The Right Kind of Education

The title of this post is taken from Chapter 2 of Krishnamurti’s Education and the Significance of Life, which I was reminded of while reading Larry Cuban’s blog about Great Teachers:

For the past quarter-century, however, policymakers and politicians have chopped, grated, and mixed together the goals of schooling into a concoction seeking to make education an arm of the economy. They scan international test scores, focus on achievement gaps, and boost teacher pay-for-performance plans. This policy direction has shoved the notion of “great” teaching into one corner of the ideological debate and thoroughly erased the distinction between the “good” and “successful” in teaching. Now “great” teaching means test scores go up and students go to college. A big mistake.

When the educational mission is reduced to a test score, as it now has become, demoralization of all involved is the end result. Who, but corporate bean counters and politicians give a damn about any of that? Certainly not the kids. Not the parents. At least, not the ones I know. Test scores tell us nothing about who we really are as a community or as individuals. They are “funny money” created to serve an alien economy that only recognizes bottom lines, no matter how irrationally they were derived. As an educational practice, it is destructive and self-defeating.

But enough of all that. Larry Cuban mentioned Vivian Paley, and linked to her Wikipedia page, which contained a link pointing to an excerpt from her book, A Child’s Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play. The book chapter that is posted online is a piece called Big “A” and Little “a”, which tells about what happens when Kindergarten imports first-grade curriculum content in order to boost achievement scores. The result, says Paley, is that play is banished from the grade where it has always been regarded as the primary instructional mode. Taking a long look back at an earlier time in schools, she notes:

Short attention spans were not yet considered a deficit in my schools in Great Neck, N.Y., and Chicago in the sixties and seventies. We saw that the children’s concentration was intense when they played and we filled the other times with playful rhyming games, songs, and poetry, to which we added picture books and fairy tales. The children’s own chants and shouts rang out as they ran, climbed, jumped, pushed, pulled, and rearranged their environment, all in the name of fantasy play. Restlessness, impulsivity, and timidness faded in the quest for a dramatic role, and daydreams awakened into social play and big arcs of paint.

Teachers, she recalls, began noticing superheroes and Barbies appearing in students’ repertoires of imaginary characters, and they began to wonder about the influence of television on children’s imaginations. Later, as increasing numbers of students entered kindergarten after having been cared for in pre-school centers, play gradually came to be regarded as unproductive, and a waste of time, giving birth to the “academic kindergarten” and the labeling of young students as “at risk.” The solution for students who enter school “behind” from the start has been to provide them with increasing amounts of academic skill instruction, and to give them less time for imaginative play. Says Paley:

We blamed television for making children restless and distracted, then substituted an academic solution that compounded restlessness and fatigue….We no longer wonder “Who are you?” but instead decide quickly “What can we do to fix you?”

I see this happening throughout the elementary school curriculum. More time now is required for Math and Reading instruction, and less for Science experiments. In fact, there may be more real science going on in the boys’ bathroom than in the classroom. I realized this the other day after I walked in on a fourth grader who was kneeling in the sink so he could make “fog” on the mirror with his breath. I asked him if he was learning anything, and the poor kid hustled out of the room, worried that I was going to complicate his day.

But, back to Krishnamurti. His little book, Education and the Significance of Life is a gem. In Chapter 2, he criticizes the overemphasis on method and stresses the value of self-knowledge. And, like Vivian Paley, he celebrates the value of play:

To understand a child we have to watch him at play, study him in his different moods; we cannot project upon him our own prejudices, hopes and fears, or mould him to fit the pattern of our desires. If we are constantly judging the child according to our personal likes and dislikes, we are bound to create barriers and hindrances in our relationship with him and in his relationships with the world. Unfortunately, most of us desire to shape the child in a way that is gratifying to our own vanities and idiosyncrasies; we find varying degrees of comfort and satisfaction in exclusive ownership and domination.

Surely, this process is not relationship, but mere imposition, and it is therefore essential to understand the difficult and complex desire to dominate. It takes many subtle forms; and in its self-righteous aspect, it is very obstinate. The desire to ”serve” with the unconscious longing to dominate is difficult to understand. Can there be love where there is possessiveness? Can we be in communion with those whom we seek to control?

I believe this is something that anyone who aspires to become a “great teacher” needs to keep in mind. The school reformers will never get it.