Learning

It’s Banned Books Week in the US, an event sponsored by the American Library Association;

BBW celebrates the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them. After all, intellectual freedom can exist only where these two essential conditions are met.

The next Freedom to Read Week in Canada will be from 25 February to 3 March 2007. Here are some books from the Canadian list of challenged books (PDF):

• Margaret Atwood – The Handmaid’s Tale
• Lynn Reid Banks – The Indian in the Cupboard
• Margaret Laurence – The Diviners
• Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird
• Alice Munro – Lives of Girls and Women
• J.D. Salinger – Catcher in the Rye
• John Steinbeck – Of Mice and Men

I am sure that all of the individuals, politicians and members of school boards strongly believe that they know what is best for our children and that banning books would be good for our society. I think that they are wrong.

Complaining about any existing system is usually futile and always frustrating. I try to focus my energies on developing alternatives and trying these out. It’s what we’re doing with our Commons initiative and what we should be doing with education.

My first formal education experience was in a one-room school. It was a wonderful time for the the three of us in Grade 1, and we got to see what was happening in the other grades. I don’t remember being bullied there, but I do remember being bullied later in elementary school when we moved to a modern school, with separate classrooms for each grade.

Robert Paterson has written about the one-room school and how it was a trusted space for learning:

None of these schools had more than 50 students. Most had closer to 30. They had a wide range of ages and abilities. In practice, the teacher acted as a learning facilitator. Much of the teaching was done by the older students who helped the younger ones. So while the teacher was an authority figure, she was not the sole talker. Most of the teaching was in the form of a series of conversations between the students themselves. She did not claim to know everything either and called on the wider resources and knowledge in the community to help if needed or pointed the child to the library.

As Rob notes, the design of the school empowered the children in their learning and made them all teachers as well. John Gatto, interviewed in Flatland Magazine, explained that the one room school was too empowering and therefore dangerous to the established elites:

The one room school had a mixture of six or seven ages simultaneously. Everybody got the same work but the teacher didn’t teach. The teacher only taught a few kids, who taught a few kids, who taught a few kids. There was this tremendous powerful interdependence, where terrific confidence of talking to people older than you was developed in the course of the school day. There was concern for people younger than you. There was responsibility. It was almost a cost-free institution, and it worked splendidly, but it had to be eliminated because it doesn’t subordinate the professional staff. There are no principals, or superintendents, or assistant superintendents.

Gatto goes further in the Seven Lesson Schoolteacher, “But total-schooling as we know it is a byproduct of the two “Red Scares” of 1848 and 1919, when powerful interests feared a revolution among our own industrial poor. ”

I find the argument in favour of the one-room schoolhouse quite compelling. I believe that the model is highly suited to our networked information economy and will actually address some of the problems that those who advocate for “back to the basics” or “no child left behind” complain about.

I propose small schools, loosely joined:

• With access to the Internet a one-room school would have to reach out to the rest of the world and not be wrapped in the confines of the industrial school. Schools would have to seek out partnerships and not be isolated islands.
• Communities of learning online could be developed to link learners in several schools and even in different countries.
• No teacher would be able to “master” the subject matter, so teachers would become facilitators of learning, which is what they profess to do anyway .
• Small schools would be integrated into the community and there would be a sense of ownership by the community, not the education system.
• Most children would be able to walk to school, therefore eliminating busses, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and encouraging exercise.
• Children and parents could have more than one school to choose from.
• Sales of industrial school buildings could be used as financial capital for the transition.

The one-room school, grounded in its community but linked to a world of learners, is a model that deserves to be tested.

We attended the annual “meet the parents” session at our local high school last night. Given my criticism of the existing school system (as regular readers will know), I decided to concentrate on listening for understanding and kept my mouth shut.

I found the teachers to be interested in education and motivated to teach. They all seemed to be competent in their areas of expertise. However, on leaving the school, I tried to figure out why my gut feeling was negative. After a night of reflection, I think that my concern is the evident dichotomy between espoused theory and practice, coupled with an unsubstantiated belief in education maxims that have been scientifically proven wrong.

Let’s start with what I heard. Here are the key messages, taken from my 4 pages of notes, reinforced by the principal and teachers:

• The school’s purpose is to challenge children, therefore there will be homework every night.
• We are delighted to say that we test regularly (even though high performing students are exempted from the final exams, and these are the students who will be going to university and will continue to write exams).
• The focus is to teach to the test.
• Students are here to learn, and will be scored on behaviour in class.
• Each teacher sees over 100 students per day, so don’t expect personal attention.
• Punctuality is critical.
• Each teacher covered the assesment breakdown in great detail.
• Incorrect behaviour, described in detail, will be punished.
• We have 640 students in the school and need to maintain control at all times.
• There is very little money for new textbooks ($10,000/year – enough for one subject for one grade level), therefore we do book counts regularly.
• There is very little money for photocopying or paper

The strangest message of the evening was that hats cannot be worn in school as a sign of respect for this “learning environment” and as well as a sign of respect for those who died in previous wars. As a retired Army officer, I don’t understand this one at all.

Here are some of my concerns:

1. There are no data that show that homework improves learning and I invite anyone to show me studies that indicate this.
2. There is a school-wide belief that test performance correlates directly with learning.
3. There is a belief that learning only takes place in a classroom and is directed by a teacher. All other forms of learning are secondary.
4. If learning is so important, why is the major effort put into control and assessment?
5. There was no mention of any of the last decade’s research in brain-based learning, though the unscientific and disproven Bloom’s Taxonomy was mentioned.
6. There was an unquestioning acceptance of the reliance on a single technology – the textbook – when other technologies are available and cheaper.
7. There is an unquestioning belief that the existing regional school model, requiring strict control measures due to its size and structure, is the only viable option for education.

As we parents moved from class to class at the sound of the bell, I felt I might salivate on hearing the next one. It’s been a long time since I was in a bell-controlled environment and I found it very uncomfortable. I’ve previously mentioned John Taylor Gatto’s acceptance speech as teacher of the year, and the fact that teachers reinforce indifference to learning through the “lesson of the bells”.

I would like to quote again from Gatto because I am scared most by the subliminal messages that are being driven into our children’s minds on a daily basis:

The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. The expert makes all the important choices; only I can determine what you must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions which I enforce. If I’m told that evolution is fact instead of a theory I transmit that as ordered, punishing deviants who resist what I have been to tell them to think.

This power to control what children will think lets me separate successful students from failures very easily. Successful children do the thinking I appoint them with a minimum of resistance and decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to study, I decide what few we have time for, or it is decided by my faceless employer. The choices are his, why should I argue? Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.

After four years of high school, will our children become intellectually dependent? Should we be scared?

We have just elected a new Provincial government that ran on a 3-E platform (energy, education, economic development). Will any of this change?

Here is a letter that my friend Graham Watt sent to our local paper, and one that I would like to share, with Graham’s permission:

How often do we run into someone who has the power to change lives for the better? Someone with a simple take on life and especially the teaching of learning.

I would say not often, especially in this manic time of cell phones that take pictures and computers in schools purpoted to solve the youth learning dilemma.

But this spring and summer, Stephen Haff, now a Crake Fellow at Mount Allison, came in and very simply changed some young lives for the better.

Through the continuing benevolence of the Live Bait Theatre Company , Stephen ran two wonderful drama workshops for young people. Not workshops to learn drama, workshops using drama to learn.

Teens and pre-teens worked together, all equals, visiting elderly Sackville people, listening to their life stories, learning of their lives, and then, together, taking these stories and re-telling them in the context of their own young lives.

Stephen Haff is an educational activist, an agent provocateur, and his insurgents are the young and restless kids who want to know that there’s more to life than copying trendy styles.

He seems to have little time for the trappings, propos and visual effects which are so prevalent in our visually-obsessed culture that they’ve become the culture.

Instead he believes in simple storytelling wonder, the importance of relationships, and especially the vast and unacknowledged potential of each and every young person to thrive.

Stephen Haff, a Mount Allison grad, went on to a Masters degree in English at Yale then plunged himself into one of the most violent ghetto schools in New York, where murders and stabbings replace simple bullying (of 600 students just 60 would graduate).

Such a high level of waste of human sensitivity and potential gave him a gift of his own, a realization that within each child exists a need to belong, and to be confident enough to love others.

None of this would have come to our little Sackville without the foresight and courage of Charlie Rhindress and Live Bait to provide and encourage it.

At the same time, Live Bait brought together another talented group of younger actors from seven to 11 years old to strut their stuff in a wonderfully entertaining and very funny play.

So we were exposed not only to the considerable natural talent of our local children, but the opening of young minds to life itself.

Alas Stephen Haff is leaving Sackville for a private school position in Halifax. Let’s hope he can return to continue spreading the gift of learning.

Our son acted in four productions that Stephen directed over the past year, and during that time we watched as a boy became a young man. As one learning activist to another, thank you, Stephen.

Stephen showed us what can happen when we reverse the teaching model and allow people to become responsible for their own learning. In his address to parents and friends after one production, Stephen allowed as to how the final product was not important, as it was the process of problem-solving through drama that helped the actors to grow. The final production was just one more problem-solving excercise. Or to put it another way, the voyage is the destination.

Stephen Haff’s vision is evident on his website, RealPeopleTheater.org, and he has left us another initiative, the Reciprocal Learning Network, that I hope to incorporate into our town commons.

Here is a picture of Stephen as Leontes, from A Winter’s Tale. Note the emphasis on intricate period-specific costumes ;-)

I attended a learning lab at the Masie Center in January 1997, the same year that Learning Trends was launched. Elliott Masie has now published the 400th Learning Trends newsletter, available as a 39 page PDF. It comes complete with a Creative commons license, which is a great advance from the previous blanket copyright statement.

Trends400 includes comments and prognostications from a wide variety of contributors. Informal learning is frequently mentioned and it is evident that there is a growing use of open source tools for learning – two subjects dear to me. The articles submitted by dozens of readers show how your audience [learners] can be the major creators of your content.

Here is what I found to be the best piece in Trends400, as it addresses some of the core issues around human learning:

Dear Elliott, A bit more than a year ago we met in the Swiss consulate in Boston and I remember how you walked around with a Sony Play station in your hand and talked about the opportunity to use this tool for locating people with similar interests in one’s environment and to learn from or in the community.

That reminds me of the situation that taught me how I learn and how my children learn best. I was shoveling gravel to create a new patio some years ago and my son, Leonhard, then 3, wanted to help level the ground. But since he was always between my legs or just where I wanted to either take or put the gravel, I decided to create a small heap of gravel just for him. It took him about ten seconds to find out that his heap was not where he could learn what he wanted to learn. The Center of Action was clearly my shoveling and that was where he wanted to be.

So, I adapted my mode of working to enable him to participate at the Center of Action. I learned a lot from participating – maybe not being of real help – at the Center of Action. And the Center was the only place where I did not mistakenly take the wrong cues. How to watch, how to move, what is efficient, what is a problem, what counts: it is all there. I believe that each child and every learner will immediately detect whenever he or she is distracted and pulled away from the Center of Action. The children and students lacking attention are just indicators that we do not radiate the feeling of being at the Center, or worse, that we are not there and therefore cannot teach.

Ulrich Gysel

In a nearby school classroom is a sign that states, “for whom the bell tolls” and the teacher says to the students that “it tolls for me, not you”. This reminded me of John Taylor Gatto’s teacher of the year acceptance speech in 1992, as he described the seven lessons that are taught universally in western education.

The third lesson I teach kids is indifference. I teach children not to care about anything too much, even though they want to make it appear that they do. How I do this is very subtle. I do it by demanding that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. It’s heartwarming when they do that, it impresses everyone, even me. When I’m at my best I plan lessons very carefully in order to produce this show of enthusiasm. But when the bell rings I insist that they stop whatever it is that we’ve been working on and proceed quickly to the next work station. They must turn on and off like a light switch. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of. Students never have a complete experience except on the installment plan.

Indeed, the lesson of the bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that can no longer offer important work to do. Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their argument is inexorable. Bells destroy the past and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as an abstract map makes every living mountain and river the same even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.

Want to improve learning? Get rid of those damn bells.