighting with other kids and when he saw me, he'd say, “Ooops, I forgot. Peace.” And he'd stop fighting.
After he left my class, I'd see him sitting in the principal's office. I'd say, “Send him to me. I know how to deal with him.” So many times, our minority kids would be sitting in that office all day. Its their punishment. I still have that story of his at school, all bound for him. But I'm afraid he's gone.
I'm not pessimistic. I have lots of hope. I think more people are finding out about cooperative learning. Science is exciting. Math is exciting. But it means little unless it is incorporated with peace. I feel that I need to be there to be part of making the change.
She is a Nisei, born and raised in Seattle.
As a sixteen-year-old, shortly after World War II was declared, she and her family, among scores of thousands of Japanese Americans, were arrested and sent off to internment camps.
“Horse Stalls and pigpens were converted to shelters for many of us. Our family of six was assigned to one room. They gave us burlap bags. We were told to stuff straw in them and they would be our mattresses...There were machine-gun towers in the parking lot. The guns were aimed inside, at us. People would drive around in cars, calling us names. You'd feel like an animal in the zoo.
“Everything was so surreal. The assignment one teacher in camp gave us was: 'Write why you are proud to be and American.' [Laughs softly.] We had to salute the flag every day and sing the national anthem.”
Around 1965, I was a Head Start volunteer. I got turned on to working with young people, so after my children were raised, I went back to school. I got my master's degree in early childhood education when I was fifty-six years old.
I started teaching in the early '70s and have been doing so ever since. I teach six-year olds, first grade. I've taught kindergarten and preschool, as well. I teach mathematics, science, and peace.
How does one teach peace? Well, I immediately say to them, “If you're not at peace with yourself, with your neighbor, with your community, you can't really learn very much. We have to get rid of all this garbage, this angry, competitive feeling. Then we'll all get along.”
We'd go outside and do these exercises in the morning to invigorate ourselves. We pretend that we're taking all the anger out of our bodies, getting rid of our anxieties and throwing them all into outer space. We're not polluting the space, because what we're throwing out is just being disintegrated. So we talk about environment that way also.
I tell them: When you're in school, no one is going to be sent to the principal, and nobody's going to be turned bad. If something unpleasant happens, we're going to resolve our own conflicts. When trouble may start, I tell them to stop, rest awhile, let's talk things over, because we need a cooling-off period. What happens in our classroom has to be a win-win situation for everybody. We don't have a winner and a loser.
Under no circumstances will they be punished. I tell them that making a mistake is the most natural thing to do. Everybody makes mistakes. The thing to do is to learn from our mistakes. The more mistakes you make, the more you're learning, so don't worry about that.
At my school, they didn't quite know what to do about me. The principal called me and said we were to attend a community meeting. I said, “Fine. Are the other teachers coming, too?” He said, “No. You'll be meeting with parents and you must be prepared to tell them how you're going to teach their privileged children.”
When I walked in, there were forty parents already seated. They had met an hour before, getting all their questions organized. They immediately wanted to know where I had been educated. I told them I had been to the University of Washington and was just about to get my master's degree.
They wanted to know if their children would pick up my Japanese accent. I told the, “I'm sorry, but this is a Seattle public school accent. I was born in this city.” They were so very anxious and worried. “you've been teaching poor children all these years. How will you deal with our children, who have had lots of preschool and are very advanced? Can you meet the challenge of these children?” I said I could meet the challenge of any child. “It's the challenge of the parents that may be more difficult.” They were quite shocked. [Laughs softly.] Two parents monitored my classroom every day for a month.
Here is a very affluent neighborhood of ambitious parents who don't know quite what to do with this Asian woman who is so outspoken. After a month of monitoring, they decided that I could teach. Eventually, these parents became more supportive of me than the staff did. They were the ones who recommended me for the Teacher for Excellence Award. Some of their attitudes were at first condescending, but that changed and it was wonderful.
The staff had a very hard time of it when I first came there. Remember, I had displaced a white teacher, who was transferred to the central area. They were naturally feeling sorry for the other woman and said, in so many words, that it wasn't fair that I should get all the breaks because I was of the minority. They felt it was a real privilege for me to come here to teach white children. Referring to my old school, they'd say, “Oooh, how did you stand it?” I said I loved it down there. I said, “Actually, I feel it's an inconvenience for me to come here. At the old place, I could walk to school. Now I have to drive all the way out there.”
One teacher asked me, “Who are you?”
I'm Aki Kurose”
“Well, you know what I mean.”
“No, I'm not sure, though I suspect I know what you mean.”
“What are you?”
“Oh, I'm a teacher.”
Finally, she said, “Well, where do you come from?”
“Oh. I come from Madrona.” (That's the area where I live in Seattle.)
“Well, no---you know what I mean.”
“I think I do.”
“What kind of name in Kurose?”
“That's my husband's name.”
She was getting quite angry with me. Finally, I said, “Are you asking my ethnicity?”
She said, “Yes. Are you Chinese or Japanese?”
“I am Japanese and proud of it. Why is it so important to you?”
Then she said some of her friends got killed in World War II. I said, “I'm very sorry, but I don't think I'm responsible for it. I'm against war, so please don't regard me as your enemy.” For many years, on December 7, they'd bring up Pearl Harbor: “Your people...” They'd want to talk to the students about it. I'd argue with them that that kind of history isn't what it's about. I always tell my students that war is the enemy, so you can't name people as the enemy.
It's changed a lot in the nineteen years I've been there. Because our busing is no longer mandatory, it's starting to get sterile again. We've lost a lot of black students. Oh, it was a challenge and hard at the beginning. I think the problem had more to do with money than color. You send these kids to a neighborhood with Porsches, Volvos, Mercedes, and mothers who are constantly at school to see to the needs of their own children. The whole lifestyle is so different from these bused kids, usually of single parents or working ones who can't participate. The PTAs there are like pink teas in beautiful homes. What working parent can go to a PTA meeting at ten o'clock in the morning?
The kids in my class were wonderful and starting to get along with each other. I said, “We're not going to compete.” Many of the parents in these affluent neighborhoods are so anxious for their kids to be at the top of the class. I said, “I'm sorry, in my classroom there's nobody at the top of the class, nobody in the middle, and nobody at the bottom. We work cooperatively. No grades in my class.”
At first, the parents didn't like it. They love to have their Susie first in line, top in math or top reader. I said I don't give tests that way. I give them problem-solving activities where they work cooperatively. Nobody's answer is wrong. We try to justify the answer. If they say, “Four plus three equals eight,” I say, “Let's see if we can justify that statement.” So the children work in groups of four and think about it. Each may come up with a different answer. So they rethink it. This one little boy who had four beans and three beans had to justify the total of eight. He suddenly realized something. He then broke one bean in half and said, “Four plus two plus the two halves of the seventh bean equal eight.” He thought it through.
When I first began teaching, I thought I had to have lots of knowledge that I could share with my students, so they could memorize all these things. That's not what education is about. We need to teach them that the planet earth is here for us to cherish and share with everybody. We have to stop this possessive approach, especially with young children. I realize as they grow up, they may have to compete. But at the low-elementary level, they need to build up their self-esteem and self-worth and, above all, learn to think.
I remember a letter from a college student who'd been one of my kids. “You made me interested in math and science. They have been among my favorites ever since. I know that not only does 5+6=11. So does 6+5. But the foremost part of your curriculum was peace. It has made the big difference in my life.” Teaching them the skill of living on this earth in a peaceful manner is what education should be about.
It's so sad to hear teachers saying, “I can't wait to retire. I can't wait for the school year to be over. I can't wait until three-thirty when the kids will be out of my classroom.” If you've lost that spirit, I don't think you should be teaching.
Some of them are burnt out because the classes are so large or because they can't deal with the anger of the kids. When busing started, most of the black kids were out in the hallway or being sent to the principal's office. I protested: this gives the wrong message. The other kids, the whites, se them in the hallways or in the principal's office and think they're all bad kids.
I said we don't need to punish kids this way. So I've been working with communtiy people, trying to get a peace curriculum passed through the legislature, because if you can't get along with one another, what;s the use of having a Ph.D.?
I have four kids at each of six tables. Every morning, I have a bouquet of flowers on each table so the students may enjoy its beauty---and learn the botanical names. In this way, they learn to spell rhododendron, azalea, chrysanthemum. They put a flower picture book together. On the back, they write a poem about the flowers they've come to know. In learning botany, they learn math as well---how the leaves are attached, how they are spaced, they count the petals. When the petals fall, they don't throw them away, they study them. You'll see children treasuring the stems, with the petals gone. It is not learning how to memorize, but how to see them as beautiful parts of their lives.
We grow salmon in the classroom. I take the children to the fish hatchery at the University of Washington. We see the spawning salmon. They allow us to squeeze the eggs out, which we bring back to the classroom.. We have an aquarium with refrigeration. And we grow the salmon eggs. We raise salmon! [Laughs delightedly.] Part of our curriculum is the life cycle of a salmon. The children learn a song about these fish. We release the little fingerlings back into the fresh streams, where they can hide under the rocks and gradually finish their lives, going back into the sea. Then we all sing “Bon Voyage, Bon Voyage.”
Every morning, we go outside to exercise. My bused-in-children, especially, don't need to be thrown into a classroom immediately. They need to get some of that energy out. We make a big circle, we study the clouds, the motion of the sun. While they exercise, they count by fives, by tens, “higher, higher.” All this time they're learning multiplication.
As we observe the clouds, they come up with these fantastic things: “Mrs. Kurose, you're talking about these cirrus clouds, but why do we see the cumulus?” They use these words not by rote, but because they connect with them what they experience at that moment. It's so exciting! I realize I'm learning so much from my students.
I encourge them to write constantly. They keep a journal and they write their thoughts. I don't say, “Spell it right,” certainly not at the beginning. They do inventive spelling and their stories are so exciting. I'm pretty good now at deciphering their spelling. But they know from the beginning what they've written. They share it with the group. So the observing and the writing are relevant to their day.
They know all the phases of the moon. My students tell their parents about a waxing, gibbous moon. A number of mothers and fathers there have told me, “We didn't know what a gibbous moon was until our first graders came home and told us.. We're learning astronomy from your students.”
I was honored as Teacher of the Year for the Seattle area. My name was submitted by the parents. The following year, the National Science Center gave me the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science and Mathematics. There was one winner from each state.
Bush was president. It was very ironic because under him the teachers have been damned with fewer benefits, and the students with fewer services. At the Rose Garden, some of the teachers were so excited about Bush. One said, “I'm never going to wash my hands.” I said, “Ughh!”
Bush came up to me, smiling: “Hi, would you like to take a picture with me?” I just couldn't help myself and said, “No, you're not my favorite president.” He just looked. I don't think he was even listening. I said, “You're supposed to be our 'education president,' but you don't show it. You're allotting all this money to the military, when all these children need education.” I added, “One stealth bomber would pay for the salary of hundreds of teachers. Two stealth bombers would probably supply many good school districts. You need to change your priorities.”
He just stood there with his plastic smile and he said, “Okay,” as he put his arms around me and had this person take a picture of us. He didn't hear a word I said.
I was thrilled to be in Washington. I was thrilled to see the White House. But I was sad because things just didn't fit. I had borrowed a dress from my friend because I didn't have any formal gown to wear. I put “Peace” buttons all the way across. I wear these buttons every day, on every garment. When my grandchildren come over, the first thing they say is, “Okay, you have them on.” My students love it.
During our Curriculum Night, the parents are invited. We have to explain what we teach. I said, “I want you to know that peace is the most important part of my curriculum. I teach science and math, but if a child is not at peace with himself or herself, with the neighbors, with the community, true learning cannot take place.”
On this night, one man said, “That's none of your business. I want you to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. That's why I'm sending my kid to school, to learn the three Rs. What's all this nonsense you're handing out about atomic bombs, Sadako, or whatever?” I said, “Yes, I do tell them about Sadako and the thousand cranes because I think it's a wonderful children's story.”
Sadako was a twelve-year-old girl who was an A-bomb victim and was dying of leukemia. There was a Japanese legend that if you fold a thousand paper cranes, you can have good luck and a long life. She made 650 cranes and then she died. I thought children could relate to this.
I siad to this man, “Please , take this book home and read it. It's not controversial, it's not subversive.” e took it but he wasn't very happy. I said, “If you have any problem, you can always call me at home. Or I'll stay after school. Or I can come to see you. I'm interested in the parents as well as the children. I work hard and I want you to know I will deal with any of your concerns.”
This was in September. That was the last I heard from him---until November. I got this call, “Mrs. Kurose, I'd like an appointment with you. Can I drop in after school?” I said, “Of course.” I was nervous, had no idea what he was going to say. He said, “I want to tell you a story.” I thought: Uh oh. “My son is reading so beautifully His math is wonderful, and he treats his younger brother so nicely. He's no a mean kid anymore. And he likes to talk things out. I offered him a set of G.i. Joes, but he said to me, 'Dad, Mrs. Kurose would be very upset. That's a war toy. I would rather have a microscope.'” He was delighted. He said, “Mrs. Kurose, if you have any tax problems or whatever, I'd be happy to do your taxes for free.” He was an accountant.
Another parent who came said, “Boy, were our faces red! My wife and I were yelling at each other, and our little daughter said, 'Stop, stop! You're supposed to cool off and talk things out.'” The child was in my class.
Is my teaching today better than when I was younger? Absolutely. My face gets red when I think of the first day I taught. “All right, children, let's pass out the workbook.” Ridiculous. Aside from the classes I take, the children are teaching me how to discover things. You can tell a child that mixing vinegar with baking soda is going to fizz, but it won't make an impression unless they do it themselves. We do little magic things, too. I take a boiled egg and put it on top of a bottle. It won't go in no matter how we push it. We put a match inside, burn out the carbon monoxide [sic], and pretty soon the egg plops in. I ask them why it did so. They have to think things out. How can we get it out? You try to shake it, you try to suck it, it won't come out. You blow into it and the egg pops up so dramatically. The kids go “Wow!” They see it.
Some of the teachers don't like my methods. They're very regimented and feel that my children are too free moving. One complained, “Why are you taking them outside for exercise? They get enough exercise on the bus.” I said, “I'm not only doing it for my bus children, I'm doing it for myself as well. I get inspired.”
I can understand some of these young teachers with families. It's a full-time job, so they lead a difficult double life. They spend so much time on paperwork, xeroxing, and dittoes. And these SATs are so meaningless. It's an insult to the intelligence of young people. You don't need paper and pencil. You can count beans, multiply them, grown them. All this is magic and so is learning.
I have a science club from kindergarten through the fifth grade. I have a cross-grade teaching: big kids work with little kids. They love it.
The most important thing I learned was to respect children. You hear lots of complaints about how young kids aren't respecting us anymore. Are we respecting them? Respect begets respect. Children are very perceptive. If you are not valuing them, they know it immediately.
I wonder if we don't really ruin kids in school, cause them to lose respect for themselves. I think the biggest crime is to have a kid sent down to the office. I see that all the time. I see them constantly getting expelled. Why would you expel a kid? Let's face the truth: somewhere along the line, we have failed in our teaching.
In our state, we just passed “Three Strikes and You're Out” legislation. Three crimes and you're incarcerated forever, or something. Won't we ever learn that punished children become punitive people? If you wallop them, that;s the only thing they're going to know, so the wallop others. Treat them as human beings and they'll act that way.
Edward was eight years old. His fourteen-year-old brother was shot in a playground, a gangland situation. The mother was homeless. “Can I take him home?” I asked her. She said, “It's up to you.” So I brought him home, bought him some clean clothes. I bought him three pairs of socks and three pairs of shorts. He was so proud. “Do I got to give these to my brother?” His brother was still in the hospital. I said, “No, these are for you.” He thought I'd given him gold bullion. His eyes were like big marbles. “I get to keep these?” I thought I was a do-gooder, but he did more for me than I did for him. I was impressed with his sudden pride.
I said, “Now we're going to eat.” He said, “We get to go to McDonald's?” I said, “No, we're going to buy a trout, with a head and tail and everything. You're going to cook it. We're going to practice science and have a great meal at the same time.” We brought it home. He examined it. We washed it. I let him look at the flesh, study it, salt and pepper it, put it in the oven, and watch it change. As he saw the flesh grow firmer, he shouted excitedly, It's changing!”
We put it on a platter. I said, “Okay, this is going to be your dinner. But let's de=bone it.” So we did it together, put the skeleton to the side and he examined the bones. He kept shouting, “Wow!” He got to take the skeleton to school the next day to his great delight. I put out the goblets with milk in one, juice in the other, and water in the third. At different levels, I said, “Take your spoon and hit those.” He hit the glasses and cried out, “I'm making music!”
I took him outside to look at the sky. I said, “There's Orion's belt and there's the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia.” I explained it to him. Now, he always talks about that night and his discovery of the sky.
Then I said it was time to go to bed. And when he saw the bed in a room of his own, he couldn't believe it. He had never slept in a bed by himself, let alone a room of his own. The next morning, he made his bed very carefully.
When I took him to school, during the creative writing time, he said, “I got a story.” He told it to me: “It's about stars that came down to Garfield to play football.” Garfield High is where his brother got shot. “When the stars realized they had no hands, no eyes and no legs, they went back up to the sky and made their own formations. The made Cassiopeia, the Big Dipper, and Orion.
At our school, he's been punished, suspended. This same kid. He's got the potential. He loves learning, but we're ruining him. The pity of it is the waste. Unless we stop this punitive mentality, we're going to lose a lot of kids. We've got to teach them how to deal with their anger, but we can't do it unless we learn how to deal with our own anger.
Every time he saw me, he'd say, “Peace, Mrs. Kurose.” He'd be at the playground fighting with other kids and when he saw me, he'd say, “Ooops, I forgot. Peace.” And he'd stop fighting.
After he left my class, I'd see him sitting in the principal's office. I'd say, “Send him to me. I know how to deal with him.” So many times, our minority kids would be sitting in that office all day. Its their punishment. I still have that story of his at school, all bound for him. But I'm afraid he's gone.
I'm not pessimistic. I have lots of hope. I think more people are finding out about cooperative learning. Science is exciting. Math is exciting. But it means little unless it is incorporated with peace. I feel that I need to be there to be part of making the change.
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