Breaking The Classroom Habitby Don Berg, Founder Part 1 of 2
The following is the first part of a two part series of excerpts from my book Attitude First: A Leadership Strategy For Educational Success (Trafford, 2004) talking about three of the breakthroughs that have shaped my thinking about education: I grew up in the public school system, so did most Americans. Then, when I discovered I had a talent for working with children and a passion for working with elementary-age kids, I rejected the classroom approach to education that I grew up with. Most Americans, when they become parents or teachers, don’t. Despite this rejection, I eventually realized that since classroom-based schooling continues to serve the majority of the American people, I could not in good conscience simply reject it entirely. Thus, I found myself on the horns of a dilemma; if I don’t believe that approach is correct, how do I honor the teachers who remain committed to it? I have wrestled with this dilemma for years, and I believe I finally have a reasonable answer. My part in the drama of this wrestling match has been defined by a series of three crucial breakthroughs that have changed my understanding of the problem. My first major breakthrough came when I realized that the people in schools are not the problem. Therefore, I could honor the participants in the classroom drama, because I know that whatever tragedies occur are generally a result of the set and/or script, not the students, teachers, administrators, or any other actors in the play. Whatever may be wrong with schools, it doesn’t help to put down the students, teachers, administrators, or anyone else, for being personally involved in the system. This first breakthrough meant that I was immediately challenged to clearly articulate exactly what does not work. I have read a lot of criticism of schools and classrooms, and found that I generally agree with all of them to some extent, but I was aiming for a particular mark that they all missed. I eventually re-discovered John Dewey’s books from 1916 and 1938. Democracy and Education, from 1916, was an amazingly thorough critique of the industrial concept of the classroom. This seminal work kicked off the progressive school movement, a nationwide effort to create models of non-industrial schools. Dewey inspired legions of parents and teachers to throw out conventional wisdom and try teaching in the classroom in totally different ways. Then, in 1938, Dewey threw in the towel in a series of lectures that became the book Experience and Education. After more than 20 years of well-organized effort, Dewey realized that he had failed to communicate what it was that did work, even though he was extremely clear about what did not work. He attributed his failure to the lack of a theory of experience. A theory of experience would enable him to distinguish why the same experience can be educational for one person but not another, or why one person can be receptive to instruction at one time and not another. I realized that what Dewey overlooked is that the classroom is inherently designed as a place for instructing, not learning. The classroom as we know it today was designed by and/or for instructors. The script of this play is written to portray the heroic struggles of instructors overcoming the challenges of recalcitrant or otherwise educationally impoverished students. The reason Dewey failed is because he was still pursuing the same agenda that created the classroom in the first place. He assumed that what was industrial was the management and methods used there rather than the idea of the classroom itself. As Einstein is reputed to have said, “You cannot solve a problem with the same consciousness that created it in the first place.” The six key assumptions of teacher-centric classroom consciousness are:
Upon acceptance of any school-related job or enrollment in a school the above factors are assumed, even if you personally don’t agree with them. Even Dewey assumed the classroom itself was necessary. So now my dilemma was even more acute. These are not things that can be altered without major revolutionary changes, so how can I possibly help those who are fully vested in this system without alienating them? First of all, the classroom is not bad in and of itself. The challenge is to use the classroom in developmentally appropriate ways. If we understand the developmental challenge of the elementary years (ages 6-12) as one of constructing a social world, then what kind of social world do we expect children to construct within this kind of environment? How often do we as adults gather in socially isolated, developmentally homogenous groups, give one person (by virtue of their advanced maturity) autocratic authority over our every behavior, and ensure that we don’t have much control over our own activities? That doesn’t sound like an environment that has much to offer, unless you are being groomed for a monastic or highly institutionalized lifestyle. It doesn’t sound like a recipe for the kind of healthy social development necessary to handle the freedom and responsibility of living in today’s complex world. The very core of Dewey’s analysis was his concept of the continuity of experience. His primary criticism of the industrial classroom was that it broke that continuity by introducing experiences that were inconsistent with how human beings actually experience the world. As children human beings are not designed to handle large, age-segregated, autocratically managed, academically oriented, physically immobile, and socially isolated groups. Therefore, because of their developmental immaturity, children aren’t capable of taking advantage of the opportunities available in that kind of environment. In my estimation, the classroom would be O.K. for children, in small voluntary doses, since most of the qualities of the classroom, individually (not all at once), are in some contexts basically normal in adult society today. But it is not a desirable place for children to be forced to spend the vast majority of their waking hours, during the critical developmental phase of their life, when they are constructing the foundations of their concepts of social reality. It is the script that is the problem with this play, not the set and not the players. We are designed to build concepts of social reality within a relatively simple network of relationships (i.e., a family or tribe) in which each player in the social network has real influence and regular meaningful contact with every other member of the network. This is how families and tribes are organized. A democratic society is, essentially, meant to be a scaled up version of that same dynamic. The classroom is probably an appropriate setting for teaching many teenagers and adults because they are presumably refining their constructions of social reality, not laying the foundations. Healthy teenagers and adults are capable of understanding, and effectively putting up with, the social limitations of classroom consciousness because healthy teens and adults, unlike children, are capable, to a greater degree, of managing their own attention. We have inherited a cast of millions of caring and committed teachers and a set with an incredible elementary school infrastructure. The challenge is to write a new script that portrays the heroism of learning (like the movie October Skies, based on the real-life story of how the son of a coal miner took responsibility for his education and became a rocket scientist.) My second major breakthrough came when I realized that identifying classroom consciousness does not meet the standard for saying what does work, it only identifies a matrix of assumptions that do not work when simultaneously applied to children. In fact, I fully realize that this matrix of assumptions can’t all be rejected at the same time, because then we would probably cease to have a coherent system. As I contemplated schools, I noticed how much the non-industrial alternative education movement had generally alienated the mainstream school system and also remained a thoroughly marginal segment within the education industry. Home schooling is clearly the most widespread alternative and it only accounts for, at most, 4 or 5% of the K-12 students in the U.S. All other alternatives account for maybe 2%, to be generous, and, in my opinion, 7% of the market is not a substantial subversion of the dominant paradigm when that 7% represents a fractious and largely disparate set of groups. Whatever the alternative and home school groups are doing to increase their market impact isn’t working, or if it is working, it is moving glacially slow. Most alternative schools that have survived more than five years appear to be doing good things educationally with their students, but they simply aren’t reaching enough of them to be significant in the industry. So, I’m not going to open yet another alternative school anytime soon, but I hope I can help good alternative schools make a bigger impact. The second part talks about the third breakthrough and begins to put together the foundations of an alternative way of thinking about education. Over the years since I wrote the book,Attitude First, my fundamental insights have not changed, though I have developed different ways of expressing them.
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