I am becoming more and more uncomfortable with the whole concept of “school” and “education”, seeing both as formalized and standardized bureaucratic mechanisms that awkwardly attempt to both facilitate and direct human development. I think that is at the heart of the issue and my discomfort, because facilitating people and directing people are two very different approaches to human social interaction, often incompatible with each other.

A recent piece I read in Education Week, “Superintendents Push Dramatic Changes for Conn. Schools”, highlighted my discomfort with this discordant duality. From the intro to the piece…

The Connecticut classroom of the future may not be limited by a traditional school year, the four walls of a classroom, or even the standard progression of grades, based on a proposed package of unusually bold changes that are being advanced by the state’s school superintendents. Instead, the current system would be replaced by a “learner-centered” education program that would begin at age 3; offer parents a menu of options, including charter schools and magnet schools; and provide assessments when an individual child is ready to be tested, rather than having all children tested in a class at the same time.

As a broken-record advocate for “many educational paths” this all sounds very good to me. Build an entire infrastructure of different and differentiated learning venues, which in some cases is a school, in other cases perhaps a library, in other cases a “real world” venue like a work place or community center, and even a kids’ home. Leverage the Internet as well to link all these together, students with teachers (only when teachers are needed by the learners) or create new virtual venues beyond all the brick and mortar ones.

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This is quite a long piece (over 7000 words) weaving a narrative thread through my young life that I think illustrates a key principle of unschooling. That principle is that the natural desire and capability of a young human being to learn and the opportunity to take a “deep dive” into the subject of interest results in a profound degree of broad learning and development beyond the perhaps narrow area of exploration. Note that though the subject of my youthful interest was the “art of war”, the impact and benefit of my learning pursuing that interest was much broader than the narrow and arguably non-progressive subject matter. Also note that very little of this tale involves anything that I learned in school (beyond learning how to read and basic math).

As far as I understand it, the premise of sending kids to school is that they will be given an opportunity to learn things, and in particular, the things that the larger community feels are important for kids to learn to become successful and productive adults. For many if not most people, behind that premise is the assumption that left to their own devices, kids would not learn these important things, and instead will just “get into trouble”, “stare at the TV”, “read comic books”, “play games”, etc.

Certainly in a lot of conventional thinking, kids “free play”, motivated by their own personal developmental needs (whatever they might be) is considered secondary to the formal learning that society generally compels them to undertake. And for the older youth, “playing games” is considered a waste of time better spent learning or doing something more “important”.

That assumption seems to persist in our culture despite what an observant parent or person who has studied child development will tell you, that young people are naturally motivated to learn and develop, interested in the world around them, and if not constantly redirected or otherwise kept away from those interests, continue to explore and learn voraciously. I suspect that many of us adults see our own lives as all about doing what we have to do rather than what we want to do, so whether we are projecting or applying some sort of convoluted logic, we figure that kids are not really interested in doing what they are supposed to be doing (that is learning) either.

As a parent of two now young adult kids, I certainly saw how much they were “learning machines” who loved to dive into things of interest to them. One of the main reasons their mom and I let them leave school and “unschool” during what would conventionally be their high school years, was because school (and particularly all the homework after school) had managed to turn most learning into a chore for them, rather than a passion.

Sure I had gone to school when I was a kid, including to a conventional high school as an older youth. But somehow back then in the 1960s and early 1970s it wasn’t so psychically draining. Maybe because there wasn’t nearly as much homework and there was none of the current standardized test obsession. Though in a mostly white middle-class university town there was the assumption that most kids would be going to college, I don’t recall my parents or my friends’ parents constantly trying to stage-manage our young lives toward that end. Also at my high school I don’t think they even took attendance, because I selectively would leave school during the day and miss one or more classes, but none of the school staff or my mom ever said anything about it.

For me as a kid, my life revolved around the things I did outside of school, and without the pursuit of those things that really interested me, my young life would have been mostly an exercise in compliance at school and perhaps boredom (or worse) at home. One of those compelling self-directed interests that weaves itself through my childhood, older youth and young adulthood was my fascination with the history and the “art” of war.

And that… is my extensive unschooling narrative that makes up the bulk of this piece.

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Because it may well have happened a long time ago before you and I were born! From my reading of history it began in the early decades of the 20th century and was solidified by the development of the “education industrial complex” in the 1960s. Now in the early 21st century we see this corporate public education system finally showing signs of collapsing due to the weight of its bureaucracy, corruption, regimentation, and entrenched interests. And as a result we see all the business foundations desperately trying to revive and sustain it, and the many billion dollar business market it represents.

What happened in the early 20th century I lay out in my previous piece, “Education and the Cult of Efficiency”, based on a book by the same name written by Raymond Callahan and published in 1962. In his book Callahan documents how an educational “crisis” was fabricated at the turn of the 20th century for a range of reasons, starting with selling newspapers and magazines. Says Callahan…

The material achievements of industrial capitalism in the late nineteenth century were responsible for two developments which were to have a great affect on American society and education after 1900. One of these was the rise of business and industry to a position of prestige and influence, and America’s subsequent saturation with business-industrial values and practices. The other was the reform movement identified historically with Theodore Roosevelt and spearheaded by the muckraking journalists. (pg 1)

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I was pleased to see this piece in the Huffington Post a while back and finally gotten around to writing about it. As the author Lisa Nielsen says in her opening…

It’s rare for education reformers, policymakers, and funders to listen to those at the heart of education reform work: The students.

Seems to me that in most education policy statements and discussions in the media, the students are not seen so much as the clients or key stakeholders in the education process, but more like the product. I think it is important that we resist the conventional wisdom of looking at education as an institution manufacturing an educated citizenry as its “product”, whose stakeholders are not our young people, but only political and economic leaders and parents (as necessary votes to keep at least those political leaders in office).

FYI, Nielson sets the context for this list of items from K-12 students…

In fact Ann Curry, who hosted Education Nation’s first student panel, admitted folks at NBC were a little nervous about putting kids on stage. In their “Voices of a Nation” discussion, young people provided insight into their own experiences with education and what they think needs to be done to ensure that every student receives a world-class education. After the discussion Curry knew these students didn’t disappoint. She told viewers, “Students wanted to say something that made a difference to you (adults) and they did. Now adults need to listen.”

So here are each of the sentiments shared by the students as listed by Nielsen in her piece. For whatever reason, the statements are very brief and lack any detail of meaning, but given that, they still communicate some important messages that I think we adults that attempt to play a role in young people’s development need to wrestle with… (more…)

So why is it that doctors play a key role in running the institutions (hospitals) where they practice their profession and defining what constitutes quality practice, but teachers generally don’t? Aren’t these both considered “professions”, and as such should be given comparable stature? No hospital would think of having a governance structure where doctor’s don’t play a key role, particularly in the delivery of medical care. Shouldn’t teachers play a comparably critical role in running their schools and defining what constitutes educational practice?

Perhaps as a parent, and not a professional educator, I am not in the ideal position to pose these questions, but I don’t find the teachers I know posing them. The teachers I know personally generally define themselves as “labor”, union organized labor in most cases, in opposition to the people that run their schools, who are considered the “management”. Even the teachers whose words I see on Daily KOS or elsewhere in the media championing their profession rarely call for that profession to play the key roll governing their schools and the education process generally.

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When most people think of a “school”, particularly a school for young people, the image of kids sitting behind desks with a teacher at the front leading the class (as the “sage on the stage” as they say) generally comes to mind. Somewhere down the hall from this and other classrooms is an “office” including administrative staff and particularly the school principal who runs the school, including giving marching orders to and evaluating the teachers, and dealing with student disciplinary issues that are referred to them by the teachers.

The “governance model” is presumed to be completely hierarchical. Students at the bottom of the hierarchy get their lectures, assignments, evaluation, administrative and disciplinary rules from their teacher(s). Teachers are supervised and evaluated by their school principal. The principal acts as a conduit for the educational mandates on curriculum and pedagogy from the district, which is basically implementing the curricular and pedagogical standards set by the real school decision-makers, the state legislature, through the auspices of the state board of education and other related state bodies.

What is important for people to know is that there are at least two other very different models for schools existing in the real world, that are beyond the conventional imagining of most people. The better known (and more numerous) of these other models is what are often referred to as “holistic schools”, which look more at educating the “whole person” beyond compartmentalized academic subjects, and are generally based on the ideas of a visionary educator like Maria Montessori, Rudolph Steiner, or John Dewey. Though elements of their educational philosophies have worked their way into conventional U.S. schools, it is an interesting discussion for another time why most conventional schools in the U.S. do not fully embrace the educational visions of these great thinkers.

The road least taken (and perhaps qualifying as the “Rodney Dangerfield” of school models), are schools that include students in the schools’ governance and allow those students to completely direct their own learning. Such schools are often referred to as “democratic-free” schools, and though rare, can be found in many parts of the U.S. and in countries around the world. Though highly unorthodox they are anecdotally judged effective by most who have studied them, but the very nature of an educational content and process that can be different for every student and is not externally dictated, makes them difficult if not impossible to measure by any standard school evaluation metrics.

Here is my best shot at an overview of this democratic-free school model.

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I love the narratives of human history, especially when compelling threads can be drawn out (hopefully real and not just imagined) connecting events, choices and consequences over the scope of centuries. I am particularly drawn to contemplating how a particular event, and how people chose to react to that event, can impact events centuries later. For example, the cynical machismo of Western leaders (along with their countries’ intellectuals and artists) driving choices that lead to World War I. One could argue that this power struggle at the expense of cultural suicide destroyed the “immune system” of Western culture and led to the “cancers” that followed: economic depression; the growth of totalitarian states driven by fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism; and the wars (hot and cold) and other holocausts that they perpetrated on their fellow humans throughout the century.

In a less apocalyptic vein, I have been contemplating these past few days another historical narrative thread that links Napoleon Bonaparte and particularly his victory over the Prussians at the 1806 battle of Jena with the development of the public school system in America and the continuing educational controversies, dysfunction and dilemma that we have in that area today. I was inspired by a comment made by a reader of my blog piece “Schooled to Accept Economic Inequity”, regarding my reference to the Prussian influence in the development of the U.S. public school system.

I first read about that Prussian connection in John Taylor Gatto‘s book, The Underground History of American Education, a book which has shaken and reshaped my whole conception of education as much as Riane Eisler‘s book, The Chalice and the Blade, has reshaped my understanding of human history and the challenge of that history today. It is Gatto’s insight which I then try to put into Eisler’s framework of a continuing cultural thread of patriarchal top-down control.

From Chapter Seven of Gatto’s book, focused on the U.S. education system’s Prussian connection…

The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon’s amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done. (Gatto page 131)

You may think it a stretch, but I think it is at least a good story with truth to it. A narrative thread of how the patriarchal control paradigm perpetuates itself within a larger context of human civilization’s transition from hierarchies of power and control towards a circle of equals. So here goes… (more…)

This is the title of a book by Raymond Callahan first published in 1962, but brought to my attention in the suggested reading list in radical educator John Taylor Gatto‘s book, The Underground History of American Education. Callahan’s book focuses on the history of the public education system in the U.S. in the first three decades of the 20th century, and his premise that, the system was transformed into a business-industrial model which one could argue continues to this day. Perhaps we have seen a resurgence of that business-industrial model in recent decades with curriculum standardization, scripted teaching methodologies, high-stakes testing, the growth of and “education-industrial complex” and efforts to exert more external top-down control over teachers.

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With all due respect to my comrades plthomasEdD and catwho (who also contribute to the Daily KOS “Education Alternatives” group), and the thoughtful pieces they have recently posted on the group’s list, I wish to put forward a very different thought on this issue of what are appropriate and inappropriate venues for trying to fix our society’s problems. In particular, I want to challenge their assumption that we can not “fix” schools until we first address the underlying issues of poverty and inequity that make our society dysfunctional.

Blogger catwho sums up this position I am taking issue with in their piece, “The Myth of Failing Schools”…

You cannot fix the schools until you fix the students. You cannot fix the students until you fix their parents. You cannot fix their parents until you fix society. How do you fix a broken society?

PlthomasEdD said in theirs, “Don’t Ask Schools to Fix Society’s Problems”…

First, we must acknowledge, as Traub did in 2000, “The idea that school, by itself, cannot cure poverty is hardly astonishing, but it is amazing how much of our political discourse is implicitly predicated on the notion that it can”

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I got a nice acknowledgement on my most recent blog piece from Robert Skeels in his piece for the blog “Schools Matter”. Robert liked my insight into the teaching profession being disrespected and never fully treated as a real “profession” (like doctors and lawyers) because it has historically been and continues to be a “pink-collar ghetto” dominated by women. He took great issue though with my position in support of charter schools as the “only game in town” for communities to make any sort of real educational changes in their neighborhoods. Robert wrote…

I find your stance on charters somewhat lacking nuance and I think we need to find another mechanism than charters to move in a direction of democratizing schools.

In saying that “we need to find another mechanism”, I think Robert is acknowledging that he is not aware of any other mechanisms right now for moving “in a direction of democratizing schools”.

So I put it out to folks who read my blog (including the Daily KOS version), what other way is there out there for parents to transform their neighborhood public schools so those schools offer different educational paths to suit a diverse democratic community? What other way is there to see a new neighborhood school created that meets their need say for a different sort of learning venue that might be more suited to some of the kids in their neighborhood that do not do well in a highly academic, highly instructional (rather than say experiential) conventional public school?

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