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.

I certainly will bear witness to the idea that learning can happen outside the classroom. I know from my own experience growing up, plus watching my kids do the same, that most of my and my kids most profound learning happened outside of a school classroom and not under the direction of a teacher. That said, I know other kids who really resonate with that whole academic classroom milieu. For those kids that seek it out, great. But why as kids do we have to build our “school days” anchored around sitting on our butts in a generally information-impoverished classroom environment being spoon-fed instruction by a gatekeeper adult, unless that instruction is what we have individually decided we are seeking?

Finally the idea that mastering a particular body of knowledge should be done on the learner’s timetable rather than the state’s. And the related problem of all kids the same age having to learn the same thing at the same time. To me this is a remnant of a 19th century industrial paradigm that facilitated building a million Model T Fords, but not help kids transition to adulthood in the 21st century.

So starting to imagine all these wonderful transformational possibilities, I continue to read about what is motivating the council of the state’s school district superintendents to move forward with this plan…

“We’ve seen a not-so-subtle transformation in the education world from providing students with an opportunity to learn, to an obligation to be sure that every kid does learn,” said Frank H. Sippy, the superintendent of the 4,500-student Pomperaug Regional School District 15 and a member of the 16-person panel that developed the education transformation proposal. “We superintendents recognized we’re pretty well equipped to do the former, but not terribly equipped to do the latter.”

My heart sinks reading this. I am enough of a believer in people having the liberty to direct their own lives to feel that the state has no business going beyond giving every young person the opportunity to learn. You start forcing people to learn and there is a profound paradigm shift which corrodes the natural internally motivated urge every human being has to learn things.

Once it becomes the state’s obligation to direct rather than facilitate each person’s development, then it justifies the use of standardization and centralization to force schools to teach and students to learn. The justified use of force leads to all sorts of coercion and corruption that we see in all this teaching to the test and the inevitable cheating that is the collateral damage of that.

Then I read…

In 2008, at an annual policy conference that brought together 123 of the state’s 165 superintendents, the leaders talked about how the mission of education had shifted to the expectation that all students should be achieving at high levels.

I thought we progressive people had figured out that the goal is to offer people equal opportunity, not try to engineer equal results. That is the critique of progressivism that conservatives are always putting forward.

So here again is my ambivalence. Somehow whenever learning and human development are framed in terms of “education” and particularly in that learning venue we call “school”, it becomes a bureaucratic exercise where we are trying to do things to people rather than do things for people. The state of Connecticut is talking the language of learner-centered facilitation but accepting the obligation to have kids achieve concrete learning objectives rather than just ensure that they have the opportunity to do so. It seems like such a slippery slope!

So sill with some hope but also a great deal of concern I will continue to watch the unfolding events in Connecticut. Hoping that the benefits of making formal education more differentiated and more on the learner’s timetable will outweigh the costs of the state taking ever greater responsibility for the outcomes and direction of individual human development.

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.

Inspired by My Dad’s Experience in World War II

My dad had fought in World War II, and in the early 1960s when I was beginning to become aware of the larger world, that huge cataclysm was still burned deep into his consciousness and that of his peers. It was also still a significant part of U.S. popular culture. There were shows on prime time TV like “Combat”, war movies like “The Longest Day”, and comic books like “Sergent Rock” that I saw or read which gave me a perhaps simplistic, glamorized or nostalgic view of how it was.

So it was only a matter of time before I learned about the war and my dad’s participation in it. When asked, he was happy to tell me stories of several dramatic exploits. He had been a lieutenant in general Patton’s army, and the commanding officer of a squad of motorized light artillery that saw action in the last months of the war in the allies assault on Germany. I recall my fascination with his stories (and the other popular culture narratives) rather than any sense of fear or horror at the carnage. The grimmest of those stories was when he ordered his sergeant to shoot an unarmed prisoner, a German SS officer that refused to get on a truck with the other captured enemy soldiers. I was riveted by this story and the moral ambiguities of killing a man in cold blood, but in a circumstance where “martial law” was appropriately in force.

Like other compelling stories I was exposed to, these World War II narratives became starting points for my imagination play in the basement or the backyard of our house. Not sure whether I asked for them or my parents bought me them unsolicited, but I had a big set of three inch German and Allied plastic soldiers along with tanks, bunkers and other such stuff. I used them along with the “terrain” of our basement to recreate the dramatic battles of the War as I imagined them, based on listening to my Dad and voracious consumption of all manners of media on the subject, including history books about the real war that were part of my dad’s library, or borrowed from my school or the public library.

Discovering the American Civil War

My fascination with these massive armed conflicts broadened when I discovered the American Civil War, an event a full century previous but still very much burned into U.S. cultural mythology. Not sure what turned me on to this conflict, but I guess it was only a matter of time given my perusing of the military history sections of various libraries looking at their WWII books. Soon somehow I had two-inch plastic Civil War soldiers to play with as well and set up various blue vs gray scenarios in my basement, based on reading library books and discovering the heroically framed characters and narratives of Generals Grant, Sherman and Lee.

The American Civil War was still so much a part of popular culture that I remember being able to go to the neighborhood newsstand (a dark and wonderful place in my hometown of Ann Arbor called the “Blue Front”) and buy “Civil War Cards”, which were sold in batches of five or ten like baseball cards (including the bubble gum in every pack). They would have a picture on one side of a general, a battle, some logistical or other detail, or some particular dramatic or lurid moment, and then on the reverse side a paragraph or two describing the content of the picture.

I bought my share of cards that my allowance and other earned monies would finance, but I also set about making my own set of Civil War cards as well. I took a stack of three-by-five index cards from my dad’s stash and drew pictures in pencil on one side (including my stick-figure people) and then my own sentence or two of explanation written on the back. I can recall one of mine with the headline “Crushed!” on one side and my picture of a stick-figure soldier trapped under a broken-down cannon.

Combining History, Fantasy & Imagination in My Play

Of course my play in the basement and backyard was never a slavish reenactment of the stories I read or watched in the movies or on TV, but started from those narratives and then often involved some creative hybridization. The hybridized play scenario I remember the most was inspired at age seven by seeing the 1954 movie version of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the 1961 movie based on Verne’s sequel Mysterious Island and the 1960 movie of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. The latter involved 19th century archaeologists and adventurers discovering a secret plateau in South America populated by otherwise extinct dinosaurs. Verne’s two stories were driven by the submarine Nautilus and its obsessively brilliant Captain Nemo leading his own deranged personal crusade against war by trying to sink all the world’s munitions carrying ships (circa Civil War era).

Pulling elements from all three stories, and leveraging my Civil War soldiers, plastic dinosaurs, Lincoln Logs, and a “submarine” I built out of a cardboard shoe box, I created my own play scenario in our basement of Union soldiers discovering “Jinx Island” (actually the area of the basement around my dad’s desk) which was rich with metals and other minerals needed for the war effort. The problem was that the island was infested with dinosaurs and Nemo’s submarine patrolled the ocean waters between the soldiers’ home base and the island’s “mine” (the underside of my dad’s desk) they had built to extract its precious raw material. I recall spending hundreds of hours in our basement playing out any number of story scenarios in my imaginary construct.

An Emerging Interest in Strategy & Logistics

As a seven and eight year old becoming further aware of the larger world and its history, what really attracted me to these historic conflicts and the related real and imagined stories around them was the massive logistics. The moving of large armies by land and sea and the grand strategies of great generals that leveraged those logistics to the highest degree possible. I read about General Sherman’s “march to the sea” in the Civil War and how it was part of an overarching strategy concocted by Sherman and General Grant to carve up the South and destroy its ability to properly supply its armies in the field. I read about Napoleon, and millennia earlier Hannibal, marching armies across the Alps. (I recall drawn pictures in a library book of Carthaginian soldiers leading one of their war elephants up a precarious mountain pass.)

Discovering Avalon Hill’s “D-Day” & Historic Military Simulations

By age nine, my growing obsession with experiencing and re-imagining the history and logistics of military conflicts could not be satisfied by playing with toy figures in my basement. Lucky for me, by age nine (having the confidence of my parents to let me ride my bike into town to the several local toy stores) I discovered (at one of those stores) a board game called “D-Day”.

Sitting in the aisle of the store with the not yet purchased game in my lap (but enough accumulated allowance money in my pocket to purchase it) I read the rest of the words on the box cover…

Now you change World War II History in this realistic Tournament GAME by Avalon Hill

Whoa! Yes! This looked like it could be the next developmental step in pursuing my obsession.

I opened the (luckily not shrink-wrapped) box. My recollection (which may not be exactly right) was that on the top of the stack of stuff inside was a sheet of shiny cardboard with an array of half-inch squares, roughly half of them a pale blue and the rest a pale pink, with printed black numbers, letters and symbols on them. With my rudimentary knowledge of military formation indicators from reading all those military history books, I figured out that each square represented a military formation, divisions in this case. There were over a hundred on the sheet and they were cut in such a way to facilitate being easily punched out and separated.

Below that in the box were various charts on card stock and an entire booklet of rules. I was of course familiar with game rules, usually on the inside box cover or an a single sheet… but this was a booklet with pages of rules with sections titled things like “Initial Set-up”, “Movement”, “Combat” and “Victory Conditions”, with little embedded diagrams to illustrate things referenced in the section text. I read enough to understand that the game was a strategic level simulation of the Allies invasion of France in 1944.

I got more excited with each piece of box content that I carefully exhumed and examined (being well aware that I was in the store and hadn’t bought the thing yet), but the clincher was the four attached sections of heavy fiberboard in the bottom of the box that I tentatively unfolded to reveal a shiny multi-color map with a grid of hexagons imposed over it. Unfolded, it was a colorful maybe eighteen by twenty-four inch map displaying the real terrain (including coastline, cities, fortresses, rivers and mountains) of France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and southern Germany.

With great excitement and anticipation I quickly refolded the map and reclosed the box with all its contents, took it to the rather school-teacher looking older woman at the store cashier’s counter and bought the amazing thing and road it home in the pressure basket over the back wheel of my bike. I think it was probably a Saturday with nothing in particular I had to do, so when I got home I took the game down in my basement (my main imagination venue), opened it up, took all the components out and spent the next couple hours examining them all, reading and trying to figure out the rules. The more than a hundred half-inch cardboard game “counters” were printed with the designations and quantified movement and combat “factors” of historical German and Allied division-level military formations, including the American 3rd Armor division that my Dad was part of.

The Zen of Playing a Historic Simulation Strategy Game

Playing “D-Day” from beginning to end took anywhere from two to five hours. With the need to master the eight pages of rules before playing, I only occasionally had a friend willing to play the other side. So I quickly became acquainted with “solitaire” play, where I played both sides. Playing solitaire presented some interesting philosophical dilemmas for my ten-year-old mind. From what I had read about the histories of wars, one general often was successful because they disguised their intentions and then caught their counterpart by surprise. Given that I was playing both sides, there was no way I could do that. And given that at any point that I might be biased to one side or the other, how could I best manage that bias so the game played out evenly. I had to develop the discipline of taking the point of view of one side, making the best possible move all its units and resolving any battles initiated by that movement, then switching to the other side, its point of view, and then making the best possible moves for that side.

I can remember spending the most time and getting perhaps the most enjoyment out of setting up all the German units in initial positions to best defend against the Allied invasion. After playing the game a number of times (mostly solitaire) and seeing the consequences of various initial set ups I became fascinated with the question of whether there was in fact one best way to deploy all the German forces initially on the map. So I would set them up and then stare at the setup for an hour or more making slight adjustments in the positions of key units, counting out how many hexes they were from key positions they might need to reach (and thus calculating how many turns it would take) depending on which of six or seven choices of beachheads available to them the Allies chose to invade.

Wrestling With the Systems Behind the Simulation

I was not only intrigued by the historical content of the “D-Day” game, but also the components of the systems, rules and algorithms built into the game to simulate the aspects of conflict, including how a degree of uncertainty in the results of a particular military action was built into the simulation. By age 10 I was developing the capability to do some pretty abstract thinking, and this subject matter engaged that developing part of my mind.

I was intrigued by the use of very simple arithmetic abstractions to simulate key aspects of the real world situation. In “D-Day” the four key elements were the units, “zones of control”, the terrain, and the combat results table (CRT).

The capabilities of a particular unit (represented by a half-inch square of cardboard representing a real-life military formation or 15,000 to 20,000 men) was boiled down to three numbers printed on the unit’s counter – an attack factor, a defense factor, and a movement factor. The first two were the relative strength that the unit contributed to any battle it was involved in. The latter was the number of hexes of clear terrain the unit could move into in one turn. So for example, all Allied units and German tank and “mechanized” units had a movement factor of four, based on the fact that all the soldiers in these units had trucks and other vehicles for transport. German infantry and coastal defense units had a movement factor of three or two because their soldiers moved about on foot.

Every unit exerted “control” of the six hexes surrounding it. If an enemy unit entered one of those hexes it had to stop and move no further during that turn, and must attack all enemy units it was adjacent to, after all other units on its side were moved for that turn.

The effects of terrain (in “D-Day” particularly coasts, mountains, cities, fortresses and rivers) were simplified to an impact on movement (of mountains) and a multiplier applied to the combat factor of a unit based on the terrain. Though all other hexes cost one movement point to enter, and you could continue moving through additional hexes if you had unspent points in the unit’s movement factor, once you moved a unit into a mountain hex it could move no further in that turn. As to terrain’s impact on combat, the defense factor of a unit located on a city or mountain hex was doubled, and was tripled on a fortress hex. Coastlines and rivers had a similar impact on combat, but one based on the relative positions of the attacking and defending units. Units attacking across a river or a coastline had their attack factor halved.

Suffice to say that for this ten-year-old it was a revelation how, these fairly simplistic movement, terrain and combat rules, applied in their various permutations and combinations, added significantly to the strategic complexity of the game. The geography of the country being fought over, including the locations of mountain ranges, rivers and cities became particularly significant, in the overall strategy of attack and defense.

In the many hours I spent playing “D-Day” I became intimately familiar with the geography of France: its extended and not completely defensible coastline, the coastal cities and fortresses that made defending a particular section of that coastline so much easier, its difficult to traverse mountains in the south and northwest, and its numerous rivers in the northwest providing great defensive positions because they flowed mostly east to west rather than north to south. Eight years later, when I was backpacking through France, believe me, I always new where I was!

Finally, the success or failure of the Allied or German side in the game revolved around the results of the movements of each side and the subsequent battles that resulted from those movements. For the simulation to be roughly realistic, it had to give an advantage to the stronger force in a battle (as modified by the effects of terrain aiding the defense) but build in a certain amount of realistic uncertainty in the outcome. This was accomplished by a “CRT” (Combat Results Table) to be used to determine the results of a battle by adding up the combat factors of the attacker (as modified by terrain) versus those of the defender (as modified by terrain), expressing them as a ratio (1 to 2, 1 to 1, 2 to 1, etc.) and then cross-referencing that ratio with the result of a roll of a six-sided die to add that degree of realistic uncertainty to the outcome. Outcomes could involve one side or the other being forced to retreat, or part or all of the attacking of defending force being destroyed.

Having the best chance for success in a battle involved carefully planning out your moves so that units with a sufficient sum of combat factors attacked to get the best possible ratio relative to the sum of the combat factors of the units attacked. This could be maddening, because attacking units with a sum of 29 attack factors attacking defending units with 10 defense factors was still a 2 to 1 and not quite a 3 to 1 ratio, with the latter being a much better attack in favor of the attacker. You can imagine that I got really good at doing simple sums, multiplications and divisions quickly in my head.

By age 11 or so I was beginning to wrestle with these arcane thoughts about simulation systems design, a tussle that would continue and grow over the next decade of my youth and on into my adulthood.

Subsequent Games and Increasing Complexity

After my “deep dive” into the “D-Day” game, I was definitely hooked on these historical military simulations, and the Avalon Hill company produced a bunch of them that I subsequently bought or received as birthday or Christmas presents. Games for various theaters of World War II, including “Stalingrad” (the German invasion of Russia), “Afrika Corps” (the North African campaign), “Anzio” (the Allied invasion of Italy), plus games like “War in the Pacific” and “Midway” focused on the naval battles that dominated the war between the Americans and the Japanese. Other games for earlier wars, “Guns of August” and “Jutland” (World War I), “Gettysburg” (U.S. Civil War), “Waterloo” (Napoleonic Wars), and “1776” (U.S. Revolutionary War). All of these games involved a similar size of fiber board map, number of die cut cardboard units, plus similar rules for movement and combat (though somewhat different in the naval games), and similar combat results tables.

I continued to spend many hours pondering and playing these games, again occasionally with a friend but mostly on my own. The games motivated me to read more about the history of and surrounding these military simulations. Learning about the generals, their actual strategies, the historical results, and the larger context of the wars (to understand the implications if any of these conflicts had been won by the other side), made the pondering and playing that much more involving.

Given my penchant to create my own play scenarios, I even made a couple attempts at age 11 or 12 to make my own games, not based on anything historical but imagined battles. I drew my own gridded out maps with terrain and creating my sheets of units on paper with pen, pasting them on cardboard and then cutting them out. I used the same movement, combat rules and CRT as the Avalon Hill games. None were great successes, but I tried.

Exploring the array of Avalon Hill games kept me occupied and gave me a very needed diversion from three years of junior high school, where puberty, extreme shyness, mostly uninteresting curriculum, plus the aftermath of my parent’s divorce made for very difficult and trying times. Setting up a board game in my room, pondering and playing it, took me away from the real world into replaying and re-visioning the dramatic narratives of history.

When I reached my later teenage years the opportunity presented itself to take even a deeper dive. In high school, I found an entire circle of friends who were devoted to playing these military simulations, and through them became aware of other games by other game companies representing historical military simulations of larger scope and complexity. This was a group of guys that were nerds and geeks before there were personal computers and all the associated gaming and online culture to be the object of our passion. While other high school kids might have gone out on dates and such, this group would gather together weekend nights to play war simulations, either large complicated board games (behemoth successors to the Avalon Hill games I played when I was younger) or Napoleonic miniatures.

Dipping a Toe into Miniatures

The miniatures was an entire game-nerd sub-culture all its own, and a “crafty” and artistic one to boot. The games were played on a “board” that was anywhere from half to the full size of a ping-pong table. (In fact a lot of these kids lived in family homes with basement rec rooms or garages with ping-pong tables.) The “units” were miniature figures (generally one-inch or two-inch depending on the scale) made out of metal or plastic and mounted on square or rectangular stands, generally two, three, four, six or eight figures to a stand. The four main time-periods or genres for these miniature figures I was aware of were ancients (Greek, Roman, etc), Napoleonic, World War II and fantasy (with the whole Dungeons & Dragons spectrum of wizards, elves, dwarfs, haflings, men, orcs, trolls, etc, along with various sorts of mythical dragons and other critters). My experience was mostly with the Napoleonic variety.

There was a significant amount of money, research, craftsmanship and artistry involved, because you generally had to buy the unpainted figures, research the appropriate military garb for the period, then paint each figure to the appropriate specs and finally mount them to wood (usually balsa) stands. Building just one battalion of Napoleonic miniatures (maybe 20 to 30 figures either standing or mounted on horses), particularly with all the detailed painting work, could take 10 to 20 hours. And these were the days before the Internet, so the detailed pictures of uniforms, armor and other military garb needed to be looked up in books either purchased from arcane bookstores or found in the recesses of academic libraries.

I myself researched and built only one battalion of French regular Napoleonic infantry, a huge enough project from me who was not particularly craft-wise or artistically skilled with the paint brush. My friend Ned, who was a very skilled artist, built maybe a dozen units, including infantry, cavalry and cannons. He taught me how to use the metal seal from a wine bottle, cut down to a rectangle and bent to look like it was flapping in the breeze. Lucky for me, the French tricolor flag, simply strips of blue, red then white was relatively easy for me to paint.

Comparable to miniature train hobbyists, you would create battle terrain using cut pieces of foam to create hills and ridges then covered with a large sheet of green of brown felt to be the grassy or dirty ground. Rivers, streams and roads could be added by cutting strips of blue, brown or gray felt. Towns, farms, castles, fortifications or other structures could be bought or built in scale. And finally trees and bushes could be added for woods or just to place about to give that added touch. When all the figures were placed on such a decked out battlefield, it was quite a sight to see, and we spent many of a late-night hour in someone’s often poorly lit basement just admiring the tableau.

The mechanics of the miniatures games were pretty basic, you played with rulers and dice, plus charts consulted for movement ability, weapons fire, melee (hand to hand) combat and morale. In terms of simulation theory, I found the concept of morale interesting. Each unit had a morale “factor”, a number that represented the relative ability of the unit to continue fighting and not “break” (retreat or just completely disintegrate and flee the battlefield). A unit’s morale at any point was a combination of that intrinsic factor plus the condition of and around the unit. If a unit had sustained heavy losses, that decreased its morale. If an infantry unit was attacked by cavalry (and the infantry unit was not in the appropriate formation) that did so as well. Finally if another unit from the same side in the battle next to or even in line of sight of the unit in question “broke”, that would impact the morale as well. Finally to all these weighted factors the amount of a die or dice role would be added, to add that additional amount of randomness and uncertainty.

Though I probably spent at least one hundred hours playing miniatures, ultimately they did not engage me as much as some of the board games. As I mentioned earlier, my passion was for grand strategy and logistics, not the tactics and excitement of battle.

Wrestling with the Ethical Ambiguities

I can not share all this with you without expressing the ethical ambiguity, and my later discomfort at sharing my “hobby” with people I knew outside the military-simulation-game-nerd world. The kind of person I consider myself and try to present to the world is a peace-loving person who abhors war and violence. I was worried I would be perceived as a closet warmonger by my friends and acquaintances outside this small circle. That maybe at some level I was captivated by this, admittedly abstract, warmongering and megalomania.

But there I was (and there I am still at times today when I play one of these games solitaire) orchestrating an assault that, if it had been real, would kill or maim thousands of soldiers, taking the strategic point of view of the Nazi war machine or defending the Confederacy and its privilege to retain slavery. But despite these ambiguities, I continue to be gripped by the strategy and logistics of these huge human conflicts.

Diving Deeper into the Really Big Games

The sophistication and complexity of the games Avalon Hill and other games produced over the next ten years increased as my appetite for these simulations continued and my growing logistical skill and sophistication was challenged by that increasing complexity. It came to a peak in my late teens and early twenties, when my circle of fellow game nerds turned me on to a new generation of really big, really sophisticated military simulations. While other teens pursued romantic relationships and/or their sexual libidos, I lusted after these huge games with their sophisticated systems and high level of historical detail.

These mega games generally included…

1. Twenty to forty pages of rules, plus additional historic commentary, essays on game strategy, and extensive game scenario introductions

2. Hundreds or even thousands of cardboard counters representing units

3. Game boards that needed a ping-pong or other large table to lay them out on

4. Numerous charts and tables for combat, supply and other logistical considerations where numerical values and ratios were cross-referenced with a die roll (sometimes even two ten-sided dice instead of the classic single six-sided one) to add some realistic uncertainty to the results

5. Sophisticated game systems that took into account things like: separate yet integrated air, sea and land operations; supply; weather; limitations on command and control; politics and diplomacy; industrial development; technological development; and dynamics of strategic initiative flowing back and forth between the sides; partisans; and varying levels and conditions of victory that in some scenarios could allow both sides to “win” or “lose” a single playing of the game.

6. Set up time, before you even played the first “turn”, that might take an entire evening.

7. Play time for one complete game that could be one hundred hours or more (played realistically on successive days or weekends, though we rarely actually “finished” any of these big games, just played them until there was a consensus of boredom and wish to move on to something else).

8. When not played solitaire, the possibility for more than one player on each side for a distribution of command authority and the resulting need for collaboration.

During my teenage and young adulthood I probably spent over a thousand hours pouring over the maps, units, rules, charts and playing these sorts of big games, throwing myself whole-heartedly into their complexities and levels of historical detail and accuracy. Games such as…

1. “Drang Nach Osten” (In English “penetrating the East”) – A strategic level simulation of the German invasion of the Soviet Union from 1941 thru 1945.

2. “La Bataille de la Moscova” (The Battle of Moscow) – The 1812 battle of Borodino with Napoleon’s Grand Armee fighting the Russians at the gates of Moscow, with hundreds of units representing infantry regiments, cavalry squadrons and artillery batteries on a board the size of half a ping-pong table. It was one of a series of grand-tactical battle games, but on this big scale with complex rules and systems.

3. “Empires at Arms” – A strategic level simulation of the entirety of the Napoleonic wars, encompassing all of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Atlantic ocean.

4. “The World in Flames” – Perhaps the largest, most complicated and most extensive game I have ever encountered, a strategic level simulation of the entirety of World War II, playable with the extended editions from 1936 thru 1945 and beyond if necessary. The various maps, diplomatic matrix, and production “spiral” needed nearly 40 square feet of table space to deploy and represented nearly the entire Earth’s land masses and oceans. Literally thousands of units represented: all the historical division and core-level land units of over 30 participating countries; hundreds of actual ships (one counter for each, including aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, commerce raiders, and classes of submarines); and air squadrons of every type of fighter, tactical and strategic bomber, carrier and other naval aircraft, and air transports. One “turn” represented two months of game time and could take maybe ten hours to play and involved any number of separate “phases” until the turn finally ended.

So rather than having a girlfriend and going out on dates or to parties, I gained an intimate knowledge of all the capital ships in the Japanese navy of World War II, and particularly the varying capability of each of the Japanese carriers, the heart of their fleet. I had an in depth knowledge of the geography between the Confederate capital of Richmond Virginia and the Union capital of Washington D.C., including the strategic significance of the Shenandoah Valley and the wooded area they called “The Wilderness”. Every detail fired my imagination and I would often have more fun obsessing with pondering the map and setting up the game pieces in the absolute best initial positions (shades of “D-Day”) than actually playing the game.

Creating Our Own Big Games

My game-nerd friends and I had a creative side which we expressed by creating, or at least trying to create, some of these big sort of games of our own. We were inspired (or maybe better to say “driven”) to increase the scope, because the larger it got the more we felt like we were capturing the grandiosity of these huge conflicts.

To this end we focused in on the Avalon Hill game “Panzer Blitz”, which simulated tactical combat between German and Russian armies during World War II. Each game set came with several hundred units representing platoons of infantry, tanks and artillery, enough to form perhaps a full battalion of troops on each side. The game came with the requisite rules and charts, but also a set of three 9 by 24 inch “modular” maps that included terrain in such a way that they could be rearranged side by side or end to end with the roads and rivers connecting.

We quickly realized that we could actually combine multiple game sets to make for bigger battles. We even figured out how to photocopy and build additional copies of the modular game boards so we could create huge game maps that again filled a ping-pong table or the floor of my friend’s family’s basement rec-room. We researched the organizational hierarchies of platoons, battalions, regiments and brigades within German and Russian infantry and armored formations and experimented with various scenarios of throwing these formations against each other across the simulated rolling hills of western Russia.

We even played a “blind” variation of the game, trying to create more of the realistic “fog of war”. We would have two identical boards, separated by some sort of a divider (perhaps a couch in our friends rec room) to hide each player’s “board” from the other. A third person “judge” would determine which of your opponents units (infantry, tanks, artillery, etc.) you could see on your board based on lines of sight given intervening woods and hills. It was generally more fun for the two players but perhaps a boring evening for the person who wore the “judge” hat.

The Unschooling Legacy of All this Time Spent

So first of all, my acknowledgement (and perhaps condolences) for those of you who have slogged your way through this very very long piece. It just felt like it took this extensive a narrative to capture the full scope – length, breadth and depth – of my “deep dive” over some 13 years into this obsession framed as a “hobby”. If nothing else it documents an important and unusual thread in my young life that is still today part of what make me uniquely me. If I happen to have grandkids someday, they can read about their crazy grandparent!

But I think it also provides an extensive personal account of thousands of hours of researching, collaborating, pondering, plotting, preparing, and “playing”. All completely motivated by my own quest to understand some of the arcane and detailed knowledge around just one of a myriad of human endeavors. Leveraging at least somewhat unfettered personal curiosity and passion for learning. I suspect I spent several thousand hours during my teenage years in this personal pursuit, and I suspect undergoing a lot more profound deep learning and personal development than that facilitated by my formal schooling.

Looking back in retrospect four decades later, we were driven by a fascination, even a “love” of the history, the strategy, the logistics as well as the systems we would need (in terms of maps, units, scenarios, charts and rules) to simulate military history, employ those strategies, and manipulate those logistics.

As I wrote at the top of this piece, in a lot of conventional thinking, kids “free play”, motivated by their own personal developmental needs, is considered secondary to the formal learning that society generally compels them to undertake. This conventional thinking extends to older youth, “playing games” instead of learning or doing something considered more “important”.

I certainly did not submerge my entire youth playing military simulation board games. There were other “unschool” type “deep dive” pursuits I was involved in extensively in my teen years, like spending several thousand hours in mounting and participating in theater productions or spending ten weeks backpacking through Western Europe.

I also spent the required 6000 or so hours in school during my adolescence, taking a not so deep dive into a range of subjects that the State of Michigan wanted me to learn. There were interesting classes, books and teachers along the way (experiences I learned from and was glad to have had), but like most bureaucratic exercises (not designed to be personalized), looking back I’d say that at least half those hours spent were not the best use of my time. In retrospect, it might have been better spent invested in one of my two “deep dives”, or maybe indulging in a third or forth in some other area.

Coming back to the present, one of the things that sets me apart in my “day job” from other people who wear the hat of business or systems analyst is my ability to synthesize, format and present information in a clear, concise and compelling format, using color and various formatting constructs creatively to aid in the easiest, most intuitive capture and presentation of the material to the reader or viewer. The thousands of hours I spent on my obsessive “hobby” acquainted me with over a hundred different games and their presentations of a range of systems and content information in artifacts such as maps, units, charts, rule manuals, diagrams and more. In playing the games, often many times, I had to really use all these artifacts and developed an extensive sense which worked better than others and why. This included the use of tables, charts, formatting of text components, and the use of color to add meaning rather than just make things more “colorful”.

I can only speculate on what other unique skills I could have brought to my adult life if I had had the opportunity to control more of my own time. Being able to more selectively choose the elements of the education the State of Michigan provided that were of most interest to me, so I could spend more of my time and psychic energies taking the “deep dives” that are so much about who I uniquely am today.

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)

Read Callahan’s book (or at least my piece summarizing it) for all the historical detail. But essentially, to blunt a media assault on education for its supposed business inefficiency, the U.S. public education system did its best to adopt business values that trumped academic values to better “prove” its efficient use of public funds to teach America’s youth a pragmatic curriculum that would make them more effective worker-bees for the burgeoning American industrial society. This also led to letting people trained in business management, rather than educators, take the reins of the U.S. public education system. Says Callahan…

The tragedy itself was fourfold: that educational questions were subordinated to business considerations; that administrators were produced who were not, in any true sense, educators; that a scientific label was put on some very unscientific and dubious methods and practices; and that an anti-intellectual climate, already prevalent, was strengthened. As the business-industrial values and procedures spread into the thinking and acting of educators, countless educational decisions were made on economic or on non-educational grounds. (pg 246)

Given that school teachers were mostly women, a male-centered society in the first half of the 20th century was comfortable accepting a cadre of male business executives increasingly assuming positions of control over these female teachers, and accepted those executives lack of credentials as educators. These were business trained administrators like Franklin Bobbitt, Leonard Ayres, and Elwood Cubberley, who according to Calahan…

Represented a new type of school administrator… They not only manifested a great interest in and admiration for businessmen and industrialists, but they resembled these men in their behavior. They were active in introducing and using business and industrial procedures and terminology in education, and they centered their attention almost exclusively upon the financial, organizational, and mechanical problems… And they in turn as leaders played a leading role in shaping the new “profession” of educational administration and, through it, the American schools. They did this through their speaking and writing and teaching, and they did it also by setting personal examples of the way to succeed in education. (pg 180)

With businessmen at the helm of the education system, is it any wonder that by mid century that system had transitioned into a huge market for business. Not coincidentally, this was the era when big corporate educational foundations still active today were launched, like the Carnegie Foundation (1905) and the Rockefeller Foundation (1913). Cubberley famously said…

Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specification for manufacturing come from the demands of the twentieth-century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils to the specification laid down. This demands good tools, specialized machinery, continuous measurement of production to see if it is according to specifications, the elimination of waste in manufacture, and a large variety in the output. (pg 152)

American business was more than happy to provide those “tools” to a growing public education “market” for textbooks, testing protocols, consulting and more. States assumed every increasing control of education and, particularly after the Sputnik crisis in 1957, ever increasing standardization and government funding. Paul Peterson, director of Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard Kennedy School, used the term “Education-Industrial Complex” (borrowed from President Eisenhower’s 1961 speech coining the term “military-industrial complex”) in a 2008 commentary Peterson wrote…

Around 1970 or thereabouts, the educational-industrial complex was hammered into place: School boards gave teachers collective bargaining rights. State governments assumed greater responsibility for financing the schools. The courts instructed schools on the civil liberties of their students. Regulations multiplied. America gained a federal Department of Education. And state and federal dollars poured into the system.

According to education blogger Dave Chandler from his piece “More of the Same: Obama and Schools”…

Our ‘education’ establishment is very much about preserving a multi-hundred-billion-dollar spending machine. Corporations make tremendous profit from selling high tech hardware and software to virtually every school district in the nation. Textbook companies and testing companies and education consulting companies and pension investment advising companies and public relations firms and bond dealers… Then there are the politicians who get campaign contributions from the above mentioned special interests and the ‘educrat’ administrators who make hundred thousand dollar a year salaries.

Other than defense, where else is their such a market with so few paying customers (the 50 states and now the federal government) with so much money to spend? Some of the biggest corporations that have made great profits tapping into this market throughout the century include Houghton Mifflin, McGraw-Hill, Pearson PLC, and Scholastic.

And is there any wonder that there is great corporate support for ever more standardized curriculum, pedagogical approaches and testing protocols, pushing us toward ever more educational decision-making authority being wielded by a small well-heeled group of governmental customers that sellers curry favor with. It all contributes to a stable and growing educational marketplace. Such a deal!

In the meantime there is increasing evidence that all the “reform” efforts of the past 30 years have done little or nothing to improve the educational outcomes for our kids. But the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations, more recently joined by the Gates Foundation and Broad Foundation, go on pushing for educational standardization.

Certainly if students and teachers were left to their own devices to develop curricula, the market monopoly of the big education corporations might be in jeopardy. One could make the argument that there is plenty of free curriculum on the Internet that teachers and/or students could access instead of purchasing and lugging around all those big heavy textbooks, constantly being updated to accommodate the perhaps planned obsolescence of the latest standards revision as part of our seemingly perpetual reform.

I must admit to not having done enough research on all this yet, but I’m really concerned that in all this focus on for-profit charter schools and private school vouchers we have missed the real “corporatization” of education. It may well be a horse that left the barn a long time ago!

So as we see from the Occupy movement, the answers to educational transformation probably will not come from either the feds or the states, both of which have for generations been in bed with the business community when it comes to public education. Change is going to have to come from the grassroots, challenging the longstanding centralization of educational power in state capitols plus the more recent efforts at increasing control by the federal Department of Education. And by challenging educational standardization of curriculum further enforced by high-stakes testing.

Given the huge power structure arrayed above us, perhaps the best we can do initially is to find every opportunity to just say “no”. Be, to paraphrase former U.S. President George Bush Sr, “a thousand points of no”! Some initial signs of these thousand points are certainly teachers fighting back against increasing state control of their profession and teachers and parents using chartering and other statutory mechanisms in some instances to “take over” their local school.

Also a bell-weather I hope is California governor Brown & state schools superintendent Torlakson who so far are saying no to continuing state participation in the federal No Child Left Behind program and its coercive Department of Education waivers that are being put forward by Arne Duncan as an alternative. Brown, who is a pragmatic administrator with a “small is beautiful” orientation, may well grasp that standardization and high-stakes testing (though adding profits to school vendors) are not adding more value to actual schools.

So my hope is that by saying no in enough contexts, and perhaps with the extra push of tight budgets, we can back away from our current business-friendly one-size-fits-all approach to giving our young people opportunities to learn. There are plenty of compelling alternative approaches to learning out their that remain sidelined to all but the most economically advantaged among us because they can’t pass muster against the current narrowly framed educational standards.

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…

1. I have to critically think in college, but your tests don’t teach me that.

K-12 school as a developmental venue seems to have completely lost its mojo, to the point where no one trusts that a gathering of young people and adults in a building with an array of resources is going to result in any learning without constant poking and prodding. Students need to be constantly tested and their scores need to be published so society can root out the “bad schools”.

Our kids know what this game is, and it certainly is not helping them go about their business of trying to figure out the knowledge and skills they need to be successful adults.

2. I can’t learn from you if you are not willing to connect with me.

There is an old Buddhist proverb that goes something like “when the student is ready the teacher will come”. Not heeding that wisdom, we adults seem to try to keep giving kids the answers before they ask the questions. Let’s change our approach to facilitating rather than directing our kids’ education by first asking them how we can be of assistance.

3. Teaching by the book is not teaching. It’s just talking.

Kids want to engage the world, which includes getting real adults’ opinions on that world and dialogging about it. More and more I’m thinking these big ubiquitous school text books are one of the greatest impediments to the real learning process, again attempting to answer the questions before they are asked.

4. Caring about each student is more important than teaching the class.

We human beings are social animals. We are best in relationship and community with each other, rather than participating in a one-way dissemination of information that is mostly out of any real context.

5. Every young person has a dream. Your job is to help bring us closer to our dreams.

This seems to me to be the strongest call out that our young people want to direct their own development while having us adults available to be of assistance and help facilitate, rather than direct that development.

6. Even if you don’t want to be a teacher, you can offer a student an apprenticeship.

Our young people want to be in real community with us adults and contribute to the real world with their efforts before they complete 13, 17 or 20 plus years of formal schooling. I can’t imagine most of them like being “institutionalized” and cloistered away in their schools from most of the real world.

7. Us youth love all the new technologies that come out. When you acknowledge this and use technology in your teaching it makes learning much more interesting.

Our kids are well aware that electronic communication technology is the water they will continue to swim in and are generally very comfortable when they swim in that water. If we adults have something we want to share with them, the perpetual question is do we make them come to us on our terms or do we go to them on theirs.

8. You should be trained not just in teaching but also in counseling.

This refers back to item 5 above. Get to know me and what I’m all about. Don’t just talk at me… help me!

9. Tell me something good that I’m doing so that I can keep growing in that.

As 30 year veteran public school teacher (and former NYC and NY state “teacher of the year”) John Taylor Gatto says…

I’ve come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us… I began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was possible that being in school itself was what was dumbing them down. Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children’s power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to *prevent* children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.

Gatto as always provocative!

10. Our teachers have too many students to enable them to connect with us in they way we need them to.

Ask Bill Gates… surveys show that class size has little impact on standardized test scores, which of course are the only metric that matters these days, so what are these kids whining about! (I’m getting snarky… forgive me!)

11. Bring the electives that we are actually interested in back to school. Things like drama, art, cooking, music.

How many of us adults looking back to school days had our most memorable experiences involved in these areas? Is it okay that they are being jettisoned in favor of ever more STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) classes in the face of declining school budgets? Since we make kids go to school, are we done with all carrots and will wield only sticks?

12. Education leaders, teachers, funders, and policy makers need to start listening to student voice in all areas including teacher evaluations.

A lot of the teachers I dialogue with freak out when they hear this. They argue that it is a conflict of interest for teachers to be evaluated by their students, that it will somehow warp the educational process. Teachers will be afraid to be “tough” because students won’t like it. Essentially… you can’t ask the inmates to run the asylum.

13. You need to use tools in the classroom that we use in the real world like Facebook, email, and other tools we use to connect and communicate.

This refers back to item 7. If I had to rely on my face to face conversations with my kids and not read and comment on their stuff on Facebook, I would certainly know a lot less about them than I do. And when I do get one of those wonderful opportunities to have “face time” with them, a little prior research on Facebook gives me insight on the comments to make or questions to ask to bring them out.

14. You need to love a student before you can teach a student.

This is that whole relational thread again. Human beings like to interact with other human beings that take the time to find out who they are and really care about that soul they have discovered. As long as we are going to continue to require adults to manage every aspect of a young person’s activities at school, they need to be adults that clearly demonstrate that they care about the kids they are shepherding.

15. We do tests to make teachers look good and the school look good, but we know they don’t help us to learn what’s important to us.

Circling back to item 1 here. The kids know what the game is. School is increasingly becoming an exercise in control rather than development.

I can imagine some of the teachers I know, upon reading the above, would share their sadness and frustration that though caring deeply about their students, standardization and teaching to the test has really diminished their craft. Other teachers and adults I know, would role there eyes and shake their heads and indicate that these kids are spoiled brats and don’t know what’s good for them, or what kind of harsh world is out there for them. They might go on to point out that teachers can’t be expected to compensate for neglectful parents who don’t have the time or inclination to really care about their kids.

Nielsen concludes by saying…

The students are ready to talk to us. How are we going to make time to listen and incorporate their voices into the policies and decisions that affect them?

Hers is a question of the governance model. I continue to pound the drums for transforming the hierarchical governance model used in almost all schools (democratic-free schools being a notable exception), and giving our young people a real voice as the key stakeholders in their own development.

Consider other professions such as medicine and law — while many doctors and attorneys are on staff, many others are in the more lucrative position of working for themselves, or being partners in the organization for which they work… Public school educators, without exception, are employees and have bosses. Teachers have principals, principals have directors, directors have superintendents, superintendents have school boards, and school boards have voters.

So the fact that teachers are not “partners”, not independent agents for hire, but instead are just worker-bees slotted at the bottom of a multi-level hierarchy contributes to their lack of status. Baeder rightly calls out the need to examine that supervisory hierarchy and advocates a move to a more egalitarian reframing of the profession of teaching as part of the solution…

But being a good employee does not mean simply doing what you’re told; it means being true to the mission of the organization, even when this requires speaking up and challenging organizational policies and “orders” in order to uphold the interests of students.

Having studied the history of America including the history of the public education system, I understand where this labor versus management, “us versus them” paradigm comes from. Unlike doctors, teachers generally did not have their own “practice”, and therefor did not contract with a school as a venue to engage in that practice, but were instead paid employees of the school or more likely the district that manages the school. Since public school teaching has historically been a female-dominated job, teachers have been framed more as low-level worker-bees, rather than high-powered (even stereotypically arrogant) professionals like doctors.

This paradigm was solidified by events in the early 20th century when the public education system was challenged as “inefficient” by the muckraking journalists, opportunistic politicians and business executives. To defend against these attacks, the public education system attempted to redefine itself in business rather than academic terms and made every attempt to demonstrate its “business efficiency”, including placing businessmen and business-oriented administrators, rather than teachers, in the positions of educational decision-making authority. This business (rather than academically) oriented management later became the adversaries across the bargaining table as teachers subsequently organized as unionized labor in the 1960s.

But this paradigm, with businessmen rather than teachers running our public schools, diminished rather than enhanced those schools as educational venues. I believe that the current degree of educational standardization and high stakes testing, as well as efforts to push these trends even further, are part of the legacy of that paradigm. Teachers have not been in a position to be seen as true “professionals” who legitimately should control education practice, as doctors continue to play a critical role governing medical practice. As such they and their organizations have been ineffective in countering this trend.

So now into the second decade of the 21st century, it is long past time in my opinion that teachers redefine their profession and assert their authority as legitimate governors of the educational process. Teachers should run their schools, define what constitutes a “good teacher” and a “good school”, govern and police their own profession including controlling the training and certification of new members of their profession. Anything less diminishes teachers as true professionals and diminishes the entire educational process. This at a time in human history when the complexity of our world begs the need for a new generation of highly talented, creative and skilled people to come into their own.

He held that the primary reason children did not learn in schools was fear: fear of getting the wrong answers, fear of being ridiculed by the teacher and classmates, fear of not being good enough. He maintained that this was made worse by children being forced to study things that they were not necessarily interested in.

Main Features: Curriculum, Pedagogy & Governance

I generally see a school model in terms of these three aspects, essentially what is being learned, how it is being learned, and who is making the decisions on what and how and managing the other aspects of the school as a functioning entity. Again in the conventional conception of a school, curriculum is predetermined by some “higher authority” and presented to the students by a teacher in a classroom through some form or another of instructional pedagogy. The school governance is assumed to be hierarchical like a factory where the principals are the “bosses”, the teachers are the “workers”, and the students are the “product”. The unionization of many teachers reinforces that assumption because it frames teachers as “labor” and the principals and administrators above them as “management”.

But in a typical democratic-free school the components of curriculum, pedagogy and governance are constituted quite differently, and are laid out below…

* The role of adult school staff: As long as the students do no harm to others, they can for the most part do whatever they want with their time in school. The adults that staff the school (which depending on the school may or may not be referred to as “teachers”) are there to facilitate keeping this basic freedom in place and are available to the students to assist as needed. Beyond this, the adult staff and the students are both involved in running the school to the extent of their ability and interest, usually by the forming of committees and bringing the most important decisions to a general school meeting.

* Access to school resources: Students are free to spend their time however they wish and access all the educational resources – library, lab, kitchen, nature, and adult staff – available in the school. Where improper use of certain equipment or venues can be dangerous (or cause damage), students generally have to pass some sort of minimum certification (agreed to by the community) for using that equipment or venue.

* De-emphasis of classes: The classroom is no longer seen as the focal point of the educational process. Depending on the school’s particular rules of engagement between the adult staff and the students, the adult staff may suggest or even initiate classes (which students may choose to attend); but at others, like Sudbury Valley, adult staff can only respond to a request by one or more students to start a class.


* Age mixing: Students are generally not separated into age-groups and allowed to mix freely, interacting with those younger and older than themselves. This is considered much more natural than the conventional school age segregation and promotes opportunities for informal mentoring between older and younger students providing real opportunities to learn from others and/or be of value to others, and all the opportunities that presents for enhancing ones own self-esteem and self-image.


* Governance & administration: The school is run by the democratic process with all the students and adult staff as participants with an equal voice and vote. There is generally a regular all-school meeting where the most important issues are addressed and resolved. Other administrative functions are handled by committees, again including both adults and students. A key aspect of the curriculum and pedagogy is learning democracy by experience, including experiencing the rights, responsibilities and consequences as fully functioning individuals within a community.

* Hiring and firing staff: In some democratic-free schools, like Sudbury Valley, the students and current staff hire and fire staff through the school meeting. In other schools this function is performed by the adult staff only.


* Order and discipline: School rules and regulations are generally made at the school meeting. All students and adult staff are equally and personally responsible for how they conduct themselves and interact with others in the school community. Every school has some sort of agreed process for students or staff to bring alleged rule infractions or other wrongs to the general meeting or some sort of “justice committee” for adjudication and assignment of any disciplinary action. These processes can even rise to the level of a school meeting deciding to expel a student. Again, a key aspect of the learning is participation in the maintenance of order and discipline and dispensing justice as part of a “jury of peers”.

* Evaluation: Students are generally not assessed, evaluated, graded or otherwise compared with one another, but of course can ask fellow students or staff for feedback on how they are doing. The assumption is the primacy of self-assessment for a self-directed learner.


* Graduation: There is generally some form of graduation and/or diploma available to students who wish for such, or feel the need for such a document for their further education or future job applications. The process differs from school to school but can involve presenting your “case” for graduation to the school meeting or to some sort of duly constituted “jury” for adjudication.

In summary, the curriculum is completely in the hands of the individual student. The pedagogy is one based on self-direction, plus the real experiences one has fully participating in all aspects of a democratically run community. The governance model is intended to mirror that of the adult society the students will be participating in.

Pros & Cons vs Other School Models

The arguments for democratic-free schools are based on their compatibility with a larger democratic society as well as the natural human learning process, and include…

* Allowing young people free rein to explore and focus on developing their unique talents to the fullest (particular if those talents fall outside the mandated academic learning in conventional schools) without the distraction of external learning mandates

* Providing young people the opportunity at a much earlier age to be fully functional people participating in a “real” community that includes both youth and adults

* Giving young people the opportunity to “learn by doing” to be active and effective citizens in a democratic country where active political participation is critical to the maintenance of a democracy, but has tended to wane in recent decades

* Enabling a community that includes some democratic-free schools to have a fuller spectrum of educational choices (along with conventional and “holistic” schools) to provide to families within that community

* Establishing an educational venue that, based on its use of democratic process, can continually adapt and evolve to meet the continuing needs of its students, their families and the larger community

* Creating an educational venue that is ethically consistent with acknowledging young people as full human beings with inherent worth and dignity comparable to adults, as those rights were laid out in the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

The arguments against democratic-free schools are generally based on the model’s incompatibility with educational standardization, plus conventional expectations and assumptions that most young people are not yet capable of directing important aspects of their own lives. Those arguments include…

* That young people do not inherently know what is best for them developmentally and need to be directed in their development by more mature members of their larger community

* That students will take their liberty as license to waste their time on activities like socializing or playing video games and not properly prepare themselves for college, jobs and other aspects of adult life

* That subjecting teachers and adult school staff to student feedback and participation in school governance dishonors and disrespects those adults as elders and proper authority figures

* That not subjecting young people to external and at times what may seem like arbitrary authority will not properly prepare them to abide by such authority in real work situations they are likely to encounter as adults

* That democratic-free schools cannot be judged on conventional school assessment metrics based on student knowledge of standardized curriculum and therefore cannot pass muster as U.S. public schools.

Advocacy & Support

Finally, if you are interested in learning more about democratic-free schools, including finding one locally to enroll a young person, or even starting one, I’m aware of at least two organizations in the U.S. that are focused on supporting this educational model…

* The Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO) was founded in 1989 by longtime democratic educator Jerry Mintz. AERO promotes democratic-free schools, and provides support and networking for people trying to start or manage such schools. It maintains a list of such schools in the United States and around the world. It offers consulting on democratic school process, school starter classes, and mounts a yearly national conference drawing democratic educators and advocates from around the country and from other countries as well. Attending one of their usually four-day conferences would be a great way to introduce yourself to this educational model and some of its key practitioners.

* The Institute for Democratic Education in America (IDEA) was founded in 2009 inspired by longtime Israeli democratic educator Yaacov Hecht. Its staff represents a younger generation of democratic education activists, and the organization provides an online community, consulting, advocacy, and a clearinghouse for innovative programs and resources that support democratic education. I had the privilege of participating in some of the early discussions and meetings with founder Dana Benis and other leaders of the organization that led up to its launch.

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…

Napoleon: The Quintessential Modern Man

Given my interest since my youth in military history and board game simulations of that history, I have always had great interest in the military campaigns of this noted historical figure. But it wasn’t until I read the two part biography of Napoleon by Robert Asprey, The Rise Of Napoleon Bonaparte and The Reign of Napoleon Bonaparte, that I got a more holistic view of this amazing person and the things he accomplished amidst his own ego, imperial power, and war that he was at the center of.

As good as he was as a military strategist and tactician, he was equally good or better as an administrator and nation builder. He developed the French civil code of law, now known as “The Napoleonic Code”, that, according to Wikipedia, “forbade privileges based on birth, allowed freedom of religion, and specified that government jobs go to the most qualified”. Unlike other conquering generals, he developed the infrastructure of and encouraged the national aspirations of the territories seized by his armies. There were some 360 political divisions in Central Europe when his armies first march from France. By the time his efforts were finally defeated and he was exiled, there were just 36, many asserting their nationalism for the first time.

Historian Jacques Barzun in his book From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, quotes French writer and social critic Stendhal, who had served in his army in the retreat from Russia, and wrote a biography of Napoleon in 1816, confessing in the introduction…

I feel a kind of religious sentiment as I dare to write the first sentence of a history of Napoleon. It deals with the greatest man since Caesar. His superiority lay entirely in his way of finding new ideas with incredible speed, of judging them with complete rationality, and of carrying them out with a willpower that never had an equal. (Barzun page 483)

Stendhal was a fellow Frenchman, but even Napoleon’s enemies, in the end, had great respect for him. Here’s Beethoven in 1820…

Napoleon understood the spirit of the times. As a German I have been his greatest enemy. But actual conditions have reconciled me to him. He understood art and science and despised ignorance. (Barzun page 483)

Barzun’s own thoughts on Napoleon’s legacy…

It was the will to take heroic risks that settled the place of Napoleon in the imagination of artists and peoples… It completed the extinction of feudal vestiges and his cavalier handling of kings and princes sustained his character of champion of the people. The world at large seems still to side with him, not Wellington, since everywhere Waterloo has become a synonym for defeat, not victory. (Barzun page 485)

All this background on Napoleon is important to this story, because he represented the spirit of the emerging nationalism of the 19th century. And though he crowned himself Emperor of France and wielded incredible powers, he was viewed by many, including some of the most intelligent thinkers in Europe at the time, as the model of the “enlightened despot” and state architect of a better society. This is particularly important, because Napoleon became the personification of the modern myth that best practices, implemented in an enlightened top-down control model, could change the face of human society for the better.

Case and point to buying into that mythology was Frederick Hegel and the emerging Prussian state.

Prussia & the Legacy of the 1806 Battle of Jena

A generation earlier a previous “enlightened despot”, Frederick the Great, had led a Prussian army and conquered and unified a number of the independent German states under the flag of a greater Prussia. After the French revolution deposed the French King and set up the first republic on the continent of Europe, that greater Prussia, led by Frederick’s successor, had joined with the other major monarchies of Europe to wage war on the new republican menace that France posed to the political status quo of Europe. In 1806 an army of the republic of France, led by Napoleon, marched into Prussia in a preemptive strike to protect the fledgling nation from one of its powerful monarchist adversaries.

The armies met outside the town of Jena in the German state of Saxony. The brilliant battlefield improvisations of Napoleon along with the superior training and morale of the French citizen soldiers contributed to a decisive defeat and destruction of Prussia’s highly trained professional mercenary army, and led to the subjugation of Prussia under French control for the next six years. It was not lost on the losers that their professional army was defeated by a force made up of inspired volunteers. The defeat shook the entire Prussian aristocracy and they committed themselves to literally retool their entire country to ensure that it would never happen again.

Two key players in that retooling effort were influential German philosopher Johann Fichte and his star protégé, the young Frederick Hegel. Here’s Gatto on Fichte’s framing of his country’s humiliating loss and what needed to be done in terms of lessons learned…

The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the “Addresses to the German Nation” by the philosopher Fichte – one of the influential documents of modern history leading directly to the first workable compulsion schools in the West… In no uncertain terms Fichte told Prussia the party was over. Children would have to be disciplined through a new form of universal conditioning. They could no longer be trusted to their parents. Fichte said that, “Education should provide the means to destroy free will”. Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of nationalism. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that “work makes free”, and working for the State, even laying down one’s life to its commands, was the greatest freedom of all. Here in the genius of semantic redefinition lay the power to cloud men’s minds, a power later packaged and sold by public relations pioneer Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee in the seedtime of American forced schooling… (Gatto page 131)

Think about even today, how many of us in 21st century America still make the argument, that when it comes to the education of our youth, parents and the young students themselves cannot be trusted to do the right thing guiding their own education for the betterment of our society.

According to Barzun, the young Hegel had an epiphany on the path forward for Prussia and Western culture generally, in the lessons learned from Napoleon and the debacle at Jena…

Periodically a mere man comes to look superhuman: he is able to change the face of society when all previous efforts have met unshakable resistance. Hegel was well placed for making this portrait from life: he was in a cellar in Jena while Napoleon was fighting to victory above ground… For the majority of thinkers and artists he [Napoleon] remained the genius in whom they recognized and celebrated not themselves as individuals, but their drive to achievement… Here was no ordinary conqueror for booty, but a man who fashioned a new Europe. The areas of influence, the efficiency of his administration, his code of laws, his active role in art and science, his lapidary judgments of men and society, even his ambition, ruthless but lofty, bespoke the heroic character.(Barzun page 484)

Prussia Develops the 19th Century’s State-of-the-Art Education System

Hegel became the leading figure of a budding young German intelligentsia who championed the role of the enlightened despot, intelligently and deftly directing the resources of a large modern state. According to Gatto and seconded by Barzun, that vision inspired the Prussian education revolution that followed, which included a complete transformation, instituting the first mandatory universal schooling in the Western world. It was a three-tiered system built around the privilege of the Prussian aristocracy but also leveraging the modern concept of meritocracy, at least to the degree that it supported the aristocratic hierarchy. The jewel in the crown was the new University of Berlin, perhaps the first “modern” university in the world.

The top tier of their equivalent of the modern “K-12” system (remember… the Germans invented the “K” part) were private schools reserved for the children of the aristocracy, Prussia’s “one percent”…

At the top, one-half of 1 percent of the students attended Akadamiesschulen, where, as future policy makers, they learned to think strategically, contextually, in wholes; they learned complex processes, and useful knowledge, studied history, wrote copiously, argued often, read deeply, and mastered tasks of command. (Gatto page 137)

The remaining two tiers were government run, and all about ranking and sorting the rest of Prussia’s youth so they could best play the needed roles in the nation’s apparatus. Tier two was for the “best of the rest”…

The next level, Realsschulen, was intended mostly as a manufactory for the professional proletariat of engineers, architects, doctors, lawyers, career civil servants, and such other assistants as policy thinkers at times would require. From 5 to 7.5 percent of all students attended these “real schools”, learning in a superficial fashion how to think in context, but mostly learning how to manage materials, men, and situations – to be problem solvers. This group would also staff the various policing functions of the state, bringing order to the domain. (Gatto page 137)

I keep thinking of that great Russian word, “apparatchik”, for people who hold key positions withing the bureaucratic or political “apparatus” that runs an organization or country.

And last (and least in terms of position in the societal hierarchy)…

A group of between 92 and 94 percent of the population attended “people’s schools” [Volksschulen] where they learned obedience, cooperation and correct attitudes, along with rudiments of literacy and official state myths of history. (Gatto page 137)

In Gatto’s provocative summary, these Prussian educational visionaries…

Held a clear idea of what centralized schooling should deliver: 1) Obedient soldiers to the army; 2) Obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms; 3) Well-subordinated civil servants, trained in their function; 4) Well-subordinated clerks for industry; 5) Citizens who thought alike on most issues; 6) National uniformity in thought, word and deed. (Gatto page 131)

The most academically inclined of the privileged aristocrats and the best of the commoners attended the flagship of the new system, the University of Berlin, where Hegel was the anchor of the philosophy department.

James Billington captures the revolutionary spirit of this institution of higher learning in his book, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith…

The new university at Berlin was the intellectual heart of the Prussian revival after Prussia’s humiliation by Napoleon. Hegel was central to its intellectual life not only as professor of philosophy from 1818 until his death in 1831, but for many years thereafter. Founded in 1809, the University of Berlin was in many ways the first modern university – urban, research-oriented, state-supported, free from traditional religious controls. Berlin stood at at the apex of the entire state educational system of reform Prussia. Deliberately located in the capital rather than in the traditional sleepy provincial town, the University of Berlin breathed an atmosphere of political expectation and intellectual innovation among both its uncharacteristically young professors (mostly in their thirties) and its gifted students. Berlin was built on a solid German tradition that had already extended and modernized the university ideal… Thus the hopes of all Prussia were focused on the new university at Berlin, the first to be built around the library and laboratory rather than the catechistic classroom. The university offered entering students the challenge of research rather than learning by rote, the promise of discovering new truths rather than propagating old ones. (Billington page 225)

What is most important to note for our narrative, is that prior to the Prussian innovations, education had been mostly a private matter not controlled by or even involving government. It was informally pursued through self-learning, apprenticeships, perhaps local teachers offering classes or tutors (for the wealthier) in ones youth. And if privilege and academic inclination allowed, in colleges and universities mostly run by or in the context of religious denominations.

The Prussian System Comes to America

It is interesting to note that one could argue that the U.S. today has a de facto three-tiered education system that mirrors the one the Prussians invented in the early 19th century.

* Tier one would be our elite private prep schools and elite private (and top public) universities that, though they are not completely limited to our society’s social elite, are still generally bastions of the most privileged in our country, including many of our top political leadership.

* Tier two would be the best of our public K-12 schools, located mostly in more prosperous neighborhoods, which have the resources to assist the most academically inclined of the children of the middle class to put them on the programmed path to get their degrees and then get good jobs as doctors and lawyers and other “knowledge workers”, our contemporary “apparatchiks”.

* Tier three would be the rest of our public schools, mainly in the inner cities and poor rural areas, generally under resourced and failing (by design as it is argued by some). Though there are the occasional exceptions of schools or individual students that rise above these circumstances into the second tier, which perpetuate the myth that anyone can succeed, many of our youth in these schools have the odds of success heavily stacked against them. From these ranks many of our lower-paid worker-bees come, including many of the enlisted soldiers in our volunteer army.

And further, our own modern university system was patterned after the research-oriented government supported system created by the Prussians. Here’s Gatto’s take…

Throughout nineteenth-century Prussia, its new form of education seemed to make that warlike nation prosper materially and militarily. While German science, philosophy, and military success seduced the world, thousands of prominent young Americans made the pilgrimage to Germany to study in its network of research universities, places where teaching and learning were always subordinate to investigations done on behalf of business and the state. Returning home with the coveted German Ph.D., those so degreed became university presidents and department heads, took over private industrial research bureaus, government offices, and the administrative professions. (Gatto page 139)

But back to our narrative…

Prussia had a great influence on the educational system in America. Here is Barzun’s take on that influence…

The American intellectual class that did exist in the 1830s looked less and less to England and France for ideas. It was Germany that fed them… Chief among American Germanists was professor George Ticknor of Harvard. He, George Bancroft (later the first national historian), and a few others had gone to German universities and carried home the message of Herder and Goethe, Kant and Schiller in all its poetical and philosophical strength. Ticknor in turn imparted it to young Emerson and his classmates. (Barzun page 504)

One of those contemporaries of Emerson was fellow Unitarian Horace Mann, who visited Prussia in 1843 with the intent of studying their schools and bringing the best of their state-of-the-art education system back to America. I go into Mann and the context of Massachusetts in the 1830s in detail in my previous piece, “The Myth of the Common School”. He of course championed and launched the first universal compulsory state run education system in America. Again a key point here is that prior to that launch, as I mentioned before, education was mostly a local and/or personal matter, informally pursued through self-learning, apprenticeships, or teachers accepting students for classes or tutoring. For us today, five to seven generations into ubiquitous state-run K-12 public schools in every neighborhood, it is hard for us to even imagine a world where education was personal or local, rather than the business of the state. It was Mann and his like-minded comrades in the Massachusetts elite, who imagined education as a tool of an emerging republic to develop its human resources and direct that development. They saw themselves as the best and the brightest, so who better than they to say what education should be for everyone else.

In Bob Pepperman Taylor’s book Horace Mann’s Troubling Legacy, he talks about how Mann tied the fate of democracy to the fate of the common school…

Common Schools derive their value from the fact, that they are an instrument, more extensively applicable to the whole mass of the children, than any other instrument ever yet devised. They are an instrument, by which the good men in society can send redeeming influences to those children, who suffer under the calamity of vicious parentage and evil domestic associations… They are the only civil institution, capable of extending its beneficent arms to embrace and to cultivate in all parts of its nature, every child that comes into the world. Nor can it be forgotten, that there is no other instrumentality, which has done or can do so much, to inspire that universal reverence for knowledge, which incites to its acquisition. (Taylor page 34)

Though the Prussians saw their new state-run education system as a tool of their totalitarian state, Mann and other American leaders who were enamored with that system, believed a state controlled education system could be a similarly effective tool to forge a budding republic that was a melting put for a diverse population of immigrants.

Building to his discussion of the Prussian schools in the Seventh Annual Report, Mann is careful to acknowledge that regardless of the strength of their educational program, schools in Prussia were employed in the service of an authoritarian state. His claim, however, is that such schools would be all the more appropriate in a free, democratic society. He is also careful to praise our own tradition of common schools and to emphasize their egalitarian structure. “Massachusetts has the honor of establishing the first system of Free Schools in the world… Our system, too, is one and the same for both rich and poor; for, as all human beings, in regard to their natural rights, stand upon a footing of equality before God, so, in this respect, the human has been copied from the divine plan of government, by placing all citizens on the same footing of equality before the law of the land”. (Taylor page 34)

Whether authoritarian or more egalitarian, it was still a new conception of education as a function of the state, exercising top-down control of every aspect of the curriculum, pedagogy and governance of the educational process. Opponents of this radical “Prussian” approach to education called this out. Conservative Episcopalian and Massachusetts state education board member Edward Newton challenged the democratizing tendencies of Mann’s vision of the common schools…

Newton makes an additional political argument, premised on the assumption that the schools in Massachusetts were in fine shape prior to the establishment of the board and the appointment of the secretary. This being the case, the creation of the state Board of Education was a political rather than an educational decision, one designed to build and consolidate the power of the state. “We do not need this central, all-absorbing power; it is anti-republican in all its bearings, well adapted, perhaps, to Prussia, and other European despotisms, but not wanted here”. This reference to Prussia, of course, is intended to remind the reader of Mann’s praise of Prussian schools in the Seventh Annual Report released earlier in that year. (Taylor page 50)

Mann and his supporters triumphed in that dialog, and from this point forward in American history, education would be a matter controlled by the states, and increasingly in recent years by the federal government as well. As such it moved from the realm of personal development, family or community life, into the political arena of state policy and social engineering. And given the prevailing Calvinist morality in American culture, author Ron Miller in his book “What are Schools For?” says that in sharp contrast to Europe…

American politics and reform movements have traditionally defined social problems as problems of personal morality and discipline, and therefore have often failed to address the ideological or economic sources of the conflict. This moralistic approach has chronically prescribed religious authority and education rather than consider fundamental institutional change to remedy serious social problems.

American education would become the main tool to address these issues. Inspired by the Prussians who had been inspired themselves by Napoleon, that tool would be wielded by the state, and all aspects of the educational system – curriculum, pedagogy and governance – would fall under a top-down control model of state responsibility, rather than being an individual, family or local community responsibility. In a country inspired by moving away from controlling hierarchies towards a circle of equals, human development would continue to be managed in an all encompassing educational hierarchy, as it still is today.

At the turn of the century America had reason to be proud of the educational progress it had made. The dream of equality of educational opportunity had been partly realized. Any white American with ability and a willingness to work could get a good education and even professional training. The schools were very far from perfect, of course; teachers were inadequately prepared, classrooms were overcrowded, school buildings and equipment were inadequate, and the education of Negroes had been neglected. But the basic institutional framework for a noble conception of education had been created. Free public schools, from the kindergarten through the university, had been established. (pg 1)

Callahan’s point here is that the situation, though not ideal (particularly for African-Americans), was nothing that called out for the kind of wrenching changes to the education system that would be wrought in the name of “reform” in the first three decades of the new century. A crisis was instead manufactured, perhaps for a range of reasons, starting with maybe selling newspapers and magazines…

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)

As a result, says Callahan…

The tragedy itself was fourfold: that educational questions were subordinated to business considerations; that administrators were produced who were not, in any true sense, educators; that a scientific label was put on some very unscientific and dubious methods and practices; and that an anti-intellectual climate, already prevalent, was strengthened. As the business-industrial values and procedures spread into the thinking and acting of educators, countless educational decisions were made on economic or on non-educational grounds. (pg 246)

Callahan calls out four trends during this period which he believes wove together to create this situation. First that the social reform-minded, scandal-uncovering journalists had made the public suspicious and hyper-critical of the management of all public institutions. Second that the growing prestige of business and businessmen in the public eye, and the resulting calls for public institutions to adopt business practices. Third that in answer to those calls, the growth of a “business efficiency” movement, championed by popular business gurus like Frederick Taylor and his methodology of “scientific management”. And fourth that the “profession” of school administration was in its infancy and only beginning to be developed and was unduly influenced by this business obsession.

The Muckrakers & Reform

Muckraking journalists started out appropriately challenging some dangerous and inhumane corporate industrial practices, including in the meat-packing business and the railroads. But with a public eager to pay money to read about ever more exposed scandal and crusading reformers, these journalists soon turned their attention more broadly on major public institutions as well, including the public school system. Writes Callahan…

That genuine problems existed in American society at the turn of the century there can be no doubt. But the generation of widespread public enthusiasm and indignation necessary to give force to a reform movement in a democratic society required that the public be aroused and informed. This function was performed so effectively by the muckraking journalists through the medium of low-priced periodicals that one historian has stated that “to an extraordinary degree the work of the Progressive movement rested upon its journalism” and that “it was muckraking that brought the diffuse malaise of the public into focus”… The vehicle for muckraking was the popular magazine – McClure’s, Munsey’s, the Ladies’ Home Journal, the Saturday Evening Post, and later the American, which were attractively printed directed toward popular appeal… These journals were published not by literary men but by business promoters, and their editors were newspaper editors. (pg. 3)

Just as today with our ubiquitous cable news and radio talk shows trying to reveal, expose and rail against our society’s perceived ills to get ratings and sell advertising to make a profit, the popular magazines of a century ago sold copies detailing scandals and championing reformers. (Tabloid journalism, actually, has been with us since colonial times!) Unfavorable comparisons were made between schools and business, with the strong suggestion that business and industrial practices be adopted by educators. Writes Callahan…

The business ideology was spread continuously into the bloodstream of American life. It was strengthened, not weakened, by the muckrakers as they extolled “modern business methods” and “efficiency” and connected these in the pubic mind with progress and reform. It was strengthened, too, by the vigorous conservation movement because the emphasis upon conservation blended into and reinforced a corollary drive to eliminate waste, and the elimination of waste was connected with modern business methods. It was, therefore, quite natural for Americans, when the thought of reforming the schools, to apply business methods to achieve their ends. (pg. 5)

A Nation at Risk?

Some seven decades before the publication of “A Nation at Risk”, another incendiary use or misuse of statistics and social science research galvanized the public. Writes Callahan…

Into this difficult and potentially explosive situation an American educator – not a business man or muckraking journalist – threw an incendiary bomb in the form of an allegedly scientific study of retardation and elimination, published in 1909, Laggards in Our Schools. The author, Leonard Ayres, had collected his data from school records and reports and from statistics collected and published by government agencies. They showed, Ayres said, that the schools were filled with retarded children and that most students dropped out of school before finishing the eighth grade. By retarded children, he meant children who were over-age for their grade regardless of how well they were doing in their work. He claimed that the extent of the retardation varied from 7 per cent in Medford, Massachusetts, to 75 per cent for Negro children in Memphis, Tennessee, with the average being about 33 per cent for all pupils in public schools… Although his data showed only that large numbers of children were over-age for their grade without regard for the social or educational reasons, he held the schools responsible, charging that their programs were “fitted not to the slow child or to the average child but to the unusually bright one.” (pg. 15)

This was an era of rampant use and misuse of scientific or pseudo-scientific studies manipulated to justify inappropriate solutions. The most infamous perhaps were the IQ tests administered to American soldiers who fought in World War I which supposedly proved that blacks, Jews, and most southern and eastern Europeans were intellectually inferior to northern European (Aryan) whites. These studies were taken very seriously, and led to the first American laws being passed in the 1920s severely limiting immigration, and also provided supposed scientific justification for the extreme racism and antisemitism that would be unleashed on the world in the decades to come.

Leonard Ayers’ statistical study did not take into account the fact that so many of the immigrant kids new to the country were entering school for the first time so though older, were placed into the earlier grades. Counting these immigrants statistically made it look like the “retardation” (grade repeating) rate was much higher than it really was.

It is sobering to me how much scientific research has been done, particularly in the early years of some new area of science before the methodologies have matured, that have produced flawed results that justified bad policy.

A Call for “Business Efficiency” in Education

Writes Callahan…

Ayres did more than simply report the percentages of “retarded” children in the schools. He was one of the first educators to picture the school as a factory and to apply the business and industrial values and practices in a systematic way. He used the normal year-by-year progress through the schools as a criterion for measuring the relative “efficiency” of a school and he developed a system for presenting this “efficiency” in percentage form… But instead of pointing out that the schools were caught in a vicious circle, with overcrowding causing retardation and retardation contributing to overcrowding, he centered his attention on “the money cost of the repeater” and charged, “It cannot be denied that we are spending money in teaching large numbers of children the same things over again.” (pg. 15-17)

According to Callahan, Ayers research and its impact on a reform-minded public…

Helped set the stage for the spectacular debut of the efficiency expert on the American scene in the fall of 1910. The dominance of businessmen and the acceptance of business values (especially the concern for efficiency and economy), the creation of a critical, cost-conscious, reform-minded public, led by profit-seeking journals; the alleged mismanagement of all American institutions; the increased cost of living; all these factors created a situation of readiness – readiness for the great preacher of the gospel of efficiency, Frederick W. Taylor, and his disciples. And school administrators, already under constant pressure to make education more practical in order to serve a business society better, were brought under even stronger criticism and forced to demonstrate first, last, and always that they were operating the schools efficiently. (pg 17)

Frederick Taylor was one of the great popularizers and gurus of the “business efficiency” movement. He put forth a detailed system of industrial management branded as “scientific management”, that got great public attention in hearing in the fall of 1910 before a federal government commission. Taylor’s ideas were championed by progressive reformers and conservationists like President Theodore Roosevelt, who said…

Scientific Management is the application of the conservation principle to production. It does not concern itself with the ownership of our natural resources. But in the factories where it is in force it guards these stores of raw materials from loss and misuse. First, by finding the right material – the special wood or steel or fiber – which is cheapest and best for the purpose. Second, by getting the utmost of finished product out of every pound or bale worked up. We couldn’t ask more from a patriotic motive, than Scientific Management gives from a selfish one. (pg 20)

Taylor and others felt it was appropriate to apply these principles not just to industrial production but to the “production” of educated people. Said Taylor during the hearings…

No school teacher would think of telling children in a general way to study a certain book or subject. It is practically universal to assign each day a definite lesson beginning on one specific page and line and ending on another; and the best progress is made when the conditions are such that a definite study hour or period can be assigned in which the lesson must be learned. Most of us remain, through a great part of our lives, in this respect, grown-up children, and do our best only under pressure of a task of comparatively short duration. (pg 30)

I am struck by the demeaning tone of his assertions that children and most adults need to be spoon-fed knowledge in a context of external pressure. But certainly this is still a very widely held paradigm today.

Presumably within that same paradigm, a critique of the U.S. public school system, appearing in the Ladies Home Journal in the summer of 1912 did its part to inflame the situation with a call for more business efficiency in education, asking…

Can you imagine a more grossly stupid, a more genuinely asinine system tenaciously persisted in to the fearful detriment of over seventeen million children and a cost to you of over four-hundred-and-three million dollars each year – a system that not only is absolutely ineffective in its results, but also actually harmful in that it throws every year ninety-three out of every one hundred children into the world of action absolutely unfitted for even the simplest tasks of life? Can you wonder that we have so many inefficient men and women; that in so many families there are so many failures; that our boys and girls can make so little money that in the one case they are driven into the saloons from discouragement, and in the other into the brothels to save themselves from starvation? Yet that is exactly what the public-school system is doing today, and has been doing. (pg 51)

The Journal is calling the U.S. public education system of the time “completely ineffective”, even though in author Callahan’s opinion, the system was functioning pretty well at the turn of the century (at least for most white kids and their families). My take is, like the ranting “talking heads” today, the Journal was manufacturing moral outrage that would get a rise out of their readers (whether factually true or not) in order to sell more copies of their very popular mass-circulation magazine.

There was also an anti-intellectualism and business-bias in much of the criticism. Callahan sites a speech in 1909, when the Superintendent of the Illinois Farmer’s Institute, speaking before the National Education Association convention, said…

Ordinarily a love of learning is praiseworthy; but when this delight in the pleasures of learning becomes so intense and so absorbing that it diminishes the desire, and the power of earning, it is positively harmful. Education that does not promote the desire and power to do useful things – that’s earning – is not worth the getting. Education that stimulates a love for useful activity is not simply desirable; it is in the highest degree ethical… (pg. 10)

Wow… okay then! I would say that this statement also continues to be part of our majority educational paradigm and conventional educational wisdom, though I don’t think most people would admit it. This is why, when you are totally engrossed in figuring out a complicated math equation and the bell rings signaling the end of your math class, it is critical to the institutional view of your own educational development that you cease and desist, drop what you are doing and move on to your next class… *grin*

Science & Pseudo-Science to the Rescue

By 1912, continuing in the paradigm referenced in the previous paragraphs, criticisms of educational inefficiency were coming from key members within the education establishment. There was a growing consensus that the solution was the application of business efficiency principles and scientific management to the schools. One of the leaders of the effort to solve this problem was Franklin Bobbitt, a University of Chicago professor of educational administration, who spoke to the need to set up educational “standards” such as one for speed and accuracy of arithmetic calculations…

The ability to add at a speed of 65 combinations per minute, with an accuracy of 94 per cent is as definite a specification as can be set up for any aspect of the work of the steel plant. (pg 81)

Using these standards, said Bobbitt, school superintendents…

By glancing over the number of units of results obtained by each teacher in each building in his city, especially when thrown into distribution tables and graphs, can locate instantly the strong, the mediocre, and the weak teachers. By noting the distribution by buildings, he can also see at a glance what building principals are doing a superior grade of work. (pg 82)

Bobbitt believed that the larger community, particularly businesses in that community, needed to set those standards (in quantitative terms) for what constituted an appropriate education. Further, teachers could not be left to their own devices to set educational practice. Only scientifically proven “best practices” should be followed. Said Bobbitt…

Teachers cannot be permitted to follow caprice in method. When a method which is clearly superior to all other methods has been discovered, it alone can be employed. To neglect this function and to excuse one’s negligence by proclaiming the value of the freedom of the teacher was perhaps justifiable under our earlier empiricism, when the supervisors were merely promoted teachers and on the scientific side at least knew little more about standards and methods than the rank and file. (pg 90)

Beware of “caprice in method” you teachers! Heaven forbid you should do it your way and not follow the best practice determined by the state! This too is part of that conventional educational paradigm that still exists today.

Defensive Pedagogy

Callahan argues throughout the book that the many applications of “scientific management” and “business efficiency” in schools were not done to actually improve the educational climate for teachers and students, but to defend the growing budgets for public education and the school administrators and superintendents who managed those budgets from the withering criticism of “reformers”. For example…

Bobbitt’s system, which had the merit of being very definite, presented an interpretation of education which men in business and industry could understand. It too, if applied, would enable schoolmen to defend themselves, in the first place by making their work seem scientific, and in the second place by relinquishing the responsibility for deciding on educational objectives and – to a great extent – for formulating the contents of the curriculum, and turning these functions over to business and industry. Following Bobbitt’s plan, schoolmen would become mechanics whose task would be to figure out ways and means of doing what they were told. (pg 91)

So I think it is still true today, with things like ordering extra medical tests for “defensive medicine” and all our current educational focus on testing, that much of what we do is to a large degree a CYA (cover your ass) exercise. The public was being manipulated and inflamed by the popular press (e.g. The Ladies Home Journal’s “completely ineffective” charge) and the schools needed to plow money into their defensive PR, as they plow money into testing programs and special outside consultants and interventions today.

The Birth of the Profession of School Administration

Writes Callahan…

The combination of the development of specialized graduate work in school administration, and the growing influence of business on education with the subsequent conception of education as a business, led to the idea of school administration (and especially the superintendency) as a “profession” distinct from teaching… In the years after 1911 the idea of the separate profession developed as a natural corollary of the adoption of the business-industrial practices and, especially, of the adoption of the business organizational pattern to the schools. Since administrators were acquiring graduate credits and degrees, the claim was more defensible. (pg 215)

Franklin Bobbitt and other professors of school administration at the most prestigious education schools led this effort to move the management and governance of schools from scholarly to business-focused managers…

The most unfortunate aspects of Bobbitt’s system were his invitation to laymen, and especially businessmen, to interfere with the work of the schools; his oversimplified and mechanical conception of the nature of education and his almost complete lack of understanding of teaching as an art, which made it possible for him constantly to draw parallels between management and the worker in industry and the administrator and teacher in education; his building up of the authority of the administrator on the one hand while limiting the freedom of the teacher on the other; and his completely unrealistic conception of what would constitute a scientific basis for education… On this last point, Bobbitt, like many of his contemporaries in education, was impatient with educational theory, which he regarded as mere opinion. (pg 92)

Traditionally schools had been run by teachers, with the most senior teachers becoming the schoolmasters. But during this period, in an attempt to try and muffle the criticism, more and more schools and school districts reached out to business professionals to be more involved in school governance, and created a “profession” of school administration mostly divorced from teaching and scholastic wisdom. Writes Callahan…

All these changes were to have important and far-reaching consequences for the schools and especially for the administrators. The self-image of these men began to change. All through the nineteenth century leading administrators such as Horace Mann, Henry Barnard and William T. Harris had conceived of themselves as scholars and statesmen and, in professional terms, the equal of the lawyers or the clergyman. After 1900, especially after 1910, they tended to identify themselves with the successful business executive. (pg. 7)

The education leaders and advocates during the first decades of the 20th century were administrators like Franklin Bobbitt, Leonard Ayres, and Elwood Cubberley…

Taken together, these men represented a new type of school administrator… They not only manifested a great interest in and admiration for businessmen and industrialists, but they resembled these men in their behavior. They were active in introducing and using business and industrial procedures and terminology in education, and they centered their attention almost exclusively upon the financial, organizational, and mechanical problems… And they in turn as leaders played a leading role in shaping the new “profession” of educational administration and, through it, the American schools. They did this through their speaking and writing and teaching, and they did it also by setting personal examples of the way to succeed in education. (pg 180)

Perhaps the leading educational administrator of this period was Ellwood P. Cubberley, dean of the School of Education at Stanford, who published his widely read and influential textbook, Public School Administration in 1916. According to author Callahan…

Cubberley described the emergence of the educational efficiency experts as “one of the most significant movements in all of our education history” and he added (prophetically, as it turned out) that their work would “change the whole character of school administration.” (pg 96)

Changing that character involved growing the status of the administrator by ongoing increases in the training requirements including new university degrees in school administration and even graduate work. So for example…

In the academic year of 1899/1900 Teachers College offered only two courses in administration… By the academic year 1924/25, twenty-nine courses were offered to administrators under three main divisions; Courses in Educational Administration for School Superintendents; and Courses for Teachers, Supervisors, and Administrators in Normal Schools and Teachers Colleges. School superintendents were required to take, among others, two large composite courses each carrying 6 points a session – two to three times the usual credit. (pg 195 & 198)

And in the Harvard Graduate School…

By 1927, however, the catalogue was describing the superintendent of schools as the professional “general manager of the entire school system,” and claiming that the job compared with the best in the older professions and in business and industry. It also stated that the money rewards compared favorably with those of “salaried executives” in other lines… The trends taken in administrative training in Teachers College, Chicago, and Harvard were not isolated ones, but typical of the whole country, which, indeed, followed the leadership of these schools. (pg 199)

Professionalizing the key high-level managers of the educational enterprise certainly made them more resilient to criticism from the public and the muckraking press that played the role of public watchdog. But it also increased the top-down control exercised by the educational hierarchy over the teachers and students engaged in the actual learning process. These highly trained “schoolmen” in positions of high administration and authority would certainly be expected to develop the “best practices” that principals would be expected to enforce, teachers to follow, and students to comply with.

The Gender Perspective

In the “in loco parentis” paradigm of the schools, teachers would be the “mothers”, and these highly trained schoolmen were definitely the “fathers” who “knew best”.

Gender is an important perspective that author Callahan does not bring up anywhere in the book, and I think it is a critical missing perspective. At this time in history (and still today but to a lesser extent) the teaching of public school students was and still is a female-dominated profession. In a still very patriarchal society where women could not even vote yet in federal elections, these exclusively male business efficiency “experts” were not about to give any degree of authority to a category of workers made up mostly of women. The “profession” was managing these teachers and not the teachers themselves.

Framing Schools as Educational “Factories” in a Hierarchy of Control

Callahan argues that Cubberley probably had the greatest ongoing influence on the new profession of school administration because of his extensive writing, speaking and teaching. Wrote Cubberley…

Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specification for manufacturing come from the demands of the twentieth-century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils to the specification laid down. This demands good tools, specialized machinery, continuous measurement of production to see if it is according to specifications, the elimination of waste in manufacture, and a large variety in the output. (pg 152)

This is another key element of the conventional educational paradigm still surviving today. Parents are expected to birth, raise and train their kids to a certain degree and then send them off to school where those “raw products” are “shaped and fashioned” with predefined educational materials to produce the value-added educated worker and citizen that then helps power an industrial society. It is a very simple and mechanistic way of looking at things.

Efficiency’s Progeny

This new educational paradigm, as championed by Cubberley and others involved the administrative hierarchy that still to a large degree exists today. Says Callahan about the education leaders of that time…

For a decade they had accepted the business values in education and now this acceptance – sometime reluctant, but often enthusiastic – came home to haunt them… Now they were committed to a platform of economy and forced to be preoccupied with per-pupil costs. Furthermore, they had worked to establish themselves as executives and they had applied the management-and-worker parallel in education. When action had to be taken it was clear… the best possibility for economizing was on teachers’ salaries. Such savings could be achieved by lowering or freezing pay scales, or, more palatable professionally, by increasing the teacher’s load. Both of these steps were of course unpopular with teachers and as a result administrators had to deal with dissatisfied faculties. (pg 222)

Unlike doctors and lawyers, teachers were getting further and further away from the true governance of their work and the venues (schools) where they applied their craft. But again (harping on the issues of gender), a mostly female workforce of teachers did not have the internal or external authority to fight to make it otherwise.

Writes Callahan…

In the thirties administrators developed impressive-appearing formulas for standardizing and equalizing the teacher’s load. The size of classes in the high school was stabilized in most instances at between 30 and 35 students, and administrators attempted – partly for reasons of economy which were more pressing after 1929 and partly to equalize teaching loads – to see that as many classes as possible were standardized at this level. The result was the teaching load which is accepted as the norm in most public high schools today. This load of five classes (or six) meant that each teacher attempted to teach 150 to 200 students a day,and the unit system which was widely adopted by 1910 required that teachers and students be in class five periods of 45 to 60 minutes a day five days a week for an entire semester. This system, especially in the large high schools, makes the educational process resemble the assembly line in the factory. (pg 239)Undoubtedly the sheer number of students to be educated, plus the great moral commitment to educate all the children to the limit of their ability, would have created stubborn educational problems even if Americans and their educational administrators had not been economy-minded and had not developed a mechanical conception of the nature of education. But fifteen years of admiration for the mass production techniques of industry on the one hand and saturation with the values of efficiency and economy on the other had so conditioned the American people and their school administrators that they allowed their high school teachers to be saddled with an impossibly heavy teaching load. The American people not only allowed this to happen but their insistence on economy forced it upon the schools. And just as some of the leading school administrators did not repel but actually invited lay interference, they not only did not resist this increase in class size but actually initiated the steps, advocated and defended them, and put them into effect. (pg 232)

Callahan writes how this paradigm plays out in today’s structure of the typical school schedule and logistics…

In the thirties administrators developed impressive-appearing formulas for standardizing and equalizing the teacher’s load. The size of classes in the high school was stabilized in most instances at between 30 and 35 students, and administrators attempted – partly for reasons of economy which were more pressing after 1929 and partly to equalize teaching loads – to see that as many classes as possible were standardized at this level. The result was the teaching load which is accepted as the norm in most public high schools today. This load of five classes (or six) meant that each teacher attempted to teach 150 to 200 students a day,and the unit system which was widely adopted by 1910 required that teachers and students be in class five periods of 45 to 60 minutes a day five days a week for an entire semester. This system, especially in the large high schools, makes the educational process resemble the assembly line in the factory. (pg 239)

And how a university infrastructure producing educated “experts” helped in that perpetuation…

Between 1915 and 1925 thousands of men had received professional training at the master’s degree level and had gone into important educational positions all over the country. More important, hundreds had received their doctor’s degrees in educational administration and had gone into even more important positions as superintendents of large cities, as officials in state departments of education, and most important of all as professors of education in teachers colleges and universities where they taught teachers and other student administrators and directed research studies even for the doctor’s degree. (pg 249)

People today who try to understand how societal institutions and the accompanying values and protocols perpetuate themselves, talk about the “path of least resistance” as a critical mechanism of transmission. The industrial paradigm for education with its simple mechanistic process model that acknowledged the primacy of business and the ethical underpinnings of capitalism were apparently such a path.

Other Paths

It was during this same era that John Dewey was formulating and advocating for his ideas on education. From the Wikipedia article on Dewey…

The ideas of democracy and social reform are continually discussed in Dewey’s writings on education. Dewey makes a strong case for the importance of education not only as a place to gain content knowledge, but also as a place to learn how to live. In his eyes, the purpose of education should not revolve around the acquisition of a predetermined set of skills, but rather the realization of one’s full potential and the ability to use those skills for the greater good. He notes that “to prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities”… Dewey goes on to acknowledge that education and schooling are instrumental in creating social change and reform. He notes that “education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction”

Dewey’s vision of giving the student “command of himself” obviously did not carry the day relative to the industrial paradigm of Cubberley and others where the student acquired “a predetermined set of skills”. The failure of truly progressive and holistic education in Dewey’s time, and later when it had a renaissance in the 1960s and 1970s speaks to the power of this prevailing industrial paradigm of education.

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”

I think Traub’s quote is a profound insight into our American culture and its focus on a “good” education as a utopian cure-all for what ails our society. The proper preparation or training (some would say indoctrination) of the younger generation is seen as so critical that both progressives and conservatives fight over what will be included in the increasingly standardized curriculum. We know the most dramatic and publicized of these struggles, including evolution vs creationism or intelligent design, multiculturalism and American history beyond the waspy Pilgrims and their progress, and sex education.

The assumption is that what is taught in our public schools is the official version of our culture and that our young people as students are not generally mature enough to apply a critical lens to what they are taught. As a result, an increasingly standardized curriculum becomes homogenized and sanitized in an attempt to displease no significant political constituency. The more pre-digested the curriculum becomes, I would argue, the less interesting and compelling it is for our young people. Certainly the expectation that instructing kids on this sort of curriculum can lead to a transformed society is certainly a misguided and naive one.

On the other hand, a truly compelling curriculum would be to in fact ask kids in schools to diagnose society’s ills and try to fix them, focusing perhaps on their local community. Isn’t this consistent with what “progressive education”, as conceived by people like John Dewey, is all about?

Dewey laid out a concise statement of the philosophy of progressive education on page 19 of his short book, Experience & Education, contrasting point by point with traditional education…

* Expression and cultivation of individuality, rather than imposition from above

* Learning through experiences, rather than through texts and teachers

* Acquisition of skills and techniques as means of attaining ends which make direct vital appeal, rather than acquisition of isolated skills and techniques by drill

* Making the most of the opportunities of present life, rather than preparing for a more or less remote future

* Acquaintance with a changing world, rather than static aims and materials

Wouldn’t a “how can we fix society?” curriculum be completely in line with Dewey’s principles?

Now I’m certainly not a proponent of a one-size-fits-all education system, so I would never advocate that all schools should adopt this sort of curriculum and approach to learning. But it would certainly be a compelling alternative if some schools did.

That curriculum and approach to learning exists today and is known as “Critical Pedagogy”. A school frames itself as an organization for community transformation. Rather than studying the standardized curriculum that may have little relevance to say urban at-risk youth and their neighborhoods, the curriculum becomes their struggle to understand the forces that adversely affect their community and how to take action against those forces and to build the positive components of community.

It seems to me if we want our young people to have any chance to be real agents of change in their adulthood, we should give them the opportunity to cut their teeth on those skills in their youth. Not every kid will be called to politics, community organizing, advocacy and activism, but for those that are, what more rich educational venue could their be?

I just today ran across another piece, “What is Critical Pedagogy?” on the site 21st Century Education. Quoted from that piece…

The basic tenet of Critical Pedagogy is that there is an unequal social stratification in our society based upon class, race and gender. McLaren states that Critical Pedagogy: “resonates with the sensibility of the Hebrew symbol of tikkun, which means ‘to heal, repair, and transform the world, all the rest is commentary.’ It provides historical, cultural, political, and ethical direction for those in education who still dare to hope. Irrevocably committed to the side of the oppressed, critical pedagogy is as revolutionary as the earlier view of the authors of the Declaration of Independence: is history is fundamentally open to change, liberation is an authentic goal, and a radically different world can be brought into being.”

Further, the authors site the pedigree of these educational ideas…

Many renowned educators and theorists works contribute to or support this theory; they include Peter McLaren, Douglas Kellner, Ira Shor, Henry Levin, John Goodlad, Theodore Sizer, Jonothan Kozol, the Holmes Group, Michel Foucault, the Critical Theory of Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School, Pierre Bourdieu, Stanley Aronowitz, and Antonio Gramsci.

Here are Ira Shor’s ten goals of Critical Pedagogy:

1. Oppose socialization with desocialization

2. Choose critical consciousness over commercial consciousness

3. Transformation of society over reproduction of inequality

4. Promote democracy by practicing it and by studying authoritarianism

5. Challenge student withdrawal through participatory courses

6. Illuminate the myths supporting the elite hierarchy of society

7. Interfere with the scholastic disabling of students through a critical literacy program

8. Raise awareness about the thought and language expressed in daily life

9. Distribute research skills and censored information useful for investigating power and policy in society

10. Invite students to reflect socially on their conditions, to consider overcoming limits

The author of the piece summarizes…

Critical Pedagogy, then, is defined by what it does – as a pedagogy which embraces a raising of the consciousness, a critique of society, as valuing students’ voices, as honoring students’ needs, values, and individuality, as a hopeful, active pedagogy which enables students to become truly participatory members of a society who not only belong to the society but who can and do create and re-create that society, continually increasing freedom.

Wish I had had the opportunity to be exposed to this sort of approach in school, it would have been much more interesting and memorable than most of the standard classes that I had, which among other things kept me cloistered in the classroom and away from any semblance of the real world.

Actually I had the opportunity to experience this sort of approach to learning, in my young adulthood, when I got involved in the feminist movement as an activist for the Equal Rights Amendment. Oh to have had that same opportunity at a younger age! Again, not for everyone, but would have been great for me!

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?

I’m really interested for people who know about these things to chime in. I’m just a parent (with two now young adult kids who struggled in conventional public schools) who tries my best to be well read about all the education news and trends, but I am not seeing anything else out there. I’m perhaps naive about charter schools, so please give me some hope that there is some other way for a community to “think globally” but “act locally” in changing just one of their local schools into something they think will be a better venue for their kids to learn.

For example, say a group of parents, kids and teachers in a “majority minority” at-risk urban neighborhood would like to be able to send those kids to a neighborhood school using a Critical Pedagogy curriculum to help kids learn about and actually have the experience challenging racism in and improving their local community. Following this curriculum none of the standard textbooks would be used, the cadre of teachers in the group would develop their own materials focused on identifying privilege and strategies for challenging it. The hope would be that if the kids really engaged in this alternative curriculum they would learn enough of the state standardized knowledge to at least not completely fail the standardized tests. All this, while at the same time in this same neighborhood there is a much larger majority of other parents, kids and teachers who would prefer a more conventional school focused on the four conventional academic subjects and using all the standard textbooks and teaching methodologies.

If the first group of parents did not have the option to start a charter school, what would you suggest they do? Go to the school board or the district superintendent and ask that a new school be opened in their neighborhood that used a Critical Pedagogy curriculum that the teachers among the neighborhood group had come up with? Given the typical education bureaucracy and one-size-fits-all mentality, what would district leaders likely respond to this group of people? Great idea… we’ll help you make that a reality?

Robert Skeels goes on to criticize charter schools here in Los Angeles…

Where the most vile and greedy 501C3s have succeeded at commoditizing children to the tune of millions, the potential for corporate market forces to co-opt and dominate charters too great. The endless list of scandals, the predominant profit motive, the lack of democratic control, and the capricious way they can be closed, begs a different path entirely.

Sally and I were actually involved in starting a non-profit charter school here in Los Angeles using a John Dewey based social studies curriculum and teaching conflict resolution rather than using rewards and punishments. Do you think we could have convinced the Los Angeles Unified School District (with its 70,000 adult staff and 700,000 students) to create a small school, teach the Dewey curriculum, and convinced the principal of that new school to use only conflict resolution to resolve all issues and infractions?

We are aware of several other charter schools started in Los Angeles launched by determined parents and/or community activists that we have a direct or indirect connection with. I have read in the local media about many more started by groups within the community.

As to the “vile and greedy 501C3s” that have set up charter schools in Los Angeles and “succeeded at commoditizing children to the tune of millions”, I have not read about those organizations, and would be grateful if someone could point me to some pieces documenting their bad deeds in the city of Los Angeles. That said, I am aware of the issues in other parts of the country with for-profit charter chains in Florida, Ohio, and other places.

We know the names behind the so-called charter “movement” and they certainly aren’t people interested in democracy, community, or a populace with critical thinking skills.

I am aware that there are a number of non-profit charter schools set up by Democratic activist and community organizer Steve Barr and his Green Dot organization. Inspired by his progressive roots, Barr transformed the failing LAUSD Locke High School and has been acknowledged in many (but not all) circles for his success. Barr notably negotiated with the state teachers union and has staffed all his schools with unionized teachers, unusual for charter schools, but consistent with Barr’s progressive activist roots. (Barr did butt heads with the local United Teachers of Los Angeles union and its former head, A.J. Duffy.)

We need a better way to have schools with more community oversight and parental decision making, while removing any mechanisms for corporate control (non-profit or otherwise).

I agree, and I welcome any thoughts on the path forward on this. Maybe we change the charter laws so that all charters must be started by non-profit organizations (and ones that are not fronts for for-profit enterprises). Maybe our public school systems can be decentralized so that parents can participate in the budget, curriculum and policy decisions made in the neighborhood school their kids attend. I know my partner Sally served on the board for several years of the alternative Dewey charter middle school (referenced above) that our daughter attended.

But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. At least based on the study done at the Yale Law School in 2006, only 14% of charter schools in the U.S. were either for-profit or were non-profits managed by a for-profit company. The Department of Education statistics counted 3780 charter schools in the U.S. in 2006 growing to 4694 by 2009. Even if somehow all of those 914 additional schools were for-profit, still a strong majority of U.S. public charter schools have been legitimate non-profits, like our local alternative school where my partner sat on the board, or Steve Barr’s Green Dot schools.

Should we cut off a mechanism for people outside the education establishment and its now nationalized hierarchy to launch schools because it has been exploited by some?

Robert Skeels quotes Jonathan Kozol who says…

In the long run, charter schools are being strategically used to pave the way for vouchers. The voucher advocates, who are very powerful and funded by right-wing foundations and families, recognize that the word voucher has been successfully discredited by enlightened Americans who believe in the public sector. So they’ve resorted to two strategies. First, they no longer use the word “vouchers.” They’ve adopted the seemingly benign phrase “school choice,” but they are still voucher advocates.

I think there is good news in that the campaign by conservatives to promote vouchers has pretty much failed to date, evidenced by the change in strategy that Kozol calls out. I think he is also right that some (but not all) conservatives are opposed to public funded universal schooling (like they are opposed to public supported universal health care).

But in my reading of recent U.S. education history, conservatives did not start the charter school movement, and their involvement in it I would argue is more about trying to diminish or destroy the teachers unions which have effectively opposed conservative political and legislative initiatives. I would further argue, that at least in Los Angeles and other locales, charter schools have invigorated a moribund and overly-bureaucratic public school system allowing for some alternative approaches to learning, teaching and governing a school to be tried and leveraged.

All that said, I don’t think that charters have enough real freedom to provide truly different educational opportunities for our youth. They are constrained by many of the same key limitations that keep conventional public schools in the teach to the test mode with standardized curriculum and ubiquitous high-stakes testing. We still need to fight to end that standardization.

The charter option, though significantly flawed, gives you at least a limited opportunity to create a school in your neighborhood at least somewhat outside the box, though you still have to teach to the standards and to the test. But honestly, in the present reality, how else can you launch a school based on Critical Pedagogy, maybe have the teachers run the school (like a charter in Detroit MI) or have the parents “take over” a failing neighborhood school. How else could you have a school adopt a Montessori, Waldorf or John Dewey holistic education model.

If you don’t have the option to start your own public school, then you are just a small community of people challenging a multi-billion dollar national educational-industrial complex. How do you even begin to make headway there without either waiting for, or hastening the demise of our “command and control” education behemoth.

So please fellow progressives, reconsider a complete and total opposition to charter schools, unless you can come up with some alternative method to get new schools launched in ones own neighborhood without having to dismantle and transform the entire U.S. centralized educational bureaucracy first to do so so. Yes we should continue to fight for educational change from the top down (including, I would argue, trying to get charter laws amended to ban for-profit schools). But don’t remove this mechanism for achieving at least some degree of educational change from the bottom up, at the more human and doable local level.