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The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and "Tougher Standards" Paperback – September 5, 2000
Purchase options and add-ons
- Print length352 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateSeptember 5, 2000
- Dimensions6 x 0.92 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100618083456
- ISBN-13978-0618083459
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“A very important achievement — a powerful, crisply written assault upon the mad excesses of the educational ‘standards’ movement.” -- Jonathan Kozol
“Alfie Kohn forces readers to ask what our children are doing in school and what skills they really need to succeed in life. If you’re a parent or concerned citizen, this book ought to be on your list.”
The Washington Times
Linda Perlstein comments that "the activities that he suggests are wonderful" and that Alphie's is "an inspiring philosophy." The Washington Post
"The Schools Our Children Deserve is a very important achievement, a powerful assault upon the mad excesses of the educational standards movement. It is a remarkable book that should become a classic in the field." -- Jonathan Kozol, author of Savage Inequalities
"The Schools Our Children Deserve forces us to reconsider most of what we thought we knew about education -- about homework and standardized testing, about phonics and what makes a good teacher. I want to hand this book to every parent in America and say, 'Before you send your child to school tomorrow, you must read this!'" -- Deborah Meier, educational reformer and author of The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem —
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Abigail is given plenty of worksheets to complete in class as well as a substantial amount of homework. She studies to get good grades, and her school is proud of its high standardized test scores. Outstanding students are publicly recognized by the use of honor rolls, awards assemblies, and bumper stickers. Abigail's teacher, a charismatic lecturer, is clearly in control of the class: students raise their hands and wait patiently to be recognized. The teacher prepares detailed lesson plans well ahead of time, uses the latest textbooks, and gives regular quizzes to make sure kids stay on track.
What's wrong with this picture? Just about everything.
The features of our children's classrooms that we find the most reassuring--largely because we recognize them from our own days in school--typically turn out to be those least likely to help students become effective and enthusiastic learners. That dilemma is at the heart of education reform--or at least at the heart of this book. On the relatively rare occasions when nontraditional kinds of instruction show up in classrooms, many of us become nervous if not openly hostile. "Hey, when I was in school the teacher was in front of the room, teaching us what we needed to know about addition and adverbs and atoms. We paid attention and studied hard if we knew what was good for us. And it worked!"
Or did it? Never mind all those kids who gave up on school and came to think of themselves as stupid. The more interesting question is whether those of us who were successful students "achieved this success by memorizing an enormous number of words without necessarily understanding them or caring about them."' Is it possible that we are not really as well educated as we'd like to think? Might we have spent a good chunk of our childhoods doing stuff that was exactly as pointless as we suspected it was at the time?
It's not easy to acknowledge these possibilities, which may help to explain the aggressive nostalgia that is loose in the land. Any number of people subscribe to the Listerine theory of education: the old ways may be distasteful, but they're effective. Doubtless, this belief is reassuring; unfortunately, it's also wrong. Traditional schooling turns out to be as unproductive as it is unappealing. Thus, we ought to be demanding non-traditional classrooms for our kids, and supporting teachers who know enough to reject the siren call of "back to basics." We ought to be asking why our children aren't spending more time thinking about ideas and playing a more active role in the process of learning. In such an environment, they're not only more likely to be engaged with what they're doing but also to do it better.
Parents have rarely been invited to consider this point of view, which is why schools continue operating in pretty much the same way, using pretty much the same set of assumptions and practices, as the decades roll by. In this chapter, I'll try to explain what traditional schooling is, then make the case that it's still the dominant model in American education and explain why this is so. After that, I'll turn to a more recent, and closely related, phenomenon: the widespread call to raise "standards" that has come to dominate discussions about school reform. Once we understand more about the support for traditional teaching and for Tougher Standards-- arguably the two dominant forces in our educational system--we'll be ready to analyze them critically and explore alternatives that may make more sense for our children.
Two Models of Schooling
Let us begin by acknowledging that there are as many ways of teaching as there are teachers. Anyone who attempts to apply a single set of labels to all educators will be omitting some details and ignoring some complications--not unlike someone who describes politicians in terms of how far they are to the left or right. Still, it isn't entirely inaccurate to classify some classrooms and schools, some people and proposals, as tilting toward a philosophy that is more traditional or conservative as opposed to nontraditional or progressive. The former might be called the Old School of education, which of course is not a building but a state of mind--and ultimately a statement about the mind.
When asked what they think schools ought to look like, some back-to-basics proponents cite the importance of "obedience to authority" and list certain favored classroom practices: "Students sit together (usually in rows) and everyone follows the same lesson. Missing are ... clusters of youngsters working at a pacee and on a topic of their own choosing. In basics classrooms, lines of responsibility are very clear; everyone knows his or her task and recognizes who is in charge." The idea is to have students memorrrrrize facts and definitions, to make sure that skills are "drilled into" them. Even in social studies, as one principal explains, "We are much more concerned about teaching where Miami is than about Miami's problem with Cubans." Not all traditionalists would go quite that far, but most would agree that schooling amounts to the transmission of a body of knowledge from the teacher (who has it) to the child (who doesn't), a process that relies on getting the child to listen to lectures, read textbooks, and, often, to practice skills by completing worksheets. Furthermore, "children should be behind their desks, not roaming around the room. Teachers should be at the head of the classrooms, drilling knowledge into their charges."
In the Old School, reading lessons tend to teach specific sounds, such as long vowels, in isolation; math classes emphasize basic facts and calculations. Academic fields (math, English, history) are taught separately. Within each subject, big things are broken down into bits, which are then taught in a very specific sequence. The model also tends to include traditional grades, plenty of tests and quizzes, strict (punitive) discipline, competition and lots of homework. Anything that deviates from this model is often reviled as a fad, with special scorn reserved for efforts to teach social skills or address students' feelings, to have students learn from one another, to use nontraditional ways of assessing what they can do, as well as to adopt bilingual education, a multicultural curriculum, or a structure that brings together students of different ages or abilities.
Nontraditional or progressive education is defined in part by its divergence from all of this. Here, the point of departure is that kids should be taken seriously. Because learning is regarded as an active process, learners are given an active role. Their questions help to shape the curriculum, and their capacity for thinking critically is honored even as it is honed. In such classrooms, facts and skills are important but not ends in themselves. Rather, they are more likely to be organized around broad themes, connected to real issues, and seen as part of the process of coming to understand ideas from the inside out. A classroom is a place where a community of learners--as opposed to a collection of discrete individuals--engages in discovery and invention, reflection and problem solving.
These aspects of progressive education (and many others, to be discussed in chapter 8) have been around for a very long time--so long, in fact, that they may actually define the more traditional approach. For centuries, children learned by doing at least as much as by listening. Hands-on activities sometimes took place in the context of a mentor- apprentice relationship and sometimes in a one-room schoolhouse with plenty of cooperative learning among kids of different ages. Many aspects of the Old School, meanwhile, really aren't so old: "The isolated-skills approach to learning," for example, "was, in fact, an innovation that started in the 1920s."'
What we may as well continue to call the traditional approach (if only to avoid confusion) represents an uneasy blend of behaviorist psychology and conservative social philosophy. The former, associated with such men as B. F. Skinner and Edward L. Thorndike (who never met a test he didn't like), is based on the idea that people, like other organisms, do only what they have been reinforced for doing. "All behavior is ultimately initiated by the external environment,"' as the behaviorists see it-- and anything other than behavior, anything that isn't observable, either isn't worth our time or doesn't really exist. Learning is just the acquisition of very specific skills and bits of knowledge, a process that is linear, incremental, measurable. It says the learner should progress from step to step in a predictable sequence, interrupted by frequent testing and reinforcement, with each step getting progressively more challenging.
It's a straight shot from a theory like that to a reliance on worksheets, lectures, and standardized tests. On the other hand, not all proponents of worksheets, lectures, and standardized tests consider themselves behaviorists. In some cases, traditional educational practices are justified in terms of philosophical or religious beliefs. There is no single seminal figure responsible for an emphasis on order and obedience in the classroom, but the idea that education should consist of transmitting a body of information is today promoted most visibly by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., a man best known for specifying what facts every first-grader, second-grader, third- grader, and so on ought to know.
In the case of progressive education, it can safely be said that two twentieth-century individuals, John Dewey and Jean Piaget, have shaped the way we think of this movement. Dewey (1859-1952) was a philosopher who disdained the capital-letter abstractions of Truth and Meaning, preferring to see these ideas in the context of real human purposes. Thinking, he argued, is something that emerges from our shared experiences and activities: it is what we do that animates what we know. Dewey was also interested in democracy as a way of living, not just as a form of government. In applying these ideas to education, he made the case that schools shouldn't be about handing down a collection of static truths to the next generation but about responding to the needs and interests of the students themselves. When you do that, he maintained, you won't have to bribe, threaten, or otherwise artificially induce them to learn (as is routinely done in traditional classrooms).
Jean Piaget (1896-1980), a Swiss psychologist, demonstrated that the way children think is qualitatively different from the way adults think and argued that a child's way of thinking progresses through a series of distinct stages. Later in his life, he began to analyze the nature of learning, describing it as a two-way relationship between a person and the environment. All of us develop theories or perspectives through which we understand everything we encounter, yet those theories are themselves revised on the basis of our experience. Even very young children play an active role in making sense of things, "constructing" reality rather than just acquiring knowledge.
These two basic approaches rarely show up in pure form, with schools being completely traditional or nontraditional. The defining features of traditional education don't always appear together, or at least not with equal emphasis. Some decidedly Old School teachers assign essays as well as worksheets; others downplay rote memorization. Likewise, some progressive classrooms emphasize individual discovery more than cooperation among students. Even from a theoretical perspective, what appears at a distance to be a unified school of thought turns out, as you approach it, to be more like a teeming collection of factions that accept some common principles but loudly disagree about a good many others.
Still, those common principles are worth exploring. There is a very real contrast between behaviorism and "constructivism," the latter having grown out of Piaget's investigations. The things that teachers do can usefully be described as more consistent with one theory of learning or the other. Likewise, there is a marked difference between classrooms that are relatively authoritarian or "teacher-centered" and those that are more "learner-centered," in which students play a role in making decisions. It's therefore worth thinking about the philosophy that predominates in the schools to which we send our kids.
Copyright (c) 1999 Alfie Kohn. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
Product details
- Publisher : HarperOne; Edition Unstated (September 5, 2000)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 352 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0618083456
- ISBN-13 : 978-0618083459
- Item Weight : 14.9 ounces
- Dimensions : 6 x 0.92 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #160,785 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #92 in Education Reform & Policy
- #144 in Educational Psychology (Books)
- #534 in Educational Certification & Development
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About the author
Alfie Kohn writes and speaks widely on human behavior, education, and parenting. He is the author of twelve books and hundreds of articles. Kohn has been described by Time Magazine as “perhaps the country’s most outspoken critic of education’s fixation on grades and test scores.” He has appeared twice on “Oprah,” as well as on “The Today Show,” NPR’s “Talk of the Nation,” and on many other TV and radio programs. He spends much of his time speaking at education conferences, as well as to parent groups, school faculties, and researchers. Kohn lives (actually) in the Boston area – and (virtually) at www.alfiekohn.org.
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When we focus on how we are doing, we are not paying as much attention to what we are doing. In education, this means that the more important we make grades, the less the students actually learn. This creates a classroom environment where the student's priority becomes 'Is this going to be on the test?' rather than `How does this relate to everything else I know?' This focus on rank has more insidious effects, as well. If we need to give children grades, then we may only assign them work that is easy to grade. Multiple choice quizzes give a tangible number that the instructor can write in a grade book. It is much harder to grade students on a lively, classroom debate on a topic that isn't even covered in the textbook. Which do you think makes a deeper impression on the student? Where is more learning taking place?
This focus on ranking creates a climate of competition. Classmates are looked at as people to outdo, obstacles on the road to the top. Winning becomes more important than learning. Collaboration is left at the door. This is unfortunate, and has implications beyond childhood. Research demonstrates that deeper learning happens when people collaborate then when people are isolated. Collaboration fosters creativity, communication, and mutual understanding. Working together is essential in the modern world; the problems of the 21st century are far too big for any individual to solve alone. Collaboration is a skill we can develop and nurture, yet we give it little time in the traditional school. Those schools that do make the space for collaborative effort often find it has extraordinary outcomes.
Learning to submit to authority begins early in the traditional school, where students must ask permission to tend to their bodily functions, and get gold stars when they do exactly what is expected of them. Kohn covers the inherent problem of Punishments and Rewards in his book by that name. This behaviorist approach to child development stems from the work of B. F. Skinner, and likens the human mind to a machine or pet that can be trained to the 'right' response by the proper use of reward and punishment. We are not pets or machines, though. Children can be taught to give the right response through these behaviorist methods, but true understanding is not inherent in such rote learning. Understanding comes through engagement with the material because learning is an active process, not merely the memorization of data. One way helps them win at Trivial Pursuit; the other way fosters problem solving and critical thinking.
Conditioning our children to submit to authority has more ominous implications, as well. In 1963 Stanley Milgram published a well-known study in which he learned that people will do surprising things, things far outside their comfort level, if they are told to do so by someone they believe to be in authority. Such studies question the wisdom of raising generations of children who have learned to 'do what they are told.'
As if all of this isn't convincing enough, Kohn takes on standardized testing as well. Textbook and testing companies have been given enormous power to decide what our children should know. But corporations aren't people, and have different goals than people. What is best for business is not necessarily what is best for our children. These companies design tests which have proven confusing even to professional adults, and give us little meaningful information about what our children actually know. Yet budgets, salaries, and other important decisions are being made using these numbers. Remember, testing companies are in business to make money for the stockholders. When the law requires every child to take their test, the company can be sure that they will leave no profit behind.
Finally, Kohn calls into question the idea that 'harder equals better.' If test scores are down, drill them on testing more. If they aren't learning in school, send more of the same work home with them. If a strategy is ineffective, why do we act as if more of the same will eventually get the results we are aiming for? This perspective is endemic in our culture, and we shouldn't be surprised to find it in our schools. It would be funny if it weren't so sad. Neuroscience tells us that learning is an active process, but also an integrative one. Sometimes, we need to let our mental fields lie fallow for a while so they can grow a new harvest. Harder isn't always better. As John Holt once remarked, "One ironical consequence of the drive for so-called higher standards in schools is that the children are too busy to think."
So what is better? Learners learn better when they are actively engaged in the material. They become more engaged when they are allowed choice in their education, when they are allowed to collaborate, and when they are allowed to make mistakes. We can take the pressure off of our kids to produce tangible results, and free up energy for them to pursue that which they are passionate about. In some ways, this may be easier for a homeschooler, or a private school to accomplish. But teachers across the country are growing weary of methods that don't work, and recognizing that they might have to think outside the box if they really want to reach students and rediscover the joy and passion in their work. As more people wake up to the ways in which the current educational model doesn't serve us, they will demand a different approach that honors the humanity and creativity in everyone. The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and "Tougher Standards"
Read this book. If you are a parent or educator, you REALLY need to read this book.
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