Knocks Against The Way We School

(Author’s Note:  Christopher Quirk, Director of Easton County Day School, graciously allowed me to work closely with him on a proposal for a sustainable education community.  Part of this collaboration centered on a K-12 school.  The foregoing arguments set forth here are a culmination of that collaboration in January, 2012.)

Some of the knocks against the way we school are:

     -schooling systems are primarily adult driven;

     -behavioral compliance and memory are emphasized over experiential learning, the manner by which, especially young, children learn;

     -solutions to defined problems come from within the dominant schooling paradigm, essentially doing the same thing but expecting different results;

     -the full range of children’s needs are unaccounted for in the delivery of instruction and in schooling system design;

     -schooling is not designed for wellness in 21^st century life.

To the growing horror of nativist elites of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the United States was hosting a large migration, especially, from Eastern Europe.  Social convention of adult presumption of authority over children matched the need the adult elites saw for the masses of immigrant children to be Democratized along with having to be civilized, meaning, mostly, developing correct sanitation habits as well as habits of thrift, hard work and obedience to civil, “democratic” authorities.  Schooling became the means the elite adults chose to tame the wild, immigrant child:  Under the romance of mass production as a means of processing the large numbers of urban children through the system, adults from the intellectual, governing and commercial elites formed the schooling system we have today. 

The adult fascination with mass production and scientific management formed the mass schooling in America.  Adults taking pages from Classical Education divided the world of knowledge into “subjects”.  Looking to parse time and children into subject slots of the school day determined a certain schedule, driving the schedule for the school building and for an entire school system.  As the 20^th century professionalized education, it was the adult needs for credentials, standardization of practice and compensation defining preparation to work, working conditions and pedagogy.  These are no minor issues:  the profoundly negative consequences of forcing children to function in systems designed for adult convenience and adult notions of adult-child relationship rather than children’s needs can be seen in our schools everyday, and are most severe for children at the “tail ends” of the curve (those who are gifted, those with disabilities, and gifted children who also have disabilities).

One of the most evident examples of adult driven systems is the focus on compliance and memory.  Such focus is easiest for adults both on a practical level (it is easier to grade tests than to develop student self-assessing skills, or for portfolio development and review, or to facilitate discussions) and because it matches where adult energy tends to be, more sedentary.  But, more important than convenience is that these adult command and control systems over children are a direct consequence of the dominant understanding of childhood and of parenting.  Our nation and society have had well over a hundred years of blistering analysis, commentary and counter-arguments to our system of formal learning yet it remains constituted much the same as it always has.  And while one can argue that contemporary formal learning structure is deeply embedded in our civilization having been firmly planted in the late Middle Age European grammar school-university system, the single most effective explanation of the seeming paradox is the resistance to fundamental change in social attitudes of and practice in child rearing which presumes total adult power over the child.  Please to remember the theory in law which makes children subservient to adults in the school building, in the school system, is “in loco parentis”, in the place of parents.

In Italy over one hundred years ago, Maria Montessori viewed very young children in learning environments constructed by adults of the time unable to grow children mentally or physically healthy, for these environments were looking to satisfy adult need, not child need.   Repulsed by what she saw, she devised a theory and a method of formal learning based on the satisfaction of actual child need.  Unfortunately today, her Method has been captured by the adult social habit to rule over children and is being employed, again, to satisfy adult need not child need!  Montessori schooling is presently one of the fastest growing education movements, but it is so because it offers a safer environment, a more defined adult over child discipline environment, than conventional schooling.

Yet, as Maria Montessori observed children are best suited to be interacting with and exploring their world.  They are dishonored by having to sit in rows or in groups on the floor listening to adults for large chunks of time.  More, as John Holt points out this is not the way children learn:

     “[Holt would bring his cello into school letting the children have a turn

     ‘playing’ it]…almost all little children attack the cello in the same way.

     They are really doing three things.  They are making the machine go.  They

     are enjoying the luxury of making sounds.  And they are making scientific

     experiments…They have to pile up quite a mass of raw sensory data before they

     begin trying to sort it out and make sense of it…It doesn’t take a child long…to

     grasp the basic idea of the cello, the relationship of the bow, the string and the left

     hand.  But while he has been figuring this out, he has been ceaselessly active.  One

     could say that he is having too much fun-a weak word, really-playing the cello

     to want to take time to figure it out.  A scientist might say that, along with his useful

    data, the child has collected an enormous quantity of random, useless data.  A trained

    scientist wants to cut all irrelevant data out of his experiment.  He is asking nature a

    question, he wants to cut down the noise, the static, the random information, to

    a minimum, so he can hear the answer.  But the child doesn’t work that way.  He

    is use to getting his answers out of the noise.  He has, after all, grown up on a

    strange world where everything is noise, where he can only understand and make

    sense of a tiny part of what he experiences.  His way of attacking the cello problem

     is to produce the maximum amount of data possible, to do as many things as he can,

     to use his hands and the bow in as many ways as possible.   Then, as he goes along,

     he begins to notice regularities and patterns.  He begins to ask questions-that is

     to make deliberate experiments.”

    (John Caldwell Holt, How Children Learn, Revised Edition, Reading, MA:  Perseus

    Books. 1984, pp 71-75.)

The consequences of the conventional adult driven schooling are that with needs grossly unmet children are emotionally hobbled and psychically scarred, resulting in outcomes different than adults expect, or if the outcomes are according to expectations they have come at a great psychic expense to the child.  This leads to hand wringing and a demand for solutions.  Unfortunately, the solutions that result exchange one ineffective model for a different ineffective model and get largely similar results.  These solutions emanate from those most tightly wound into the dominant system’s paradigm.  It is the paradigmatic trap, the inability to conceive through a competing paradigm.

Therefore, both the initial model and the solutions fail to account for not only how children learn, but also for how they function.  School children in every grade are generally expected to simply behave in the way that would make adults most comfortable.  For this reason, basic needs are ignored.  An example will suffice.  Children who are deemed by the adult in the room to have difficulty paying attention are scolded to “pay attention” with little understanding by the adult of the individual child’s social, emotional and cognitive operations.  More, the very notion of not “paying attention” is considered abnormal by the adult but, in fact, may be the normal means by which a child engages the world:  It is known as “switching”, where concentration switches from one thing to another thing to another to another in sometimes quick succession eventually coming back to the first cause for concentration.  Nevertheless, multiple daily scoldings happen and then “interventions” and “accommodations” are placed on the child based on what is manageable within the school environment.  In other words, the interventions and accommodations are not specifically suited to the child’s actual need!  Children are expected to organize, concentrate and prioritize with no actual understanding by the adults of the individuals’ social, emotional and cognitive properties. 

The costs of these failures in the system are particularly pronounced at this time in history.  But it was not always so.  Youngsters not fitting into the mass schooling production system as late as the 1920’s could drop out to go West and find gainful life-time employment on the ranches, on the farms, in the factories, on the seaports or in the oil fields.  Even in the factories, the mills and the mines of the Northeast and in the factories and mills of the Mid-West a youngster could drop out and be alright.  The Great Depression, of course, changed all that, although the West hadn’t completely closed, but by the mid-1930’s it had.  Then, the Second World War and the post-war industrial boom brought the drop-out a middle-class life, with family, two cars and a suburban house.  But, from the mid-1970’s onward to today, the de-manufacturing of the country, the high productivity gains of modern corporate, petro-chemical, industrial agriculture and the rise of competitor countries’ ability to produce natural resources less expensively have closed the former “cooling off” places for the drop out, to the point that, presently, a youngster leaving school drops out to the street, and to all attending that environment.  The labor selection function of modern schooling once doing well, for some time now, has turned dysfunctional. 

Thus, formal learning is required to turn its attention to preparing youngsters for life itself, not for jobs or careers.  To have as the goal of formal learning the social utility of a disciplined, trained workforce is to give to education the conventional meaning which is a far too narrow, counter-productive and harmful one for 21^st century America and which continues the dysfunction damaging to all youngsters and to the nation and the society. Schooling ought to be looking to the larger function of socialization, of providing the society and the nation with healthy citizens capable of making their own decisions.  Or to sum it up:  The goals of our intentional learning communities ought to be to cultivate in all youngsters a solid psychological foundation for future growth and a cognitive dexterity for life long adaptability to life’s vicissitudes.  Indeed, schooling should be about the healthy, happy growth in self-awareness, self-regulation and self-actualization.  In the end it’s all about taking care of the psychic side of life, for once that is healthy, the rest will follow in good order.  The 21^st century and beyond need mentally healthy citizens who can leverage their good health in which ever way they discern is in their best interest and in the best interest of family, community, country and civilization.