Competitiveness and excellence are not necessarily related. Competition may lead to excellence, but it may also lead to cheating and lying. Or it may lead to more benign perversions, like data mining and “public relations” initiatives that focus on quality indicators, rather than quality itself. Alfie Kohn’s twitter stream today contained a link to a story about how colleges may manipulate their rankings in US News and World Report’s list of top universities. But data mining and publicity campaigns aren’t always necessary for an institution to promote itself. Sometimes ideology alone is enough for a school to stand on.
Case in point: I found an old composite photo of my first-grade class (1959 – 1960) the other day. The main thing to notice is that there are 41 kids in the picture! This was a Catholic school. The numbers fluctuated over the years; we had 37 kids in third grade, and 47 in fifth. In my experience as a teacher, elementary school classes are considered large at 30, and parents complain when numbers get that high. But here we see that people of modest means were willing to pay real money to put their kids in a no-frills private school with no science equipment, no teacher aides or support staff, no gym or music teachers, no special classes, no librarian, no nurse.
There was also no whining and nobody to feel sorry for you. There were no special kids, either, come to think of it. If you ever got the idea that you were somehow special, you’d soon learn otherwise. My younger sister came home from her first day in first grade and reported that a little girl who wouldn’t stop crying was put in the coat closet with the door closed. You can bet that dampened any similar emotional displays. I have several stories like this – things that I remember which, if they happened now, would result in legal actions against the teacher. Stories about abuses at Kipp charter schools sound very familiar to me. To be fair, my first teaching assignment was in a Catholic school, and there was none of that there. This should not be read as a general indictment, but as a reference to a particular instance.
Maybe the most interesting thing about this is that I have no recollection of the classroom feeling crowded, or anyone even talking about it being crowded. Apparently people believed that you can put any number of kids in a classroom as long as they stay in their seats and speak only when spoken to. What they mostly taught was order and obedience. Discipline is what my parents – my dad especially – believed was most important; it was good training for the workplace. It may come as no surprise that he eventually became a big-deal corporate executive.
None of the things that Alfie Kohn names as staples of progressive education were part of my elementary school experience. There was no collaboration and no intrinsic motivation. There was no discussion. There were text books, lectures, and tests. There was drill and repetition. There was abundant moral training and attention to detail. None of those things are bad in their own right. But a steady diet without variation also meant that there was plenty of boredom and little real learning. Most of the authentic learning I did was away from school in the neighborhood.
My own teaching philosophy and my reservations about using any form of coercion to get kids to learn runs straight back to my early years in school. The need for order has to be balanced with respect and a certain amount of freedom to direct our attention toward what interests us. The teacher has to figure out how to put that together, and the extent to which he or she can do that makes all the difference for kids. Bill Kerr has a great quote from John Dewey on this practical problem.
“As every teacher knows, children have an inner and an outer attention. The inner attention is the giving of the mind without reserve or qualification to the subject in hand. It is the first-hand and personal play of mental powers. As such, it is a fundamental condition of mental growth. To be able to keep track of this mental play, to recognize the signs of its presence or absence, to know how it is initiated and maintained, how to test it by results attained, and to test apparent results by it, is the supreme mark and criterion of a teacher. It means insight into soul-action, ability to discriminate the genuine from the sham, and capacity to further one and discourage the other.
This comes from a 1904 paper by Dewey called THE RELATION OF THEORY TO PRACTICE IN EDUCATION. I’m anxious to read the whole thing, and plan to do that soon.
Because of my experience in a militantly repressive elementary school climate – one that was deliberately chosen for me despite its obvious shortcomings – I believe that educational excellence is in the eye of the beholder, and what works for one may not be right for someone else. School reformers are now on the verge of enshrining a narrow set of values in new national standards and a national curriculum. Students will be tested and schools will be ranked. Data will be sliced and diced to show whatever it needs to show. Some kids are not going to pass through the gate, and they shouldn’t have to. Who gets to define success in the end?
Incidentally, if you think you can find me in the picture, you’re welcome to take a shot. I’ll post that bit of info later, somewhere in the comments, if anyone is interested.
7 Comments
I remember my kindergarten class at Nordale had 45 students and just one teacher. I sat on one side of the room with three rows of students and we looked over at the over side of the room with three rows of students. Amazing!! I don’t remember it ever being loud or out of control either!
I think we were just raised differently, like you said. I haven’t seen any support from our Education Secretary for smaller classroom sizes in the near future! Of course that would mean using the billions to create more school buildings and staff!!!
Maxine, thanks for that information. I assumed that the public schools were not as crowded, but after I posted this I wondered if that was really the case. Was your first-grade class also that big? Maybe huge elementary classes were common for everyone during the peak of the baby boom. I don’t know, but I’m curious. I attended public high schools, and they weren’t especially crowded.
I started school in 62 and my smallest class, at the time the class picture was taken, was 34. I remember 2nd and 3rd grade being much larger. OTOH, class sizes became much smaller around 8th grade. I’m sure that ability tracking and dropouts played a larger role in that.
Doug – I found you in the photo. You’re that good looking kid!
I had 52 in 1st grade (Catholic school) and close to that until about 5th. By 8th grade we were down to about 37. I remember Dick and Jane readers and “Think & Do” workbooks and assignments like, “After you’ve read the story and answered the questions and done your 3 or 4 Think and Do pages, go back to the story and make a list of all the words you find with the “ea” pattern in them. Then all the ee words and ei words and er words and if you get that done do the next page in your green Think and Do workbook and then correct any mistakes on pages we already finished and if you get that done see me (if you “saw her” you usually got to write definitions of vocabulary words out of the dictionary). Anything not finished becomes homework.” Then the teacher would run reading groups for 90 minutes (which is why we needed to be kept “busy”).
My first 5 years I taught in Catholic schools that were mostly quite different, but a few teachers hankered back to “the old ways.” Partly because they had to compete for students. When I was in Catholic school there was no one that wasn’t Catholic at the school. In fact I remember when it was a big thing because the pastor announced we would start accepting students from surrounding parishes. The Catholic school I taught in for a year in Oakland had been the same. When I was there it was 89% Baptist, 97% African-American and only 6 students in the whole school actually attended the huge church associated with the school which shared our playground.
Brian
52! Woah.
I remember Dick and Jane. And Spot. I didn’t know anything about reading or writing when I started first grade. I could say the alphabet and count to 100. We had workbooks. The teacher hung up only the best papers on the bulletin board around the room. She called us up to her desk and showed us flashcards with words like Dick, Jane, look, and Spot. Eventually we had 3 reading groups named after birds. That’s how I learned to read. It was no big deal, as I recall. But some kids must not have found it so easy because I remember being tortured in sixth grade, having to listen to them read aloud one-by-one from the social studies book.
Thanks for your input, there Brian. I am the third mug over from the top left corner, roughly analogous to where I am on the map of N. America.
What an interesting post. I must have missed it. You know I, at the least, narrowed my guess on your identity down to three pictures, you were one of them.
I don’t really know how many 1st graders I went to school with, but I’m now on Facebook, having resisted, talking to some of my old classmates from those very days. It’s kind of thrilling to be honest to talk to a peer that i attended the 6th birthday of and still recall her momma’s yummy cupcake. It means a lot to me to connect to them. I should ask Kelly Corwin, she would recall our class size. In fact I recall almost noting of the 1st grade and PLENTY of my life at the time outside of school. I was spanked a few days into 1st grade, in the cloak room, just humiliated, for writing on a desk. I had severe vision problems my parents lacked skills to figure out until I was 13. So I just copied neighbors basically. One told me to crayon my name on the desk.It seemed odd but I did it. And there it was when the teacher walked by. So in short order I learned other people “set you up”, teachers don’t/couldn’t figure out how to be fair, others hit you too and that I think turned off memory of that grade. Other than her using a felt bad for the weather every day i have nothing much. I knew the teacher for years and years though. Mrs. Parsons was well thought of, and Georgia actually seemed a good person. I suppose one of my life truths is I usually get to see the other side of something and then just hold onto this rather hard thing I like to call the rope burning at both ends.
I do know we had Dick and Jane, it was 1963, we never moved around the room and we were as quiet as it gets. I did learn to read there. That’s true and I have the workbooks. My mom did not do that, she likes to say they told them “not to.” clearly she did not question authority in 1963. My old work looks ALOT like the stuff they make me do with the kids now. Surprise!
When I went to teach in LA in the later 80′s my class size was over 40. In South Central LA that meant I had a room far above my ability to be able help. In my 4th grade no one really read. It was difficult.Except Phyllis. I taught 9 years in the Salinas Valley usually at sizes of 36 to 38. over 40 they had to pay you more. I used to sit and hope that I’d not be at over 35. Boy grading took forever and lots of it was just such trash to plod through. Until class size reduction I had no experiences below 30 in CA. In West Virginia I taught art as a traveling teacher in a 5th/6th situation and all the classes there were around 35. So, I had to “cope.” But I didn’t have a way, and we still don’t, to track those kids into their life to really see if things are better now, then. I mean that. I do also mean I have very strong opinions about it. But the willingness to look long term aren’t there. And then, would we have systems to understand our affects/effects? I appreciate I learned to read way back when- but they hit, they tracked, they were heavily into behavioral systems, they had people teaching that were just a year out of racially segregating the school-and segregating the teachers. These ladies of seemingly good character who taught me worked for years with two peers completely segregated up on White Avenue at the school for “negro” kids and when that ended I find it hard to believe hey were open armed.( I do know the teacher I most respected was the one who was a year or so out of her career stay n the segregated school and a fantastic model, mrs. Peyton) I recall very warm feelings about ordering a Scholastic book for a quarter, the candy store, the walk to school. Many kids I think about warmly, but some were intolerant bullies that seemed to be allowed, if not encouraged in ways like this… You stood up in 5th grade, if failing to recite all your multiplication tables everyone missed lunch and the school bullies beat you senseless.Well it happened to me. I was a late bloomer in an age intolerant to that. After school kids taught you “lessons.” That’s not changed either in a way, I lost a former student to his murder in school 1 1/ years ago. In that place, adults weren’t there in those outside domains we kids negotiated often. I know now they knew that stuff was going on. It never occurred to me then and that has been hard to hold. I know now they said things within school ( in my world of course) and set up things to arrange by proxy a group looking down your throat.
It fit the problem issues of the times. It set a stage actually.
The questions that ought to be asked of all of this probably disappeared, or got buried, since it appears that once more I’m sitting in trainings that are thrillingly arranging situations to manage a group with techniques I recognize from another place and time. A sure echo.. I’ve seen resentment, resistance, behavioral issues grow in children and boredom, narrowing, game playing, clock punching, dullardness even larger in instructors….all grow. It’s not confined to children, many I work with everyday remind me of Jimmy our class bully, ready to beat you down and “take action in their own hands” based on some simplistic agenda. We aren’t allowed to ask a question now say in a meeting. All of them are parked unanswered in a “parking lot.” And with mandated instruction ALL the techniques of old rolled into play to silence teachers, at times turn one against another and label the all of this some big progressive move towards “real improvement.” It happens I have a life to contextualize what I saw. And I’m aware enough to know it’s embedded in the way it was done. And that it wasn’t the same everywhere.
I don’t know. I suppose school purpose is in the eye of the beholder. I just recognize it when I’m down on the ground really (or metaphorically) with someone kicking me in the skull. And strong arm stuff, and I’ve seen enough through schools in my time, is still pretty revolting.
But that’s anecdote.
And 1st grade. Later in my schooling, well eventually, I found things turned a bit. I try to look back at the artifacts I saved over those years, listen to my friends recollections, look at what I care so strongly about, to observe what I took from school. It’s rather hard to evaluate. While on the surface I want to say I learned more away from it, and I did do that, I also learned a good bit there. However pathetic, there were more texts. I didn’t have that at home, I could listen and study from teachers. You drew racists, loves, buffs, leaders, weaklings, flops, futile failures, dreamers, charismatic believers, holy people, zen travelers. It was expanding and contracting. I suppose in that way rather early on I viewed it in a complexity model.
I always , always, asked myself what we were there to do. And that was very different both by system, in the context of the times, within individuals interpreting. And within my context, levels of development. I always felt it was as wide a difference as you speak to about your father. Mine would view the purposes so differently even than I had. He used to say, still says, “This specialness crap ruined education.” Where in it, in thinking the child totally unique, I found the possibility.
Sometimes I’m afraid to know what others want of it, as I recall when I struggled in elementary- it was a plenty big enough feeling group calling for your being humiliated or thrown down the hill if you somehow kept the class in for recess failing to get some concept. I always have struggled with that. What they might want for another. What they wanted and did with me.
oh the editing.
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