This is part of a much larger piece I wrote about learning and education. I think the criticisms of our school system given here are reason to think and consider what we are doing to our children.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH SCHOOL
Ideally, schools exist to preserve and regenerate learning and the arts, to give children the tools with which they may create the future. At worst, they produce uniform, media-minded grown-ups to feed the marketplace with workers, with managers, and with consumers.—Stephen Nachmanovitch (1990), p. 116.
So far we have looked at a number of phenomena which affect the way in which we attempt to integrate children into our society and how these might change our thinking about learning and school. We are faced with revolutionary technology which not only changes the way in which we might learn but also changes the way in which people communicate and relate to each other. Sweeping social changes, some the result of technology, are changing the way in which adults perceive children and children perceive adults.
It is my opinion that our current approach to schooling is not recognising the depth of cultural change taking place any more than it recognises how learning takes place and intelligence develops. The school as we know it is, after all, based on a model developed in the nineteenth century. What follows is a look at some aspects of what we now think of as traditional education with an eye to seeing how they interfere with children’s learning and undermine their intelligence.
Some Personal Observations
When I first started teaching, like most young teachers I approached the job with a sense of idealism and a conviction that school was good for children. After a couple of years teaching in elementary schools, I began to notice that something was wrong. I began to notice that certain aspects of what we were doing weren’t working. For example, even though part of what we thought we were teaching was respect for school property, the level of vandalism, incidences of annoying minor damage to the school building and to the school’s textbooks, increased steadily the longer the children were under our care and tutelage. At the end of each school year, when the textbooks were returned, I observed that the books that had been used by the younger children, those in the first two or three grades, were in nearly perfect condition, while the books that had been used by the older pupils had been severely damaged. A good portion of them had to be discarded as useless, and those that were salvageable were often so marked up with drawings and obscenities that it took several days and a platoon of Grade Four youngsters, under the unrelenting supervision of Mrs. Sharpe the vice-principal, to clean them up.
I also noticed that the average six-year-old, entering school for the first time, approached this new experience with eager curiosity and a willingness to participate in classroom activities. But as these young people advanced through the grades, there was a noticeable deterioration in this attitude. Many of the older kids were sloppy and indifferent if not downright rebellious. An inordinate amount of time, it seemed to me, had to be spent on discipline or exhortations to pay attention, work hard, do your homework, etc.
Alfie Kohn (1993), in his book titled Punished by Rewards, observes:
When they first get to school, they are endlessly fascinated by the world. They are filled with delight by their new-found ability to print their own names in huge, shaky letters, to count everything in sight, to decode the signs they see around them. They sit on the floor at story time, eyes wide and jaws slack, listening raptly as the teacher reads. They come home bubbling with new facts and new connections between facts. “You know what we learned today?” they say.
By the time the last bell has rung, the spell has been broken. Their eyes have narrowed. They complain about homework. They count the minutes until the end of the period, the days left before the weekend, the weeks they must endure until the next vacation. “Do we have to know this?” they ask. (p. 142)
With this in mind, it is not surprising that teaching fairly simple concepts like long division or prepositions seemed unexpectedly laborious. There were always a few kids in the class who never got it, no matter how frequently it was taught at them. Consequently a good part of each school year was devoted to a complete review, amounting to a re-teaching, of the subject matter, especially of mathematics, of the previous year, as if it were expected that most of the year’s work would have been forgotten through the course of the summer.
Another remarkable revelation came one day when a fairly average student who had been absent with an illness for about two weeks returned to the class. After the various lessons and the assignment of seatwork, I spent a couple of minutes with this youngster bringing him up to date on the learning that he had missed. A couple of minutes! That was all it took to bring him up to date on two weeks’ work. Why then was the normal progress of classroom teaching so inefficient?
The results in terms of kids’ knowledge and skill were minimal when compared to the amount of effort and expense invested in the project. For example, even though there was a carefully constructed curriculum for each grade, setting out in detail what was to be learned during that year, it was only necessary for a student to demonstrate a knowledge of about half of it—which half was never specified—in order to receive a passing grade. The product seemed to bear little relationship to the resources being put into its creation. Why was it that we all kept putting so much effort into something that obviously wasn’t working?
At the same time, what was going on in the school had the blessing of all those education professors, text-book writers, psychologists, and measurers of academic achievement over at the university. Surely they knew what they were doing. In every class there were always those students who did really well. Their papers and books were always neat, they paid attention in class, they did their homework, they did well on tests, and of course they got As. So what was wrong?
What slowly dawned on me was that school was not about learning and teaching, it was about a power struggle. It was a battle between a handful of teachers and several hundred youngsters, and because the youngsters were weaker and less experienced than the teachers it was necessary for them to resort to subtle forms of resistance, such as failing to comprehend the simplest of concepts in arithmetic or grammar, suddenly having a broken pencil during some crucial bit of seat work, making up excuses for not doing required assignments, not being able to find a necessary textbook, daydreaming instead of hanging on teacher’s every word, needing to go to the washroom at some key moment, and other endlessly creative subterfuges to grasp at some shred of self-respect and self-determination.
Even the kids who excelled at schoolwork didn’t seem to be very interested in it. They were very good at following directions and at doing what they were told. Their pleasure in learning what the school offered them was in the rewards they reaped for being model students, for knowing that they were better than the other kids. What would happen to those good students if you took away the top grades, the prizes, and pats on the back? Would they still pursue their studies—out of interest alone? Whatever the answers, most of the kids were not good students. They preferred to be messy, indifferent, inattentive, or rebellious. Their energies were devoted to a million small ways to frustrate and irritate the system. They didn’t even pretend to be interested in what was being taught, just as long as they could do enough to get by.
So, What Is Going On?
In his book Dumbing Us Down, John Gatto (1992), an award-winning teacher of 26 years experience in Manhattan public schools, lists seven lessons that “are universally taught from Harlem to Hollywood Hills” (p. 1). The seven lessons are: 1. Confusion; 2. Class Position; 3. Indifference; 4. Emotional Dependency; 5. Intellectual Dependency; 6. Provisional Self-Esteem; and 7. One Can’t Hide. These make up what he calls, in the subtitle of his book: “The hidden curriculum of compulsory schooling.”
The hidden curriculum lies in the way in which the school structures its activities. The curriculum is imposed from on high without regard to its meaningfulness in the lives of the students or the teachers. Time limits are set on everything. The day is divided into periods with each period devoted to a different and unrelated subject, so that no one interest can be worth pursuing, or as Gatto (1992) puts it, “Students never have a complete experience except on the installment plan” (p. 6). Children are segregated by age and ability. Even within the age segregation (“unlike anything seen in the outside world” Gatto, 1992, p. 2) children are further divided arbitrarily into classes or divisions, alienating them from the members of other classes, with whom they are often placed in competition to see who is “better”. Children learn to become dependent upon the approval or disapproval of authority. Some learn that success is gauged by the approval rating given by a teacher, while others reject approval and devote their energies to arousing anger and disapproval. Since the school tells you what is worth learning, there is little point in developing interests and passions of your own. Those will not improve your grade point average. And finally, Gatto (1992) points out that students are “under constant surveillance. There are no private spaces for children, there is no private time” (p. 11). The final result is emphasis on conformity, mediocrity, timidity, and confusion (Gatto, 1992, Kohn, 1993, Papert, 1993, Smith, 1998, Sternberg, 1996), or to use Gatto’s words, “dumbing down”.
But surely the well-intentioned and well-trained people who are teachers and school administrators aren’t diabolically planning to undermine children’s learning and destroy their good will and self-confidence. Quite the opposite. Most people in schools maintain a feeling of idealism and a genuine belief in the worth of what they are doing. They truly want to help children to achieve their best and to look forward to success in life. Unfortunately, however, they are caught in a set of unexamined beliefs and assumptions that turn their best intentions upside down. Most of these beliefs and assumptions are embodied in Gatto’s “Seven Lessons”. R. D. Laing once said that our institutions are turned 180 degrees, so that they do the opposite of what they say they do. Thus, prisons generate more crime, hospitals keep people sick, and schools keep people ignorant. And well-meaning people who have been schooled to be blind to society’s inconsistencies work hard to further the skewed goals of our institutions.
The School’s Rules and Regulations
The school sets certain conditions which have been determined to be necessary for the school kind of learning to take place. Let’s remember that the child who enters school has already acquired most of the skills, and much of the knowledge, needed to lead an effective life, all without much in the way of structured teaching (Smith, 1998). The school now enters with its own expectations of what and how a person should learn. The school’s rules and standards are often at odds with the child’s own interests, level of development, and personal needs. The schools says, in effect, “We know what’s good for you, you don’t.” The adult—and these is no choosing with whom you would care to spend your hours in school—now becomes a kind of adversary who must be attended to, pleased, and obeyed.
If the country’s constitution guarantees certain individual rights and freedoms, these must be abandoned upon entering school, in the same way rights and freedoms are forgone upon entering prison. First of all, as we have noted above, a child is deprived of any right to privacy. He or she is now part of a group of peers and not allowed rights of association outside of that group, except only at certain times and under very limited conditions. Nor is a child allowed solitude or privacy, except in some cases as a punishment, deprivations which bear a chilling resemblance to those of prisons. And like prisoners, school children are deprived of freedom. Once enrolled in a school, a child no longer may come and go as he or she pleases or respond to the exigencies of everyday life. Comings and goings are now determined by the school’s agenda, its timetables, and its classrooms. Emphasis is placed upon punctuality and speed in responding to time constraints. You can’t just walk away from school if you find it boring or repugnant. The law requires (or at least most people assume it does) that children attend school during a certain period of their life. And attendance implies that you be there every day at the given time unless you have a very good reason—and that reason must be supported by “believable” adults.
James Herndon (1971) suggests that captivity makes everything else about school irrelevant:
All of the talk about motivation or inspiring kids to learn or innovative courses which are relevant is horseshit. It is horseshit because there is no way to know if students really are interested or not. … That is why the school cannot ever learn anything about its students. Why famous psychologists can successfully threaten pigeons into batting ping-pong balls with their wings, but can never learn anything about pigeons. (pp. 97-98)
It would be unusual, to say the least, if a child’s home life were controlled to the extent that it is in school. “It’s now time to play with your train for 30 minutes, and then you will put that away and play with your blocks until I tell you to stop, you may eat lunch when the bell rings and not before, and you may certainly not go to the bathroom without permission.”
In addition to the compartmentalisation of time, there are constraints on speech. Children in school may not speak “out of turn” or converse with partners of their choice. Errors in grammar or choice of vocabulary will be rudely corrected. They are now expected to heed the directions of a perfect stranger called "teacher"—and don’t ask questions unless you’ve been given permission and they pertain to the lesson at hand. You must now have permission to use the toilet or to get a drink of water.
One of the stringent messages of school is that you must pay attention to things that don’t interest you. Frank Smith (1998) believes that not paying attention to what doesn’t make sense to you is an important part of learning. “The right to ignore anything that doesn’t make sense is a crucial element of any child’s learning—and the first right children are likely to lose when they get to the controlled learning environment of school” (p. 19).
The important learning here is that you have less control over your life than you thought you had; other people are now deciding what’s important for you, how you should be spending your time, and even what kind of person you’re supposed to be. Even in schools or classrooms where children are given the maximum amount of choice about what they do, those choices are necessarily limited by the school’s curriculum and its notions about what activities are appropriate for children of any given age.
Rewards and Punishments
Once the rules and regulations have been made, they require enforcement. The person or institution that establishes a set of rules for other people must live in fear of looking foolish if those rules are casually disregarded. Therefore, sanctions in the form of rewards for being good and punishments for being bad must be exercised.
The school has many ways of enforcing its rules, some subtle and some not so. In recent years corporal punishment has gone out of fashion (though there are many teachers and parents who still believe they should have the right to inflict physical pain on children) in favour of more subtle means of control.
We know from prisons that no matter how severely punished and confined some people are, they still refuse to comply with the institution's expectations (Gilligan, 1996). They will be resolutely defiant as the only means available to them to retain some shred of self-respect.
When brute force doesn’t work or is thought to be too harsh, especially for controlling children, the best way to gain compliance is by persuading your subjects to think that they really want to comply, and that their lack of compliance is a problem of theirs, not of the institution’s. Under this method, teachers, when dealing with unruly students, are encouraged to say things like: “It looks like you have a problem. How could I help you solve it?” (Glasser, 1990, p. 138). Even humour may be used to lighten things up: “Said with a smile and an appropriate gesture, this may break the tension and ‘allow’ the student to sit down because he knows he has made his point” (Glasser, 1990, p. 139). It’s still control however you cut it. The use of the word “allow” is especially interesting since it suggests that the student is being allowed not to do what he wants but what the teacher wants.
Recently, a young teacher of seventh graders wrote to www.askme.com on the Internet for suggestions regarding classroom control. The reply, obviously from another more experienced teacher (LEA 2000)—and it won a five-star rating from other readers—offered an illuminating look at contemporary discipline. It is worth looking at these suggestions in some detail:
Be sure that you have your classes enter your room in an order, one-two at a time, and work for them to do AS SOON AS they enter.
Take roll, do other Teacher tasks as they begin. Do NOT let them interrupt you as you do this. THEY HAVE THEIR WORK TO DO!!!!!
If you have clusters of talkers, break those clusters up into singles. Cluster those students who can work together (DO NOT MAKE THIS ARRANGEMENT OBVIOUS) Just do it.
Set up your standards (No more than five; three is even better) WITH input from the students.
Their time is valuable. They need every second for their studies. Do not waste their time and DO NOT LET THEM WASTE IT.
Make notes as you circulate - a clipboard is invaluable. Make several classlists for each class. Enter small marks (Known to you) in columns as you circulate T-talking; NOT-Not on task; etc.
Talk individually with students regarding their transgressions of the classroom standards.
FOR THE CHRONIC DISBELIEVER: Ask the counselor's advice regarding this particular student. Call parents RIGHT AWAY when the transgressions start. Extinguish the transgressions as quickly as possible. I have always had excellent classroom control. I depend on the students to control themselves - and I and their parents help them do this.
An impressive set of directions—or tactics—for winning at the power struggle! Note the use of moralistic terms like “transgression” and “disbeliever”, not to mention the curious notion of “wasting” time, as though it is some kind of commodity that will now be measured out by the school; doing anything other than what you’re told is now a shameful profligacy.
Clearly, the teacher will need a set of tactics, some of which must not be evident to the students, in order to assert her authority. At one time, it was simply a matter of do-what-you’re-told-or suffer-a caning, but now subtler means are called for. It’s especially interesting to note “I depend on the students to control themselves—and I and the parents help them do this” [emphasis added]. This makes it seem as though the students really want to do what their told, they may just need help in order to do it. Providing help that hasn’t been asked for signifies the superiority of the helper and the weakness of the one being helped. The school has abandoned the authoritarian approach of brute force—who-cares-what-you-want—into a form of mind control that says, “We know what you really want and we’ll help you get it.” So control of behaviour becomes a problem that the student has; it’s a matter of adjustment, of accepting, not so much what you are constrained to do, but what’s been defined as good for you what’s been defined as what kind of person your are, or should be.
Shifting the “problem” onto the student is a not-so-subtle form of humiliation, implying that your problem is that you don’t like being a prisoner and don’t like having to perform tasks that bore you and have no relevance to you. And you don’t know what’s good for you or even what you want. Similar methods involve shaming an individual child for not wanting to be part of “our group.” Last resorts in dealing with the recalcitrant student may be to enlist the co-operation of the parents or of the school psychologist. If worse comes to worse, there are always drugs to bring the misfits into line.
Of course the good kids will receive appropriate rewards in the same way that the bad kids will be dealt with by psychology or parental intervention. Rewards, or positive reinforcements, are generally considered to be more desirable than punishments and criticisms. “Some believe it is inherently desirable to give rewards, that people ought to get something for what they do quite apart from the consequences this may bring” (Kohn, 1993, p. 19). Rewarding good behaviour seems so logical and benevolent.
Harry F. Harlow, the experimental psychologist whose work with monkeys during the 1940s and 50s is widely known, performed an experiment to see how a food reward would influence monkeys’ performance in a puzzle-solving test (Harlow, 1950). The monkeys were first given puzzle devices which involved a series of manipulations leading to the opening of a compartment. In the first part of the experiment, the monkeys were simply given the devices and their actions were carefully recorded. It was noted that the animals showed considerable curiosity over the puzzles, played with them until they could open the compartment, then repeated the operation numerous times, showing a lively interest in the process of manipulation. In the second part of the experiment, the monkeys were shown that a few raisins were stashed in the compartment and could be retrieved by again solving the puzzle and opening the box. The result was that the monkeys appeared to lose interest in the process of solving the puzzle. They now made many more errors and quickly lost interest. Often to the surprise of the researchers, countless other studies have shown that the promise of rewards tends to have an averse effect upon performance. Numerous studies of this nature are cited in Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards (1993), see especially pages 35-48.
What does the Harlow experiment suggest in the matter of using rewards—gold stars, praise, As and Bs—for enhancing performance? It suggests that the promise of a reward is no better than the threat of punishment when it comes to getting someone to do what you want them to do. In school, the praise and criticism handed out in the form of grades, good or bad, and privileges, granted or withheld, focuses attention on performance—“To offer a prize for doing a deed is tantamount to declaring that the deed is not worth doing for its own sake” (Neill, 1960, p. 162)—and offers the dubious motivation of knowing that you are either better or worse than your fellow students. Alfie Kohn (1993) puts it this way:
The truth is that the problem is not just punishments but also rewards, not bad grades but the emphasis on grading per se. Anything that gets children to think primarily about their performance will undermine their interest in learning, their desire to be challenged, and ultimately the extent of the achievement. Small wonder that rewards have precisely those effects. (p. 159)
A. S. Neill (1960) makes a similar statement with his usual forthright vigour:
Goodness that depends on fear of hell or fear of the policeman or fear of punishment is not goodness at all—it is simply cowardice. Goodness that depends on hope for reward or hope of praise or hope of heaven depends on bribery. (p. 129)
At the same time, a teacher faced with a classroom full of rambunctious 12- and 13-year-olds, whom he or she is expected to enlighten on subjects chosen by the school (“READING AND MATH??? Wow. That is a lot” (LEA, 2000)), has little choice but to exercise some kind of control. It is, as they say, the nature of the beast. It is the unavoidable agenda set by the school, and we well know that the teachers themselves are judged by the quietness and obedience of their pupils. This is not going to change without radical restructuring. Again, as Alfie Kohn (1993) says, “What rewards and punishments do produce is temporary compliance. They buy us obedience” (p. 161).
Grades and Tests
Grades and report cards are another way of administering rewards and punishments, approval and disapproval. Because of the way curriculum is structured, it is believed that step by step accomplishments along the way can be measured by carefully designed tests. The school presents the child with a bit of knowledge or a piece of some skill, drills him or her on it, and then checks up by testing to see whether or not they’ve “got it”. If they haven’t got it, then they obviously weren’t paying attention or didn’t try hard enough. They will either have to be re-taught or given some kind of inferior grade or mark. “You are not as good as the kids who got As and Bs.” If a child continues to perform poorly, he or she may be further humiliated by being given “special help” or remedial treatment. If that doesn’t work, it may be found—again by testing—that they really are inferior (low IQ), and need to be segregated into special kinds of classes or schools.
The testing upon which school grades are largely based is, at best, a measure of short-term memory. Hence, the tradition of cramming for exams. A person’s level of interest in a given matter cannot be measured by a test. Tests are administered under artificial and controlled conditions that have little to do with the real life experiences that add up to learning. Tests are only important in the context of school.
That kids understand not only the importance but also the irrelevance of tests is illustrated by several examples from my own experience. When a new topic was introduced into any class lesson, the first question asked was, “Will this be on the exam?” In other words, is this worth paying attention to or not. Then, when the test was given, they all wanted to know, “What’s it out of?” Or, how many points would there be in the scoring of the test, so how much of it did you have to get right in order to pass. Someone once said that school is the only place where questions are asked, the answers to which are already known. That’s what a test is for. It’s to show how much you remember of what you were told. And that is no measure of intelligence or of education.
Another problem with tests is that they have, for the most part, only right or wrong answers. There is no room for being vaguely right (Papert, 1993, p. 172). Value is placed on “knowing the answer”, while the value of tinkering with things to figure out what works is discounted. The latter is the process of bricolage that has been discussed earlier. Bricolage does not lend itself to standardised testing; it’s too messy and unpredictable. It’s too human.
Schools have by and large adopted test scores as the measure of their success in doing what they do. Departments of Education point to test results to prove how successfully they have been spending taxpayers’ money. In some school districts, test results are even made available to parents so they can see how well their kids are doing and apply pressure if needed. Test scores can even effect the real estate market (Sternberg, 1994, p. 43) because parents will choose to purchase houses in school districts that offer the most promising results for their children, and this generates higher prices for real estate.
The scramble for high marks in school has led to the creation of a profitable industry for private tutoring institutions which guarantee, for a price, improvement in your child’s in-school performance. Parents not only fear that their children may not make it into university when the time comes but also that the public schools are failing to provide a rigorous enough program to ensure the necessary grade point averages. In Canada, between 10% to 20% of 13- to 16-year-olds are receiving out-of-school tutoring (Fine, 2000). Other, non-standard, private schools offer forms of teaching, usually involving drill and repetition, which are said to assure entrance into universities of choice (Kolbert, 2000). Because the universities have come to rely heavily, even entirely, upon grade point averages, parents are fearful that their youngsters will not make the grade and hence be doomed to lives of indolence and penury. After all, it is only those who are successful in the scientific and technical professions who are seen to have status and property in contemporary society. Woe to those who place little value upon schooling!
Parents who believe that school is the only road to their children’s success in later life have reason to be worried. The public schools, in an admirable effort to provide success and avoid failure for all, have eased up on demands of the curriculum. Considering that a good portion of the students in public schools see little reason to be there and have little commitment to their studies, the “dumbing down” of the content of school studies is pretty well a necessity. In their book The Bell Curve, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray (1994) note that:
The dumbing down of textbooks permeated the textbook market, as publishers and authors strove to satisfy school boards, which routinely applied “readability” formulas to the books they were considering. Thomas Stowell (1992) has described a typical example of this process, in which the words spectacle and admired were deleted from a textbook because they were deemed too difficult for high school students. Stowell compares such timidity to the McGuffey’s Readers, the staple text of nineteenth-century children in one-room schoolhouses, pointing out that the Third Reader used words such as species¸ dialogue, heath, and benighted—intended for 8-year-olds. (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994, pp. 430-431)
In recent years adult illiteracy has been brought to the public attention by various articles and programs. One would expect, or at least hope, that universal schooling would provide for a steady increase in literacy. According to a recent report, this does not seem to be the case:
There are indications, however, that North American children may be less literate now than they were 55 years ago. In 1945, a U.S. study indicated the average written vocabulary of children aged six to 14 was 25,000 words. A recent study by CornellUniversity professor Cole Gilbert found the average six- to 14-year-old now has a written vocabulary of 10,000 words. When you consider that in the same period, tens of thousands of words from astronaut to e-mail have been added to the English language, that is troubling news. (Bramham, 2000)
Herrnstein & Murray (1994) also cite a Wall Street Journal (1992) article which quotes an examination from a New Jersey high school in 1885. These are a few of the questions:
‘Find the product of 3 ÷ 4x + 5x2 - 63 and 4 – 5x – 6x2.
Write a sentence containing a noun used as an attribute, a verb in the perfect tense potential mood, and a proper adjective.’
‘Name three events of 1777. Which was the most important and why?’
The test was not for high school graduation (which would be impressive enough) but for admission to Jersey CityHigh School. Fifteen-year-olds were supposed to know the answers to these questions. (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994, p. 419)
As the schools have tried to become more humane due to the influence of such people as John Dewey, they have also tried to create a curriculum that would be age appropriate and interesting, even non-threatening, to students. This would have been an admirable goal had the schools and parents been willing to give up the notion of prescribed curriculum altogether and to allow children to follow their own interests. On the opposite side, there is little doubt that most children can be made to learn things like “Find the product of 3 ÷ 4x + 5x2 - 63 and 4 – 5x – 6x2” given sufficient drill and threatened with sufficient punishment. But this is hardly the point, even though parents who espouse the so-called traditional schools might like at least part of this action.
Curriculum
Who decided that learning could be divided up into subjects and that subjects could be divided up into levels and that levels could be divided up into steps that were to be taken one by one in sequence? Why, in fourth grade for example, is it “expected that students will locate information using headings, glossaries, and tables of contents?” (British Columbia Ministry of Education, 1997). Or that students in the first grade are expected to “demonstrate a willingness to participate actively in oral activities” (British Columbia Ministry of Education, 1998). Or that fifth graders should “use an outline to organize information into a coherent presentation” (British Columbia Ministry of Education, 1997). And what if they don’t?
John Gatto (1992) concludes, “School’s fragmentation of learning into subjects and periods implies that nothing is really important enough to stay with until your curiosity is satisfied.”
James Herndon (1971) asks:
Who decided that Egypt is just right for seventh graders? Who decided that DNA must be something which all kids answer questions about? Who decided that California Indians must enter the world of fourth grade kids, or that South America must be “learned” by sixth graders? (pp. 101-102)
While he concludes that “Nobody, it seems, made any of these decisions” (p. 102), it’s likely that, whoever decided, the system was based upon the inexorable logic of the 19th century factory. The factory, and the school as we know it, were inventions of the Industrial Revolution. The work of factories was divided into steps, and each step was performed by one group of people (Speed, 1975). It was not necessary that any given step had to make sense or bear any meaning to the people who were performing it, for according to the plan, the product, a bolt of cloth or a carload of coal, would emerge at the end of the process. “Put in raw material at one end, treat it all in exactly the same way, and there will emerge at the other end a predictable and standardized product” (Smith, 1998).
Another model for breaking work into pieces is constructing a building. Buildings are made step by step, starting from the bottom and working up, in carefully designed increments. Each step along the way is best completed before the next one begins. You can’t put on the siding until the framing is done, and you can’t paint the wall until the plaster is dry. All very logical and all clearly reducible into steps and stages.
An even more striking model, described by Frank Smith (1998, pp. 46-47) is the nineteenth century Prussian Army. According to Smith, unlike other armies of the time, the Prussian Army was highly organised and drilled in meticulous detail.
They selected recruits of the same age, height, weight, and experience, put them into separate barracks, subjected them to remorseless discipline and drill, threw out the ones who couldn’t make it, and forged a totally standardized, predictable, and reliable product … .(p. 47)
So the factory model, egg crate school was born. The smooth functioning of the factory model school requires all of the features of discipline and curriculum of which we have been speaking—all of the features which are in direct opposition to what we know about how learning takes place and how intelligence is developed.
The application of these methods to schooling was in contrast to what had been taking place in the disorganised one-room school, in which older children were frequently called upon to teach younger ones, and all levels of age, ability, and accomplishment were thrown together. In that kind of school, and prior to legislated compulsory attendance, failure was unknown.
As governments took more control of schools and required uniformity and predictability, children were segregated, mostly by age, seated in tidy rows, and expected to perform the same tasks at the same time with little or no interaction with one another. Though the modern school still segregates, it has for the most part done away with the rows of desks bolted to the floor and the silent lines of children marching from class to class. Contrary to modern trends, proponents of the so-called “traditional” schools, longed for by many parents, see a return to an older style of school and of teaching as a way to re-establish the values they would like to see upheld by society. These schools are supposed to emphasise drill, conformity, and obedience.
But many elements of the factory school are prevalent in even the most progressive of public schools. Punctuality is a required virtue, children are segregated into grades, the day is divided into periods, the teacher still pretty well calls the shots, and the curriculum is divided into incremental steps. All of this says that learning shall take place according to a pre-set plan devised by experts, success will be rewarded and non-conformity will be punished, and that success in school is predicated upon a student’s willingness to conform to that plan. In fact, conforming is not enough, it is necessary to believe that the school’s plan is the only one that can assure success in later life, and woe to the disbeliever. The Catholic church decrees that there is no salvation outside the church; public school proclaims that there is no education outside of school. As John Holt (1970) put it: “But now all roads lead through school. To fail there is to fail everywhere. What they write about you there, often in secret, follows you for life. There is no escape from it and virtually no appeal” (p. 57). Failure in school is failure in life.
Conclusion
While these comments may seem unduly harsh or cynical, the important point is that school controls, and it controls by threat, shame and humiliation, no matter how pleasantly these may be delivered. School assaults the child’s self-esteem by saying in effect, “We know what’s good for you—you don’t.” And it will elicit obedience to its dicta by whatever means are currently fashionable. The fact that there are many teachers who do their best to make school interesting and pleasant for their pupils does not alter the fact that once you’re in school, you have given up control of your own life—even to the extent of being able to discover on your own what kind of person you are.
The school will even make every effort to intrude upon your personal life by assigning homework. New technologies are making it increasingly difficult for children to escape the control of the school. No longer will the excuse “a dog ate it” even be worth considering when, “Teachers need only a few minutes per day to dictate assignments into an answering machine. Parents can call at their convenience and retrieve the daily assignments, thus becoming informed of what their children are doing in school” (Bransford et al, 2000, p. 224). Whether you comply and do as you’re told or rebel and raise hell, you are doing it because of school and for the school’s ultimate benefit, not yours.
The Swiss psychiatrist Alice Miller has written about what she calls “poisonous pedagogy” or any method, program, school, or system which imposes one person’s will upon another. Anytime we do this, any time we try to “help” someone who has not asked for help, anytime we think we know better what’s good for another person, we are inviting participation in a battle, however subtle, for power, individuality, and control. Alice Miller (1980/1983) has summed it up thus:
You know, now I wonder if what is called pedagogy may not be simply a question of power, and if we shouldn’t be speaking and writing much more about hidden power struggles instead of racking our brains about finding better methods of child-rearing. (p. 277)