In A Place Called School, John Goodlad wrote that the one thousand classrooms he and his team had visited were
almost completely devoid of outward evidences of affect.
Shared laughter, overt enthusiasm, or angry outbursts
were rarely observed. Less than 3 percent of classroom time
was devoted to praise, abrasive comments, expressions of joy
or humor, or somewhat unbridled outbursts such as “wow”
or“great.”(p.p. 229-230)
A Place Called School was published in 1984 before A Nation at Risk, No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top fostered our national obsession with standardized testing and test preparation; so one can be fairly certain that, with few exceptions, classrooms are not now settings of increased vigor or enthusiasm.
American author John Cheever attended a prep school in Massachusetts from which he was expelled for failure to maintain good grades. He wrote about that experience in a story titled “Expelled.”
As a college preparatory school it was a fine school. In five
years they could make raw material look like college
material. They could clothe it and breed it and make it say
the right things when the colleges asked it to talk. That was
its duty. They weren’t prepared to educate anybody. They
were members of the college preparatory system. No one
around there wanted to be educated, No Sir.
There is clearly something missing in the academic experience that Cheever’s prep school is providing. It isn’t academic rigor because, as we learn in the story, this school prepares students to get into top universities like Harvard, but it is something vital—so vital that Cheever refuses to recognize what he is getting as education. That missing component is what, I would suggest, many students find absent in their classroom learning experiences—academic vigor.
In my September blog I mentioned a comment that former US Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, John W. Gardner made back in the 1960s: “One of the most difficult problems we face is to make it possible for young people to participate in the great tasks of their time. We have designed our society in such a way that most of the possibilities open to young people are either bookish or frivolous.”(Self Renewal, p.126)
Gardner’s observation identifies one the best ways we have to inject much more academic vigor into our schools and classrooms. We should be designing more classroom learning experiences that engage students in tackling the great tasks of our time. In our own country those great tasks include: reducing income inequality, rebuilding communities and reestablishing a sense of community, developing leadership behavior focused on ethical conduct, collaboration and cooperation, reducing crime and the rate of incarceration, and finding peaceful solutions to conflicts. Internationally those tasks include working to alleviate poverty and hunger, reducing mortality rates among children, improving access to quality health care in third world countries, promoting gender equality, and increasing global understanding.
The truth is that most schools, because they are consumed with increasing academic rigor and with preparing students to pass a battery of standardized tests, have made little progress in reducing bookish and frivolous work in favor of engaging students in the great tasks of our time.
If we are to engage students in the great tasks of our times we must stop spending so much time teaching them that America is the greatest country in the world: that we have the best medical system, the best technology, the best inventors, innovators and entrepreneurs, the best business and political leaders, the best democracy, the best everything. First because it isn’t so, and secondly because the more we convince students that we are the greatest at everything, the more we weaken their incentive to tackle the myriad problems for which we still have no great solutions.
That is the message Jeff Daniels, who plays a TV news anchorman in Newsroom,
delivers when he is asked by a college student during a panel discussion to state in one sentence why America is the greatest country in the world. If you haven’t seen the show, here is a link to how he answers the question. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVwUphZ37Ww&feature=related
Structuring learning experiences that engage young people in tackling the tasks of our time adds vigor to learning experiences, but it brings rigor along with it as well. As I mentioned in the September post, my wife and I have been interviewing people ages 7 to 17 who, on their own or with the encouragement of teachers or parents, have taken on some of the great tasks of our times. At the end of this post you will find several websites that identify a few of these young people and what they are doing. What will be obvious as you view these websites is that these young people are passionate about what they are doing and because of their passion they have mastered the rigorous skills and knowledge
that makes it possible for them to do what they are doing.
Young people who discover they have a passion for something, like the rest of us, are willing to work hard to develop the skills and knowledge that make it possible for them to pursue their passion. That’s why bringing academic vigor into a classroom should be our starting point. Academic vigor has the potential to incite the enthusiasm for learning that rigor alone will not. And once a student’s passion is fueled, the doorway for rigor is wide open.
As the story “Expelled” moves forward we learn what’s troubling Cheever about his education. It is “laced with curtseys and perfumed punctualities.” Margaret Courtwright, his English teacher, is as bland as a teacher can be, but she gets students into Harvard and is revered because of that. Laura Driscoll, who is the only teacher he has ever had who could “feel history with an emotional vibrance,” is fired for telling students Sacco and Vanzetti are innocent. The school, young Cheever recognizes, is not interested in teachers who provoke students to think about and engage with the great issues of our time; it prefers those who preach:
Our country is the best country in the world. We are swimming
in prosperity and our President is the best president in the
world. We have larger apples and better cotton and faster and
more beautiful machines. This makes us the greatest country
in the world. Unemployment is a myth. Dissatisfaction is a fable.
This kind of education, says young Cheever, produces students who are“certified”for higher education, but are indifferent and disengaged from the great challenges that face society. We can and must do better than this.
It’s time for educators, politicians, businessmen, parents and the general public to face the fact that an “education” that focuses on rigor while ignoring vigor –that certifies students but leaves them indifferent—isn’t simply uninspiring, it’s underserving of the name education.
Your comments are welcome.
Websites of Young People Embracing the Great Tasks of Our Time
Dylan Mahalingham Lil MDGs
http://lilmdgs.org/
Big Book: Pages for Peace
http://www.pagesforpeace.org/home.html
Timmy ‘Mini Tyrell
http://www.minismission.com/
Robert Li Social Responsibility Foundation
www.SRFChina.org