When I reflect on my years as a school administrator, an image that frequently recurs is the joyful expressions on the faces of a class of preschool children as they were introduced to a new playground at their school. I was representing the high school at the grand opening of the playground. Before the ceremonies began, the Director of the preschool program described to me the process staff went through to design a developmentally appropriate playground. What caught me off guard was her excitement over the curricular goals that would be accomplished while children played during their activity periods. Since graduate school, I had not heard an educator associate the interests of the child with the goals of a curriculum. The mere mention of “hooking kids” would be viewed with some suspicion amongst my high school colleagues.
The assembled dignitaries could barely finish their remarks before the class of children raced past them in a scene resembling the Oklahoma Gold Rush. I was unprepared for how totally children could throw themselves into a learning experience. It was difficult to remain “adult” in an environment that was “hooking kids.” One child was so excited that she ran into my leg. As I bent down to speak to her, she looked at me and announced, “You can come and play too.” She then bolted into the play area.
The only excitement at the high school that might be comparable to what I observed that day on the playground happens during extracurricular activities, passing periods, lunch time, and the last day of school. I certainly never experienced that level of excitement connected with the high school academic program. I could not even imagine being invited by a student to a class where “I could learn too.” The students I observed daily in my high school were either “doing school” (Pope, 2003) or trying to escape from school.
Theoretically, I understood the source of the stark contrasts between the expressions on the faces of those preschool children and the expressions on the faces of students in my high school. An enduring theme in the literature on child development and recent research by neuroscientists is the downshifting in learning that occurs in environments that disconnect a child’s intellectual growth from how they feel about the world around them —the emotional—and how they relate to the world around them—the social. The perfect learning storm occurs in environments where intellectual growth is launched and sustained by experiences that capitalize on the varied talents that students bring into the classroom and promote relationships that help them negotiate the gap between abstract symbol systems and the world these systems were designed to describe and influence. How do schools, in a few short years, orchestrate this disconnect between the social, emotional, and cognitive? The origin of the separation of the child from the curriculum lies in the goals of schooling and the distortion of disciplined thought.
The evolution of schooling in America has been the story of the transformation of the one-room schoolhouse into the comprehensive high school. The steady march towards more efficiency and greater capacity has gradually reduced the discussion of the goals of schooling from “what is an educated person” to the institutional functions of certification, preparation, and custodial care. In order to accomplish these institutional goals, schools configured themselves in a way to accurately account for daily attendance, to monitor the whereabouts of students on an hourly basis, and to efficiently process students through a prescribed number of credit hours. Today’s schools do these functions very well. The school’s schedule, the supervisory functions of teaching, the subject-centered curriculum, and the “assign and assess” (Tharp, 1993) delivery model of instruction are efficient means of accomplishing the institutional goals of schooling.
The problem, of course, is that the goals of institutions are often in opposition to the goals of those who practice education and children who are subjected to “the daily grind” (Jackson, 1990) of schooling. Teachers find themselves in schools where the goals of schooling —jobs, high test scores, and admission to college—and the means of schooling—large classes, standardized curriculum, and large amounts of testing— are antithetical to a practice that requires creativity, flexibility, and sensitivity to uniqueness. Children find themselves in classrooms where the goals of schooling—promotion, good grades, and following rules —and the routines of schooling —sitting quietly, listening, waiting to be called on, completing worksheets —are hostile to the social need to be known, the emotional need to be interested, and the intellectual need to make sense out of their experiences.
The separation of the child from the emotional, social, and intellectual sources of growth becomes total when they are required to master information contained in prescribed subjects that bear little resemblance to the methods of inquiry and levels of thought found in the disciplines of the arts and sciences. The goals of a school subject are to provide a vehicle for scheduling, assigning daily class work, reproducing information on a test, and certifying to institutions of higher learning that a student has completed a prescribed curriculum. Subject matter in such a curriculum consists of catalogues of names, dates, places, definitions, events, and procedures which have been removed from the social and historical context in which the discipline evolved and the problems they were designed to solve.
Not only has the intellectual and aesthetic power of the disciplines been reduced to catalogues of information, but policymakers have deemed only the “core” subjects of English, social studies, mathematics, and science worthy of study. Other ways of knowing the world are considered “electives.” Only a minority of students in our schools possess the social, emotional, and intellectual profile to succeed within such a configuration of schooling.
The daily challenge administrators and teachers confront in schools whose goals and functions are institutional is the minute-by-minute effort to reduce the tensions created by a configuration of schooling that is openly hostile to the diversity of talents, emotions, and cultures of the student bodies they serve. Administrators and teachers respond to this challenge by employing a combination of special events, routines, techniques, sanctions, and broad interpretations of academic achievement to entertain, manage, control, and move along their student bodies. The real tragedy of institutional schooling in America is not low test scores, but John Goodlad’s observation over twenty years ago that schools are places where students have become emotionally deadened by the routines of schooling and intellectually morbid by an institutional curriculum that prizes completion of work rather than understanding and reflection (Goodlad, 1984).
Educators typically justify the “means” of controlling their populations by asserting that listening quietly, reading, reproducing information, and doing well on tests will serve as preparation for a remote future occupation or satisfying an institutional goal that is far removed from the social, emotional, and intellectual sources of learning. “Preparation, as Dewey observed, “is a treacherous idea” (Dewey, 1938, p.47). “Mis-education,” according to Dewey, will always occur when the means of schooling become disconnected from the interests, talents, and capacities of the student body served by an institution of learning. Dewey went on to assert that true educational “growth” in students occurs when teachers can use the immediate feelings and problems of a child as a springboard to walk the child back into disciplined ways of thinking about and acting upon the conditions of everyday life that disrupt our private quest for meaning and our public quest for a just society.
Administrators and teachers intuitively know that the current configuration of schooling is not working. Things remain the same, however, because the assumptions of institutional schooling are never questioned. What would happen, however, if one were able to challenge the current institutional configuration of schooling in ways that would reconnect the essential relationship between intellectual growth, the social nature of learning, and the variety of ways of making sense out of the world?
My attempt to resolve the conflict between the institutional goals of schooling and the needs of the whole child began ten years ago when a group of freshman students, who, in the words of the Director of Pupil Personnel Services, “refused to do school.” Students in this group were fourteen and fifteen years old. All members of the group had missed over thirty days of school by November and were failing every subject. The achievement profile of each member of the group did not qualify them for special education services. When these students did make a rare appearance in school, they wrought havoc in the classes they attended and even more havoc in areas where they would hide from classes. The teachers wanted them out of their rooms, the deans wanted them dropped or suspended from school, and the law was quite clear that it was my obligation to keep them in school. Students with this profile frustrate school administrators and teachers because they do not respond to normal institutional sanctions for “not doing school.” As one dean put it, “these kids love being suspended from school, they won’t serve the detentions, and they don’t care about getting a diploma.”
My journey into school reconfiguration began with a brainstorming session with the Director of Pupil Personnel Services and a teacher whose position included responsibility for monitoring the truancy program in area schools. After I completed the description of the freshman group of students who were not doing school, the two veteran student service personnel responded with comments and body language that projected an attitude of “so what else is new.”
The teacher in the truancy program calmly looked at me and said, “I know what will work with these kids, but you won’t do it.”
“No, I am willing to try anything to help these kids through school.”
“Anything?” asked the teacher in the truancy program.
The teacher in the truancy program then proceeded to describe a school configuration that would work for students who “refused to go to school.” Students would begin school at ten o’clock. The course of study would be designed by the students in consultation with the director of the program. The physical education program, which was a constant nemesis for these students, was rescheduled for the summer and would permit students to wear their street clothes while they participated in non-competitive activities. The maximum class size for the program was set at fifteen. The classroom for the program was to be located away from the normal distractions of the high school day. As I listened to the teacher tick off the parameters of the program, my response to the reconfiguration of the high school program alternated between resentment toward students who would not just go along with the program and a respect for the wisdom of a teacher and administrator who had worked with these students for many years. My institutional self was saying no to the program. My educational self said that my options resided outside the boundaries of institutional schooling. The traditional configuration of the high school was not working; more of the same was not an option.
Project STARS (Success Through Accepting Responsibility) began that day in my office. I was able to secure money for materials and a salary for the teacher. I found a room in a remote part of the building. I worked with the physical education chairperson to modify the program for these students. I felt a bit more assured about the success of the program when the teacher in the truancy program volunteered to teach and direct the program.
There were parameters for Project STARS. Students, along with their parents, had to sign a contract stipulating that they would attend school on a regular basis, would behave appropriately in class, and would complete assigned school work. Parents and students were also informed that they would not receive a diploma from the school unless they completed all required courses. Students who were unable to comply with these rules would immediately be dropped from the program.
STARS became a huge success. By the end of the first semester, students who were virtual drop-outs were now attending school regularly, were arriving on time to the program, and were completing self-selected correspondence courses in academic and elective courses. A few students dropped out because of substance abuse. But the remainder stayed the entire year, passed all of their courses, and even participated in our special “Summer Physical Education Class.” Most of these students graduated from our school four years later. I should add that they all complied with the dress code for graduation (although I did have to lend one student an extra tie I had in my office closet).
The design of the STARS program reconfigured the high school program in a way that accommodated a “person’s own deliberate, systematic, and sustained efforts to acquire knowledge, attitudes, values, skills, and sensibilities” (Cremin, 1976, p. 38). Our school, at least in respect to the STARS program, became an institution that educates (Cremin, 1976, p. 87).
The years that I worked with staff and students in the STARS program taught me that traditional institutional approaches to improving achievement that do more of the same, only harder, or the endless search for pathologies in students, only alienated the student further from purposeful approaches to learning. Both strategies ignore the fundamental disconnect between the knowledge, interests, and capacities of young people and the institutional goals of schooling. The other lesson I learned in working with teachers and administrators on different configurations of schooling is the distinctive change in their attitudes and the ways they thought about students who were not doing well in school. Professional staff, who were freed from the “mechanics of school organization and administration” (Dewey, 1969, p. 22), stopped blaming the students and parents for “oppositional behaviors,” and instead focused on how to change rules, routines, curriculum, and instruction that would address the unique talents, abilities, life- styles, and interests of groups of students whose emotional, social, and intellectual profiles did not conform to institutional routines and expectations.
The STARS program certainly did not reflect current trends in schooling that mandate a strict alignment between standard achievement instruments and a standard curriculum. The justification offered by policymakers for the standardization of schooling in America is embodied in the educational motto “No Child Left Behind.” What this motto means to educators and what this motto means to policymakers captures the underlying conflict between the institutional goals of schooling– what Dewey called the “machinery of schooling” (Dewey, 1969, p. 22)– and the social, emotional, and intellectual needs of young people. No Child Left Behind in an institutional setting means that all children will be required to attain the same level of achievement on a common curriculum. No Child Left Behind for educators means that all children will have access to quality curricular experiences that recognize multiple talents, abilities, and interests. Most importantly, for educators, all children will be involved in learning experiences that honor multiple levels of excellence and are flexible enough to permit a child to pursue the level of excellence appropriate for achieving private goals of meaning and public ways of doing.
The differences between the two interpretations of No Child Left Behind are fundamental to the discussion of the future of schooling in America. Policymakers and school administrators who continue to ignore the whole child and instead choose to intensify the “machinery of administration” will get the schools they currently have —soulless institutions where all the participants in the process go through the motions of institutional schooling but show little joy, little emotion, and little learning. The other alternative to schooling is to return to the drawing boards and reconfigure our institutions of learning in ways that honor the multiple pathways for amplifying the diversity of talents, abilities, and interests that wander the hallways of our schools today.
There are no blueprints for reconfiguring schools. As I learned with the STARS program, opportunities for accommodating the whole child arise out of the particular needs and circumstances of particular school communities. The challenge, however, that awaits school leaders who decide to embark on modifying the “machinery of administration” is the development of a coherent understanding of how modifications to programs, to routines, and to systems agree with the educational aims of the institution– what kinds of persons should education be trying to develop. The reconnection of a child’s search for meaning and worth in our society with their social, emotional, and intellectual self requires that schools reconnect the aims of schooling with the methods of schooling. What makes the agreement between means and ends so challenging in a school that values the development of the whole child is that there is not just one aim, or one method, or one routine, or one schedule that will work for all students. Instead, administrators will be required to consider multiple aims, multiple methods, multiple routines, and multiple schedules in their reconfigurations.
Amidst this swirl of reconfigured methods, routines, schedules, and subject matter, I learned that leadership in this environment must confront the daily challenge of establishing a “unity of experience” (Dewey, 1969, p. 18) that accompanies the uncertainties of reconnecting a child’s need to be known, to pursue a valued goal, and to find personal meaning in their daily experiences. The search for a “unity of experience” in such environments is not to be found in the certainties of the “machinery of administration”—standardization, prescription, and measurement. Rather, the school leader must integrate conflicting ideas about teaching, learning, and the nature of knowledge with the sense of wonder I encountered that day on the preschool playground.
REFEERENCES
Cremin, L.A. (1976). Public education. The John Dewey Society lecture; no. 15. New York: Basic Books.
Dewey, J. (1998). Experience and education. 60th anniversary ed. West Lafayette, Ind.: Kappa Delta Pi.
Dewey, J. (1969). The educational situation. American education: its men, ideas, and institutions. New York: Arno Press.
Goodlad, J.I. (1984). A place called school: prospects for the future. A Study of Schooling in the United States. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co.
Jackson, P.W. (1990). Life in classrooms. New York: Teachers College Press.
Pope, D.C. (2003). “Doing school”: how we are creating a generation of stressed-out, materialistic, and miseducated students. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
Tharp, R. (1993). Institutional and social context of educational practice and reform. In E.A. Forman, N. Minick, & C.A. Stone (Eds.), Contexts for learning: Sociocultural dynamics in children’s development (pp. 269 – 282). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Alan C. Jones 