A Long Overdue Post

I had hoped to keep a journal of sorts of my experiences as a teacher at a Charlotte Mason school. However, my experiences at that school have thus far prevented me from beginning that journal. To say that I am busy has been an understatement. This has been hard work, but the reason it has been so hard is because I am only now being exposed to so much of the rich curriculum. I had never read Howard Pyle's The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, which is a fantastically rich book, filled with humor, adventure, and wonderful ideas.

Days fly by. There is no "down time." Everything that is done is worthwhile, so much so that there sometimes seems like there aren't enough minutes in a day. Fellow teachers will know what I'm talking about when I say that the "transitionary periods" can normally eat up all kinds of time in a classroom. Those periods barely exist at this school. They can't. We need every minute of every day. So, while in my previous teaching jobs, the process of getting out textbooks could take 5-7 minutes between students who don't pay attention, the slowness of movement, stopping the chatting between classmates across desks, and answering the same question 9 or 10 times, our transitions cannot take that long. We don't do "busywork", another staple of most teaching experiences. No worksheets. No videos. No "research" projects where kids sit at computers and "sort of" look up information about topics. Every minute is valuable, and is treated that way.

More later.

Antagonism

We trouble ourselves about the uses of the young person to society.  As for his own use, what he should be in and for himself, why, what matter?  Because, say we, if we fit him to earn his living we fit him also to be of service to the world and what better can we do for him personally?  We forget that it is written, Man shall not live on bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God shall man live, -- whether it be spoken in the way of some truth of religion, poem, picture, scientific discovery, or literary expression; by these things men live and in all such is the life of the spirit.  The spiritual life requires the food of ideas for its daily bread. -- Charlotte Mason

For years as a classroom teacher, I could not understand why there seemed to be so much antagonism, suspicion, and undeserved animosity in a classroom.  When students walk in on day one, without the teacher ever speaking a word, you can feel the anxiety and tension.  "I am not going to like this... I am not going to like you."  With many teachers, the feeling is mutual.  "You are all here to make my job hard.  I'll teach you to try to derail my career."  There is suspicion.  Trust left town so long ago that it no longer carries any citizenship in Educationland.  I could not understand why this was.  "What have I ever done to you?  For that matter, what has Abraham Lincoln ever done to you?"

I have found a few answers, which I intend to talk about in the next couple of posts.  The first relates to the quote above.

Ask most any student, teacher, parent, administrator, public official, etc., what the purpose of education is, they will give you a chain of thoughts that culminates in a singular, uninspired answer: "We need to prepare them for the workforce."  Before they've even walked in the door of their preschool class, we've reduced them to a monetary unit.  They ARE their bank account.  We are so fixated on what they are going to do (read, "How they're going to make money") that we've forgotten to address who they are.

Students have recognized this, and they've been quietly rebelling against it for the past half-century.

Who are they?  They are spiritual beings.  Read into that what you want, but what I mean is that there is an intangible element to their being.  This is undeniable.  Their brain (a material element) gives rise to a mind (an immaterial element).  There is no dissecting a thought.  This element must be nurtured every bit as much as their physical body must be nurtured.  In focusing so much on the one, we have starved the other.

They are spiritual beings with a desire to know and to be known.  They are unique beings (though many might debate this), who are deserving of certain treatment.  They are deserving of the freedom that only comes from an inspired mind!

Plutarch once said that the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be set ablaze.  Most minds are capable of inspiration, and once inspired, they inevitably seek freedom.  What we seek to give them is a career.  What we have told them is that freedom is not important.  In fact, it's dangerous, and that they'd better settle for the safety of a cubicle, a boss, and a paycheck.

I am not saying that a job or a career is evil (I have one myself).  What I am saying is that I firmly believe that we do a disservice to our students when we focus solely on their livelihood and not on the development of their personhood through the transmission of, and inspiration by, great ideas.  Who wouldn't rebel against such treatment?  We are not surprised at all, in fact we cheer, when we read stories of people who demand to be treated as human beings after being treated as less than human.  Why are we surprised when they come into class and just want to get it over with?  Why are we surprised when they can't wait to get out?  Why are we surprised that almost half of students that drop out say they do so because their classes were pointless and irrelevant, even though they know they are throwing their economic future away?

Would we stand to be treated like this?  Why are we surpised when they don't?

Money Is Not the Issue, Part 2

It is starting to cause me physical pain to see people bickering about education funding.  It has come up again because President Obama wants a lot of the money in the stimulus package dedicated to public schools.

Spend more money.  Spend all the money you want.  Public schools, charter schools, vouchers... spend spend spend.  Forget the fact that we, as a nation, already spend more per pupil than every other country in the world on education save one (I think it's Norway) and dump dollars into the system.  It won't help.  The other side will continue to howl that parents don't value education enough, but that ignores the fact that there are plenty of things within the system that we do control and can change to make it work better.  

Our school system is set on a destructive foundation that dehumanizes all involved, and until it changes, all the money in the world won't help.  Until students are treated as something more than products turned out on an assembly line, they will continue to fail.  Until we treat their minds as something more than receptacles for facts that the teachers insert, they will fail.  Until teachers are no longer burdened with the responsibility of forcing or coercing students to learn, turning them into entertainers, babysitters, or tyrants, they will continue to fail.  Throw all the money you want at the problem, but our educational house is built on sand.  Until we restore healthy and proper relationships to a central place in our system, students will continue to learn to hate learning, equating it with the dehumanizing practices of the current system.  Teachers will continue to burn out and turn over.  We will continue to lag behind the rest of the world in test scores, as if that were what this were about.  Until the governing philosophy is changed, we will fail entire generations of children.

More Signs of a Screwed Up System

I sat in a meeting the other day. We were deciding to allow a student to be on a home-based program for health reasons. I know that the area coordinator from the TPS Education Service Center, if she noticed me at all, might have thought I was angry. If I were, it wasn't at her personally.

They decided that the student could "keep up" by completing a computer-based curriculum that, I am sure, is filled with a lot of context-free facts (if it's anything like the computer-based curriculum that we use here). Multiple-choice fun! It's great for training someone to play "Who Wants to be a Millionaire." It's not so great if you want someone to get an education. But it serves as a suitable hoop for our students to jump through, so our school district is content with it.

Then came the kicker for me. If the student has questions or problems understanding what they are "learning," they are to contact strangers at the ECS, not our teachers here, who the student already knows.

This student needs to be at home.  They need to get better.  But our conventions and our laws say the student has to be in school.  Obviously, we have such a low view of learning that we don't think anyone is capable of doing it unless they are either in a school or being overseen by a school.  But the real insanity of this is that the two primary ingredients for learning to take place, those being good ideas and healthy relationships, are not just absent, but REMOVED from the process!  "Here, kid... go sit in front of a computer and play a multiple choice version of Trivial Pursuit.  If you have problems, ask this total stranger who probably cares less about this subject than you do, and see what you can learn from them."

You should have seen the way I was ignored when I voiced my single objection during the meeting:  This is far from how this should be.  The road we are on has brought people to do things that simply don't make sense anymore.

"Teaching Children to Think"

For the mind is capable of dealing with only one kind of food; it lives, grows and is nourished upon ideas only; mere information is to it as a meal of sawdust to the body; there are no organs for the assimilation of the one more than of the other.
--Charlotte Mason

It has become so standard that we don't think about its veracity or its significance on the way we teach.  We talk about "teaching children to think"... and we mean that we want them to be creative in their thought processes, to be problem solvers, and to be able to break an idea down into its component parts.  To aid them in acquiring this skill, we set up programs and curricula designed to show them how this is done, engage them in "thought exercises,"  allow them to brainstorm creatively, then we find ways of grading this process (because, without this, we might be accused of not teaching anything).

What it assumes is that children do not already know how to think.  We assume this because of what we see in the classroom, which is that students seemingly do everything they can to avoid thinking (of course, what this means is that they avoid thinking about the things we want them to think about, or that they avoid thinking in the way we want them to think).  There is, admittedly, an air of apathy and general boredom, which is not to be confused with laziness.  So, naturally, we adopt the idea that it is due to a deficiency within the student that must be added, and that it must be added by a method in the classroom.

Of course, there is no actual evidence to back this up.  In fact, simple observation tells us something quite different, and that is that children are critical and creative thinkers from the time they are born.  They discern everything about the life around them from how to fit puzzle pieces together to the motivations of an adult who is talking to them.  It is the natural function of the mind to analyze in very creative ways, and saying that we must teach children to think is much like saying we must teach bird to fly.  A bird is only in need of such instruction if it is in a remedial sense.  If its wings are clipped, it may never develop the ability in the first place.  It is beginning to be undeniable that, while there may be exceptional spots and pockets of teachers who do otherwise, our system of education is, on the whole, more in the business of clipping wings than in allowing students to take flight.

Mason was quoted as saying that the only place where it seemed that ideas were excluded was in the school system (and, though she wrote a century ago in Britain, she recognized the fledgling system of education that would take hold both there and in this country).  Instead, we feed them disassociated facts, looking for "correct answers" rather than honest thought or understanding.  Simply look at the current focus on the role of standardized tests.  Our system is founded on the notion that the child is a sack whose mind must be filled with nuggets of knowledge.  The reality, which we miss every day despite the evidence that is right in front of us, is that students are not sacks, but people, whose minds must be inspired by great ideas.  Facts simply aren't inspiring.  Ideas will never stop inspiring.  Until we get this, we will continue to scratch our heads over a rising drop-out rate as minds become more and more disillusioned and dissatisfied with a system that treats them as little more than machines.

I was a fool to ever believe that I can teach children how to think.  Our students' apparent resistance and apathy are their form of protest against this mistreatment.  Stop clipping their wings, and then attempting to teach them to fly "in theory."

"I've been a soldier and a slave. I've seen my comrades fall in battle or die more slowly under the lash in Africa. I've held them in my arms at the final moment. These were men who saw life as it is, yet they died despairing. No glory, no brave last words, only their eyes, filled with confusion, questioning 'Why?' I don't think they were wondering why they were dying, but why they had ever lived. When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? To surrender dreams... this may be madness; to seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness! But maddest of all... to see life as it is and not as it should be." -- Miguel de Cervantes, Man of La Mancha

Education is an Atmosphere

With due respect for the personality of the child as a person, with all the potentiality and dignity of a full person, it is not only destructive but immoral to use fear or love (or its withholding) as a motivator, or to play upon any one natural desire of the child. With that in mind, we are left with three tools: "the atmosphere of environment, the discipline of habit, and the presentation of living ideas."

This post specifically deals with the first.

It is not an environment that these want, a set of artificial relations carefully constructed, but an atmosphere which nobody has been at pains to constitute. It is there, about the child, his natural element, precisely as the atmosphere of the earth is about us.

Children learn from their surroundings. They learn from the affection of their parents, not just for the child but for each other. They learn from the rough-and-tumble play of their brothers and sisters. They learn from their pets and their garden. They learn from their friends. They don't need these to be padded, sweetened, watered-down, or half-digested for them.

We certainly may use atmosphere as an instrument of education, but there are prohibitions, for ourselves rather than for children. Perhaps the chief of these is, that no artificial element be introduced, no sprinkling of rose water, softening with cushions. Children must face life as it is; if their parents are anxious and perturbed, children feel it in the air.

This is not a condemnation to parents who feel anxiety. It's an admonition not to feel like everything has to be kept from the children, because, in reality, you're keeping less from them than you realize.

And what of school?

School, perhaps, offers fewer opportunities for vitiating the atmosphere than does home life. But teaching may be so watered down and sweetened, teachers may be so suave and condescending, as to bring about a condition of intellectual feebleness and moral softness which it is not easy for a child to overcome.

And if there is anything that can be readily perceived in most of today's schools, it's intellectual feebleness and moral softness. It is an epidemic, and exists in public and private schools alike. What most people have pegged as apathy or a disconnectedness with reality is, in reality, these two previously mentioned conditions. Whether our inability to acknowledge them as such is due to ignorance or convenience (or our own possession of these traits) is yet to be decided.

So what is the answer?

The bracing atmosphere of truth and sincerity should be perceived in every school; and here again the common pursuit of knowledge by teacher and class comes to our aid and creates a current of fresh air perceptible even to the chance visitor, who sees the glow of intellectual life and moral health on the faces of teachers and children alike.

How is information treated at your school? On a "need to know" basis? Do we feel the need to filter reality for our students, out of fear that they might come to a conclusion we don't like? We may want to consider the idea that, in doing so, not only are we showing an immense amount of disrespect for the child's personality, but we may be intellectually and morally hobbling them without realizing it.