Today marks the beginning of what I hope will become an ongoing irregular series of articles on Chalk Jockey. The educational systems of other societies, both real and fictional, have intrigued me for a long time. I would like to devote an occasional post to the exploration and discussion of different systems. Our MAT instructors exhort us to "beg, borrow, and steal" ideas wherever we find them, and I see no reason to confine that practice to the borders of our own state, nation, or timeline. If you have visited or lived in another country, by all means join in! Add comments below, or links to relevant articles and your own blog entries on the subject.
Since fictional systems also interest me, I will devote this post to Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia, first published in 1975 but still remarkably relevant for modern readers. Callenbach weaves an alternate history of the western United States. In his timeline, the oil shocks of the 1970s and widespread concerns about environmental degradation prompt Washington, Oregon, and Northern California to secede from the rest of the US, which has failed to take decisive action towards building an ecologically sustainable infrastructure. (Sound familiar?) The novel follows William Weston, a New York journalist on assignment in Ecotopia twenty years after its secession. The story is presented through Weston's private journal entries and published articles about his firsthand impressions of the country. The following excerpt is an article about Ecotopian schools:
Now why, dear reader, would I waste the better part of a Saturday typing a lengthy presentation of a fictional school system? In some aspects the Ecotopian schools seem appallingly backwards; other aspects sound far too good to be true. Such are the pitfalls of speculative fiction.
ECOTOPIAN EDUCATIONAL SURPRISES
San Francisco, June 4. Schools are perhaps the most antiquated aspect of Ecotopian society... In fact if Crick School, which I visited, is any example, Ecotopian schools look more like farms than anything else. An Ecotopian teacher replied to this observation, "Well, that's because we've crossed over into the age of biology. Your school system is still physics-dominated. That's the reason for all the prison atmosphere. You can't allow things to grow out there."
Crick School is situated on the outskirts of the minicity of Reliez and its 125 students trudge out to the country every day. (About a dozen such schools ring the city.) The school owns eight acres, including a woodlot and a creek. The name is in honor of Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. There is not a single permanent building of any significance; instead, classes either outdoors or in small, temporary-seeming wood buildings barely big enough to hold a teacher and 10 pupils, which are scattered here and there on the school grounds. I was unable to locate the school office, and when I inquired, I was told the school has none -- its records consist of a single drawer-full of cards! With only a half-dozen teachers, my informants said, the coordination and decision-making for the school is simply part of everyday life. Since class periods fluctuate wildly (there are no hour bells) the teachers can always get together if they feel like it, and they also eat supper together once a week for more extended discussions.
Incredibly enough, the children spend only an hour or so a day in actual class work. When I asked how they are kept from destroying the school during the times they are not under teacher control, I was told that they are usually busy attending to their "projects." I could see evidence of such projects on every hand, so perhaps the explanation, optimistic though it may seem to us, is accurate.
The woodlot is a main focus of activity, especially for the boys, who tend to gang up into tribal units of six or eight. They build tree houses and underground hide-outs, make bows and arrows, attempt to trap the gophers that permeate the hillside, and generally carry on like happy savages -- though I notice their conversation is laced with biological terminology and they seem to have an astonishing scientific sophistication. (One six-year-old, examining a creepy-looking bug: "Oh, yes, that's the larval stage.") There are some projects, such as a large garden and a weaving shed, which seem to be dominated by girl children, though some of the girls are members of chiefly male gangs. Most of the children's study and work time, however, is spent in mixed groups.
By "work," I mean that children in Ecotopian schools literally spend at least two hours a day actually working. The school gardens count in this, since they supply food for the midday meals. But apparently most schools also have small factories. In the Crick workshop I found about 20 boys and girls busily making two kinds of small wooden articles -- which turned out to be birdhouses and flats for seedlings. The system is intended to teach children that work is a normal part of every person's life, and to inculcate Ecotopian ideas about how work places are controlled: there are no "bosses" in the shop, and the children seem to discuss and agree among themselves about how the work is to be done. The shop contains a lot of other projects in one stage or another of development. In working these out together, as I watched them do for a half hour or so, the children need to use concepts in geometry and physics, do complex calculations, and bring to bear considerable skills in carpentry. They marshal the necessary information with a verve that is altogether different from the way our children absorb prepackaged formal learning...
It was sunny during my visit, but Crick School must be appallingly muddy in the rainy winters. To provide some protection, and also to give a place for meetings, parties, flims and video shows, the school possesses a giant teepee-like tent. The white canvas covering is no longer new and carries many charming decorative patches... Here the children sometimes play when it is raining heavily. A large pit in the center is the site of occasional barbecues, when a deer (or one of the school pigs) is roasted and eaten; and a kitchen at one side of the teepee is often used by groups of children making themselves lunches or treats.
Does this extremely unregulated atmosphere lead to wild conduct among the children? So far as I could tell, not at all; in fact, the school is curiously quiet. Small bands of children roam here and there on mysterious but obviously engrossing errands. A few groups play ball games, but the school as a whole has little of that hectic, noisy quality that we associate with our schoolgrounds. Indeed at first I could not believe that more than 30 or 40 children were present, considering the lack of babble. The tribal play groups, incidentally, are not all of an age; each contains some older kids who exercise leadership but do not seem to be tyrannical. This is perhaps encouraged by the teachers, or at least not discouraged, for they work with groups at one general level of development but do not object if an older or younger child wishes to join in or just watch one of the class sessions.
Some of the teachers, especially those occupied mainly with the younger children, apparently teach everything. But other teachers specialize to some extent -- one teaches music, another math, another "mechanics" -- by which he means not only that branch of physics, but also the construction, design, and repair of physical objects. In this way they feel free to indulge their own interests, which they assume will have an educational effect on the children. Certainly it seems to keep their own minds lively. All the teachers teach a lot of biology, of course. The emphases and teaching loads are flexible, and set by discussion among the teachers themselves.
This, like the general operation of the school, is possible because of the most remarkable fact of all about Ecotopian schools: they are private enterprises. Or rather, just as most factories and shops in Ecotopia are owned by the people who work in them, so the schools are enterprises collectively but personally owned by the teachers who run them. Crick School is legally a corporation; its teacher members own the land, buildings and reputation (such as it is) of their school. They are free to operate it however they wish, follow whatever educational philosophy they wish, and parents are free to send their children to Crick School or to another school as they wish.
The only controls on the schools, aside from a maximum-fee rule and matters of plumbing and safe buildings, stem from the national examinations which each child takes at ages 12 and 18. Apparently, although no direct administrative controls exist, the indirect pressure from parents to prepare children for these exams -- as well as for life -- is such that the schools make a strong effort to educate their students effectively. The exams are made up yearly by a prestigious committee, comprising some educators, some political figures, and some parents -- a partly elected and partly appointed body whose members have tenure for seven years and are thus somewhat insulated, like our senators or judges, from short-term political pressures.
Indeed there seems to be a brisk competition among schools, and children switch around a good deal. On the secondary level the situation is apparently a little like ours; one school near San Francisco, which has produced a large number of scientists and political leaders, consequently has a long waiting list.
It is hard to tell how the children themselves react to the competitiveness that exists, on some levels, along with the laxity of Ecotopian life. I often saw older children helping younger ones with school work, and there seems to be an easy working recognition that some people know more than others and can aid them. But greater ability doesn't seem so invidious as with us, where it is really valued because it brings rewards of money and power; the Ecotopians seem to regard their abilities more as gifts which they share with each other. Certainly I never saw happen at Crick School what I have seen in my daughter's American school: one child calling another "stupid" because he did not grasp something as fast as the first child did. Ecotopians prize excellence, but they seem to have an intuitive feeling for the fact that people excel in different things, and that they can give to each other on many different levels.
Do Ecotopians accept the idea that poorer parents might not be willing or able, given the tuition costs, to send their children to school at all? In this crucial area, Ecotopians have not allowed their thinking to revert to that of harsher ages. Rather than a scholarship system, they give outright sliding grants to families below a certain level, and one component of these is marked for tuition. Thus the Ecotopian state, while not willing to lift the burden of education entirely off the parents' backs (thus perhaps encouraging larger families!) is still willing to force citizens to educate their children in some manner. The possibility of "kickback schools," such as arose in the US when tuition vouchers were first tried, does not seem a great worry in Ecotopia, where the welfare of children is discussed constantly -- and where the children themselves run school newspapers that are, if anything, ridiculously critical of their own schools, and would surely spot anything sneaky going on.
Judging by my brief visit, the fact that no formal curriculum prevails does not mean that Crick students miss the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, though they tend to learn them in concrete contexts. But they also learn a great deal of sideline information and skills. An Ecotopian 10-year-old, as I have observed, knows how to construct a shelter; how to grow, catch, and cook food; how to make simple clothes; how hundreds of species of plants and animals live, both around their schools and in the areas they explore on backpacking expeditions. It might also be argued that Ecotopian children seem in better touch with each other than the children in our large, crowded, discipline-plagued schools; they evidently learn how to organize their lives in a reasonably orderly and self-propelled way. Chaotic and irregular though they appear at first, thus, the Ecotopian schools seem to be doing a good job of preparing their children for Ecotopian life.
But I should point out that Crick School has real-life counterparts scattered throughout the private school networks of the United States and other countries. These go by a variety of names; "democratic free schools" and "Sudbury-model schools" seem to be the most common labels. Although most do not emphasize the development of Gardner's "naturalistic intelligence" to the degree that Ecotopian education does, they are every bit as liberal in their curricula and classroom management techniques. Students choose their own topics for study and develop their own projects, working either alone or in heterogenous groups. Teachers view themselves primarily as mentors rather than authority figures or disciplinarians. Students enrolled in such schools report higher rates of satisfaction, motivation, and enthusiasm for their chosen studies than their public-school peers. Many blossom into brilliant artists, entrepeneurs, and university scholars. I doubt that very many would function well in mainstream corporate America, however.
So what, if anything, can we student teachers learn from the Ecotopian model? There probably aren't many practices that we could directly implement into a mainstream public classroom without being fired or worse. However, there may be lessons of a more philosophical nature lurking in this example. Here's what I take away from it:
Educational systems work to promote the interests and values of the states that control the schools. The nature of those interests directly shapes educational methodology. Ecotopian culture values the harmonious existence of humanity within the natural world above all other concerns. That value system demands that all children not only learn how to appreciate the biological world, but survive in it. Beyond inculcating those basic nature skills and ethics, however, they care little about producing a homogenous academic competency within their workforce. In their eyes worker diversity mirrors biological diversity; the more diverse the better!
What, then, does our educational system tell us about our society's values and interests? Sir Ken Robinson thinks we want more university professors. Cynic that I am, I must conclude that our corporate masters desire an obedient horde of interchangeable wage-slaves willing to put up with unsatisfying jobs. (Have you filed those TPS reports yet?) Your interpretations may vary, of course, and I encourage you to share them.
Children may misbehave in class because they would rather be doing something else somewhere else with other people. Conversely, children who have the freedom to pursue their passions may be less likely to act out in troubling ways. (Recall Sir Robinson's anecdote about the disruptive schoolgirl who grew up to be a dancer.) This strikes me as the most plausible explanation for the schoolground tranquility witnessed by Weston. With minimal limitations, every Ecotopian child had the freedom to partake in the educational activities that interested him or her most. On our side of reality, we medicate unruly children for the same reason that feedlot owners administer huge doses of antibiotics to their livestock: to keep them alive and trudging along in spite of the horribly unnatural conditions they must endure.
Those of us who go on to teach in public schools will probably not be able to grant our students this degree of freedom. (At least, not right away. Give us a few more years of economic turmoil and all bets are off.) The best we can do for the moment is to earn their attention by demonstrating our passion for the subject, incorporating their interests and ideas into our lesson plans, and integrating academic coursework with the world outside of school. Which leads to my last point:
The best learning may occur when teachers combine their efforts to blend content areas into a seamless body of working knowledge. Crick School activities and projects are massively cross-disciplinary in their scope. Think of all the different subjects that could be enriched through one of the backpacking expeditions mentioned by Weston: physical education, health, and biology are obvious; but also home economics through cooking and shelter-construction; mathematics and geography through map-and-compass orienteering; astronomy if you can get far enough away from any light pollution; animal husbandry if pack animals are brought along; and even history and archaeology by visiting the sites of old settlements. A team of teachers working together could even introduce all of this subject matter over the same trip.
When viewed through the lens of schema theory, this mode of learning appears ideal for maximizing comprehension, retention, and motivation. As teachers, we should not settle for presenting our subject as an isolated content area, independent of all others. Perhaps an analogy will provide the proper perspective. Solitary islands of schema lack the coherence of an archipelago connected by bridges and ferries. Cut off contact to one island, and it may fall into ruins over time. I've seen this happen to the relationship between students and mathematics. More than once, students who want to go into nursing have asked me, out of frustration, why they have to take the prerequisite college math courses. Apparently nobody bothered pointing out the role that statistical analysis plays in medical research, or the role that nurses play in such research. In fact, the use of medical statistics was pioneered by Florence Nightingale, of all people -- the founder of the modern nursing profession. (Great example of a female mathematician, by the way, although there are better ones.)
Elementary educators may have an easier time building content connections within our system as they work almost exclusively with one group of children all day, day in and day out, over the course of a school year. They have plenty of time to work with each day, and they don't have to worry so much about disrupting other teacher's schedules if they want to go on a field trip. Secondary teachers have more hurdles to clear. Such teachers must have a good working relationship with like-minded colleagues who teach other content areas if they wish to coordinate their classes.
So concludes another post. It certainly turned out longer than I anticipated. In the future, I will try to break such articles into a series of shorter posts. By the time I realized my problem, it was already too late... I now realize how addictive this form of writing can prove.
Will read this when I get a breath! Love the poll!
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