The Schools our Children Deserve
Alfie Kohn Houghton Mifflin 1999
Take Kids Seriously
Pg. 131 If there is a unifying theme in all of these prescriptions and a common characteristic of the very best classrooms, it is that kids are being taken seriously. The educators (and parents) who do the most for children are those who honor, and work hard to find out, what children already know. They start where the student is and work from there. They try to figure out what students need and where their interests lie. Superb teachers strive constantly to imagine how things look from the child’s point of view, what lies behind his questions and mistakes. All of this represents a decisive repudiation of the Old School, where, as Dewey observed, “the center of gravity is outside the child. It is in the teacher, the textbook, anywhere and everywhere you please except in the immediate instincts and activities of the child himself.”
Pg. 132 As Dewey put it, “Nothing is more absurd than to suppose that there is no middle term between leaving a child to his own unguided fancies and likes, or controlling his activities by a formal succession of dictated directions.” Piaget’s followers are equally critical of the Romantic sensibility attributed to them by traditionalists. Indeed, that sensibility seems to show up only in conservative polemics, where it is kept alive as a way of making the Old School look attractive by contrast.
This strategy has succeeded in causing some schools and scholars to back away from a more humanistic approach to education, and that’s a shame, because such an approach not only is justified in shifting the center of gravity back to the student but is based on a solid foundation of psychological theory and research. Much of that research turns on an observation offered earlier: humans by nature are meaning-makers. I’ve tried to avoid educational jargon and technical terms in this book, but I have felt compelled to use – and now, to return to – the word “constructivism” because it refers to a school of thought that is central to creating optimal conditions for our children’s learning.
Constructivism
Constructivists argue that it is simply inaccurate to say – indeed, dangerous to assume – that people absorb information passively. We’re not blank slates or empty containers. “The pupil’s mind,” wrote Alfred North Whitehead, “is not a box to be ruthlessly packed with alien ideas.” Indeed, he suggested, an entire educational philosophy can be summed up in four words: “The students are alive.” More precisely, they – and we – come into every situation already holding a set of beliefs abut the way the world works. Constructivism is derived from the recognition that knowledge is constructed rather than absorbed: we form beliefs, build theories, make order. We act on the environment rather than just responding to it – and we do it naturally and continually. It’s part of who we are.
Pg. 133 Thus the source of intellectual growth is conflict: conflict between an old belief and a new experience, conflict between two beliefs that prove to be mutually exclusive, or conflict between your belief and mine. We make sense of things and then remake sense of things, and we do it from infancy to death.
Permit me to emphasis again: this theory I’ve been describing is no fad. Not only educational theorists but “virtually all” cognitive researchers today “[sub]scribe to this constructive view of learning and knowledge.”
Progressive Teachers and Schools
What can teachers do that’s consistent with what is known about how students learn? Not surprisingly, they can begin by curbing the practices based on a transmission view of learning, such as simply telling students what is true or how to do things. However, as I’ve been at pains to point out, this doesn’t mean they must sit back and wait for ideas to pop into the kids’ heads. Progressive teachers are at least as active as their traditional colleagues, but they are active in different, more challenging ways. Indeed, it takes a lot more skill to help children think for themselves than it does just to give them information.
Pg. 136 An Oregon teacher in her fifties once summarized her professional growth to me in one short sentence: “The longer I teach, the less I talk.”
Pg. 139 It’s as hard to be a real person in front of kids as it is to treat kids like people. That’s why so many teachers, for example, wouldn’t dream of letting children call them by their first names.
Pg. 140 Similarly, I’ve noticed from visiting countless classrooms that the teacher who excel in all the other respects described in this chapter also tend to be the ones who talk with students in an open way, not all that differently from the way they talk to adults. The atmosphere in their classrooms is loose, relaxed, friendly, often jocular. “The more informal the learning environment, the greater the teacher’s access to the learners’ representations, understandings, and misunderstandings.”
. . . . small classes – and large blocks of time in them – are vital so teachers can learn what students know. No wonder the best teaching is so rare at the high school level: how easy can it be for a teacher who has 120, 150, or even more students over the course of a day – and who has them for only forty-five or fifty minutes at a time – to do what I’m describing here?
Bad teaching doesn’t just happen. It’s practically demanded by systemic factors.
Pg. 183 Efforts to bring about progressive school reform have sometimes floundered because well-meaning administrators or consultants (1) tried to do too much too quickly, without providing adequate training and support for teachers, (2) didn’t pay enough attention to the kinds of structural changes that support better teaching, such as reducing the size of classes and the extent of departmentalization in schools, (3) tried to impose change on teachers rather than making them active partners in the process, or (4) merely provided teachers with information (about how and why to adopt new instructional techniques) rather than helping them experience a new way of teaching and thereby make sense of a radically different understanding of learning.
Pg. 184 “Why is it, in spite of the fact that teaching by pouring in, learning by a passive absorption, are universally condemned, that they are still so entrenched in practice? That education is not an affair of “telling” and being told, but an active and constructive process, is a principle almost as generally violated in practice as conceded in theory. Is not this deplorable situation due to the fact that the doctrine is itself merely told? It is preached; it is lectured; it is written about. But its enactment into practice requires that the school environment be equipped with agencies for doing.” John Dewey 1916 [future link to importance of arts in education quotes]
Pg. 185 For teachers in particular, as Dewey pointed out, “progressive education is more difficult to carry on than . . . the traditional system.” It requires a set of skills related to teaching itself, such as asking open-ended question and creating an environment where students can make their own sense of things. It also requires a thorough grasp of the subject matter being taught. If the goal is just to transmit a body of knowledge, it may be sufficient to stay one chapter ahead of the students. But that won’t do if the goal is for students to really understand ideas. Any kind of teaching that’s more rigorous and demand of students is likely to be so for teachers too. In math, for instance, the skillful facilitation of children’s understanding requires a strong grasp of quantitative principles.
“One reason drill and memorization have dominated mathematics teaching may be that teachers’ knowledge of the subject [is] too weak for anything deeper” – perhaps because of their own traditional training.”
When you watch students slogging through textbooks, memorizing lists, being lectured at, working on isolated skills, and preparing for standardized tests, you begin to realize that nothing bears a greater responsibility for undermining excellence in American education than the success of the back-to-basics movement and the continued dominance of traditional instruction.
Control Dilemma
Pg. 186 Even those educators who have the cognitive skills . . . . may find it difficult to give up some control, to live with uncertainty – not only to move beyond the comforting, predictable search for the “right answer” but to let students play an active role in the quest for meaning that replaces it. That takes guts as well as talent. It flies in the face of the way most teachers are still being trained – namely, to stay in control of the classroom at all times. Ultimately, says one high school educator, “teachers have to let students take ownership.” That isn’t just a matter of adjusting one’s instructional technique. “Teachers’ attitudes about students have to change,” too – with the help of parents.
Let’s Not Rock the Boat
Pg. 187 The introduction of a nontraditional science program led one tenth-grader to exclaim “We see what this is about now. You are trying to get us to think and learn for ourselves.” Exactly, replied the teacher, relieved and grateful that the message was getting through. “Well,” said the student, “we don’t want to do that.”
A number of educators, meanwhile, have described the games that are being played in the traditional classroom, the way students and teachers seem to wink at each other as if to say “We both know how this works: you don’t have to do much of anything if I don’t. So let’s not rock the boat.” In a way, it’s reminiscent of how children sometimes respond to traditional discipline. However unpleasant punishment (including physical punishment) may be, it’s also relatively undemanding: one need only grit one’s teeth until it’s over – as opposed to taking responsibility for one’s actions, reflecting on how they have affected other people and what else one might have done.
“A passion for learning . . . . isn’t something you have to inspire [kids] with; it’s something you have to keep from extinguishing,” as Deborah Meier has remarked.