Taking the Measure of Democratic Education and Rockaway College Concept Against Lynn Stoddard’s New Paradigm for Formal Learning, Educating for Human Greatness

(Note:  This paper has been divided into three parts so readers are unburdened with having to sit with it for the time it would take to read the entire piece, that is, unless the reader wishes.  This blog entry is the second of three.)

Lynn Stoddard in his Educating for Human Greatness, http://www.efhg.org/, advocates for a paradigm shift in education, from valuing student uniformity to valuing student differences, from standardization of teaching, learning and outcomes to developing students’ unique talents, gifts, interests and abilities, from teachers’ direct instruction ­of basic skills and subject matter disciplines as ends in and of themselves to using teacher knowledge and creativity to organize and arrange experiences for students to nurture curiosity and to draw forth student interests and engagement, from student achievement being in the mastery of a core of essential knowledge to the growth in seven major qualities/powers of greatness: Identity, Inquiry, Interaction, Initiative, Imagination, Intuition and Integrity.  To ascertain if any system has so shifted requires it to be placed against these standards.  To this point it has been demonstrated (as related last blog entry) both Democratic Education and its expression in the Rockaway College Concept have met the Educating for Human Greatness standards considered.  However, we shall see if either grows students in the seven major EfHG qualities/powers.  This entry will look at Identity, Inquiry, Interaction and Initiative with the following entry surveying Imagination, Intuition and Integrity.

Democratic Education (see http://www.democratic.co.il/en/ and http://www.yaacovhecht.com/) may be defined as formal study controlled by the learner where the individual takes full responsibility for his and for her own course of learning and as schooling controlled by the learning community collectively where the school body as a whole takes responsibility for governing itself through The Democratic Process. 

Rockaway College (detailed on this blog in consecutive entries starting on 2/16/12, ending on 3/19/12, including an overview of design on 3/17/12 and an annotated index to entries on 3/19/12) is conceived to utilize the learner-decision-centeredness and school community self-governance of Democratic Education in the service of the Twice-Exceptional, also know as the Gifted and Talented Learning Disabled.  The school represents an integrated progression in social, emotional and cognitive development from pre-school though early college established in two major units:  Rockaway College School-containing the early childhood and the primary education programs; and Rockaway College-holding a personal growth intake for a secondary education, the secondary education program and a liberal arts early college program. Graduates of the early college having gone through the College’s secondary education would earn both a high school diploma and an Associate of Arts degree. 

Identity

Democratic Education is all about confirming the child’s powers to engage the world through his and her natural inclinations and individual differences.  It is learning through the child’s intrinsic motivation toward different aspects of content and skills.  As children choose knowledge engagement based on inherent predisposition initially through intuition and later through conscious intention, each validates his and her way of knowing increasing confidence in that unique way of apprehending the world.  Each day as children define themselves by choice and action, they strengthen who they know they are.  And as the child grows into adolescence and young adulthood, the practice of conscious decision-making deepens the sense of self-worth, growing in the quality/power of Identity-the power of self-worth derived from developing one’s unique talents and gifts.

Rockaway College assumes Twice-Exceptionality (the population of youngster the school intends to serve) as a synthesis of both giftedness/talentedness and cognitive/social-emotional deficit where strength compensates for weakness creating a unique, indivisible and intrinsic motivation toward different aspects of knowledge content and skills.  Intrinsic motivational choice is the heart of Rockaway College regardless of the schooling level. The early childhood environment would be a play world centered on self-regulation keyed to social-emotional aspects of personality and appropriate growth in gross and fine motor movement and in overall body capacities and where children can choose to engage in whatever free, self-organized, unstructured imaginative play the environment supports for as long as they wish. The primary program would provide for play as well, but its intent on developing naturally inclined learning skills necessitates environment preparation supporting such development. While there would be blocks, toys and puzzles, paints and crayons, there would also be Montessori readers, charts, timelines, lab manuals and models.  Further, there would be set the academic learning of Montessori materials organized in Learning Stations centered on Literacy, Language and Measurement and in discipline areas of Earth, Space and Life Sciences, History and Geography.  Knowledge acquisition here over an entire residency would emerge unique to every child as they engage the prepared environment through their distinctive neurology, interests, abilities and communication styles, thus defining and growing in their individual Indentities.

The outdoor adventure secondary education intake program housed in Rockaway College’s Venture School is wholly about the cultivation of Identity through intrinsic choice. It provides youngsters self-selective opportunities to learn and apply outdoor skills, to enhance physical strength, endurance and dexterity, to acquire knowledge about nutrition, meal planning and preparation, and outdoor personal health and safety, and to explore multiple aspects of Botany, Geology, Forestry, Zoology and Environmental Science.  These nature play opportunities in camping, hiking, backpacking, canoeing, rafting, skiing, within an ecology of choice unfold youngsters’ natural inclinations and individual differences so each child new to the College can begin to understand how he and she engages the world and would deepen such self-awareness for the children from Rockaway College School.

In the secondary education program held in Rockaway College’s Lower School, students working the integrated, interdisciplinary thematic Free Academic curriculum would engage the learned world through his and her individual neurological construction, abilities, interests, temperament and communication style confirming Identity.  Examples of the academic themes are “Oceans”, “Mountains”, “Deserts”, “Cities”, “Luminescence”, “Alienation”, “Creation Myths”, “Spider Webs”, “Wild Fires”.  Students would select one theme at any one time on which to concentrate study.  But intrinsic choice here goes further in that Lower School students would be free to come up with their own themes based on their natural inclinations and individual differences, their unique Indentities, and to study what they have devised.

The learning engagement of the early college in Rockaway College’s Upper School fully expresses individual Identity as student decision making reaches its highest confidence.  Great Question Curriculum is also thematic.  Examples of such themes are:  How did the eighteenth century European belief against Superstition and Fanaticism affect the construction of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment?; Does Dark Matter Matter?; Can Your Render Unto Caesar When Caesar is Wrong?. Each semester small groups of interested young scholars would choose specific Great Questions to study and the course of study in the Upper School would be wholly the choice of individual students. But choice here goes much further in that Upper School faculty would through consensus with the initial and subsequent groups of Upper School students develop the generations of interdisciplinary Great Questions.  Great Question curriculum development would remain an Upper School governance issue for the existence of the College.  More, Great Question courses can be facilitated by faculty or by the students themselves.  

Inquiry

Democratic Education unleashes the child’s natural curiosity.  As John Holt points out, “…curiosity is hardly ever idle.  What we want to know, we want to know for a reason.  The reason is that there is a hole, a gap, an empty space in our understanding of things, our mental model of the world.  We…want to fill it.  It makes us ask How? When? Why?  While the gap is there, we are in tension, in suspense…”  (John Caldwell Holt, How Children Learn, Revised Edition, Reading, MA:  Perseus Books. 1984, pp. 291-292)  Indeed, the EfHG quality/power of Inquiry- the power of curiosity and efficient, effective investigation-is key to child learning and Democratic Education here, as elsewhere, follows the child.

And Inquiry is everywhere in Rockaway College.  In Rockaway College School the materials and activities of the Democratic Montessori prepared environment magnetically draw curious engagement.  Nature draws curiosity in the Venture School of Rockaway College.  Inquiry into the learned world is center in the Lower School.  Inquiry Project Based Learning would be the learning/reporting structure utilized by students to process through the Lower School to translation of matriculation to the Upper School. Every student would engage the learned world through an inquiry project determined by his own neurological construction, abilities, interests, temperament and communication style.  And the Upper School continues the inquiry focus through the shared inquiry of Socratic seminars where young adults would collaboratively explore Great Questions. 

Interaction

Democratic Education’s core is in community.  “The soul of [community]”, William Ayers states, “is a social spirit of compassionate solidarity, of engagement, of sympathy, empathy, and connectedness.  It begins in care and cooperation, and the recognition that our lives are suspended in interdependent webs of relationships.”  (William Ayers, On the Side of the Child:  Summerhill Revisited, New York:  Teachers College Press, 2003, p. 36) And this web is founded in the school community governing itself.  In self-governing schools, Ayers continues, control of behavior is not “external and exclusive, concentrated in a single tentative grip, but is internal to the group, shared equally by everyone.  This means that learning to live together is on the agenda every minute of every day; learning to live together is the assumed curriculum is what else is being considered or pursued…” (Ayers, 2003, p. 32) 

In Democratic schools children and adults live together through a commonly generated set of agreed upon rules.  Regular meetings of the whole community consider and resolve issues open to community decision. Adults and children have equal rights to speak and to persuade within community forums. Each has a single vote on questions up for community decision. As individual norms are community derived and as the rules codifying them are as well, individuals in self-governing schools live through that which they, themselves, institute effectively doing to others what is desired to be done to the individual deciding on the norms, their rules and the types of consequences resulting from rules’ infringement.  This direct social contract emanating from the overwhelming desire to live well together embodies the EfHG quality/power of Interaction – the powers of love, human relationships, communication and cooperation. 

Rockaway College would be a Democratic self-governing institution. Each major unit of this institution is its own community taking responsibility for creating amenable, caring, reciprocal social and learning ecologies.  While these communities would propose and decide on policies governing their respective units such as individual benchmarks of social, emotional and cognitive growth youngsters would need to exhibit as they progress through and out of The School and The College, their main focus would be on defining expectant behaviors consistent and inconsistent with the norms of the social/learning environments as well as the means by which inconsistent behaviors are resolved.  In other words, these communities would take it upon themselves to employ the powers of love, human relationships, communication and cooperation to allow everyone to live well together.

However, this institution goes further in the quality/power of Interaction, especially within the Venture, Lower and Upper Schools.  Here a Cooperative Self-Directed culture is established where mixed age children work together to exercise their distinctive interests and ways of knowing, where individual inquiry is accomplished through cooperative learning groups, where learning group members act together to achieve individual learning objectives, where an expectant behavior of the cooperative norm is that each youngster is to look for opportunities to help fellow students as well as to be open to help when needed and where Cooperative Learning strategies are employed for whole group learning.  Indeed, living through the cooperative community culture children, adolescents and young adults would help each other set solid emotional foundations for future growth while assisting to uncover and to explore their native intelligence, enhance their learning skills, enrich their scholarship and cultivate a deep appreciation of the classical and the modern worlds. 

Initiative

The EfHG quality/power of Initiative-the power of self-discipline and intrinsic motivation-is vested in Democratic Education placing the child as the key decision-maker in his and her education choices.   The learner is the best judge of what he should learn, Holt maintains:  “For it seems to me a fact that, in our struggle to make sense out of life, the things we most need to learn are the things we most want to learn.” (Holt, 1984, pp. 291-292)  Or as Neill so succinctly puts it, “And a child who wants to learn…will learn…”  (Alexander Sutherland Neill, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing, New York: Hart Pub. Co. 1960, p. 5)

 

In Democratic Education the basic decisions on what is learned, when learning happens and how what is chosen is learned is the responsibility of the child.  Again Neill:  “My view is that a child is innately wise and realistic.  If left to himself…he will develop as far as he is capable of developing…people who have the innate ability and wish to be scholars will be scholars…” (Neill, 1960, p. 4)  However, Neill suggests the child ought not be totally left on his/her own.  “…[a] child should not be asked to face responsibilities for which he is not ready, nor be saddled with decisions he is not yet old enough to make.  The watchword is common sense…But the imposition of authority-necessary authority-on a child does not in any way conflict with the idea that a child should be given just about as much responsibility that he can accept at his particular age…” (Neill, 1960, pp. 152-154)  Still, that which affects the individual, Neill states, is the responsibility of the individual:  “…there is a great difference between compelling a child to cease throwing stones and compelling him to learn Latin.  Throwing stones involves others; but learning Latin involves only the boy.   The community has the right to restrain the antisocial boy because he is interfering with the rights of others’ but the community has no right to compel a boy to learn Latin-for learning Latin is a matter for the individual.” (Neill, 1960, pp.114-115)

This open and sometimes guarded learner self-disciplined and intrinsically motivated responsibility has its expression across the Democratic Education spectrum from Sands School which negotiates choice to Sudbury Valley where choice is completely child-determined.  Rockaway College is child-decision-centered; however, unlike Sudbury Valley which removes the adult from almost all of the child’s decisions, this model of self-directed learning fully acknowledges the need for a mentoring relationship of adult to child where an adult mentor and a youngster enter a process mutually respectful of the wisdom of each to attain a common understanding of and an agreement on learning goals and the action steps required to reach those goals; this includes a mentor working with children on social-emotional, psycho-dynamic and learning deficit issues. 

Thus:  While children in the early childhood program most definitely would self-direct their choice of play, because of the unique executive functioning arrangement of the Twice-Exceptional, there is required to be built a close mentoring relationship between teacher and student negotiating the emergence of suitable self-regulation to proceed to the primary education program.  And while children in the primary education program would naturally self-direct their engagement with the Democratic Montessori prepared learning environment, because of their unique social-emotional and cognitive arrangements, there needs to be built a close mentoring relationship between teacher and student navigating the development of competency in receiving, processing and communicating written, oral and graphic information, including mathematical information, through as many neurologically compatible channels as the child is capable, allowing the child to comfortably accept secondary academic study.  And while adolescents and young adults would by all means self-direct their course of studies in the outdoor adventure, secondary education and early college programs, students new to the programs as well as those nearing residency’s end would need mentors thoroughly versed in the cooperative self-directed academics of the school and in the unique social-emotional and cognitive styles of the school’s population to assist them in maneuvering through the channels of the academy to graduation.  Nevertheless, the hallmark of student engagement in knowledge acquisition at each school level is the ability to self-direct, to select aspects of knowledge according to the child’s own felt needs, the child’s intrinsic motivation, and to follow-through on what has been selected according to the child’s neurologically predisposed self-regulation, the child’s self-discipline, that is, to take the Initiative on all affecting individual learning decisions.