Children educate themselves. Children are biologically built for self-education. Their instincts to explore; to observe; to eavesdrop on the conversations of their elders; to ask countless questions; and to play with the artifacts, ideas, and skills of the culture all serve the purpose of education. Regular readers of this blog know that this has been my main thesis, from Post #1 on through this one, Post #38.
Schools, as we generally know them, interfere with children's abilities to educate themselves. When we confine children and adolescents to schools, where they are assigned to rooms by age and can't choose their associates, where they can't pursue their own interests but instead must conform to the dictates of the teacher and the time course of the bell, we interfere with their abilities to educate themselves. Children's natural means of education require freedom. Regular readers of this blog know that this is my secondary thesis.
In my last two posts I outlined a case against compulsory (forced) schooling. Now, in this post, I will say a bit about what students like about school, to the degree that they like it at all, and will sketch out my thoughts about how we, as a society, could satisfy their desires and provide them the opportunities to educate themselves well without coercion. I begin, however, with a digression.
A Digression: Some Sources for Readers Who Wish to Explore Further The Ideas That Children Educate Themselves and that Our Standard Schools Interfere
Over the course of the past three or four weeks, many new readers have tuned into this blog. The comments suggest that some of the new readers have gone back to read earlier posts, to see how the arguments build, and some have not. For some readers, the ideas that children are biologically built to educate themselves and that our coercive educational practices interfere with self-education are relatively new, not something that they have thought or read much about before. For that reason, I offer this digression, suggesting some readings for those who wish to delve further into the thought and evidence behind these ideas.
The ideas that children educate themselves and that coercion interferes with self-education are by no means new. Anthropologists have found that hunter-gather adults, everywhere, understood those ideas well and therefore allowed children and adolescence unlimited free time to explore and play on their own (for documentation, see my article on play in hunter-gatherer cultures, in The American Journal of Play, 2009, pp 476-522). In modern times, ideas about self-education and the harmful effects of coercion have been discussed in depth by a number of people whose profound familiarity with the standard educational system led them to become severe critics of it. Here are three whose works have been especially influential:
• John Holt was an elementary school teacher who, after nine or ten years of teaching, decided to make systematic observations of classrooms and children's behavior within them, in order to understand why so many fail to learn the subject matter. One of his chief conclusions was that our system of forced education and grading generates fear, and fear inhibits learning. Holt's most well known books are How Children Fail and How Children Learn. Later, Holt became a leader of the home education and unschooling movement and produced a newsletter entitled Growing Without Schooling. Holt died of cancer in 1985, at a time when he was still in his intellectual prime, but his work is carried on by Holt Associates Inc., led by Patrick Farenga.
• John Gatto taught in public schools for nearly thirty years. For three years in a row he was named New York City Teacher of the Year, and in 1991 he was named New York State Teacher of the Year. In that same year, 1991, he quit teaching and stated (in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal) that his reason was that he no longer wished to "hurt kids to make a living." Gatto's experience teaching in some of New York's "worst schools" and "best schools" convinced him that schools serve primarily to dumb kids down. Gatto concluded that children and adolescents are far smarter, and learn much more, when they are engaged with the real world and real problems, or with adventures of their own choosing, than when they are in the artificial, forced environment of school. His books include Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling; A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling; and Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling.
• Daniel A. Greenberg began thinking seriously about the problems of education in America when he was a physics professor at Columbia University, in the early 1960s. Although he was a very popular teacher, he noticed that most students in his classes, and in other classes as well, were oriented toward getting the highest grades possible with the least effort possible, rather than toward really learning the subjects he was teaching. This led to a period of serious thought about the conditions in our schools that produce this attitude even in the brightest students. He resigned from his position at Columbia, moved to Massachusetts, and, in 1968--along with his wife Hanna and several other innovators--founded the Sudbury Valley School, a school designed for self-education. In this school, which I have described in a previous post, children and adolescents are free, all day, to associate with whom they please, to use their time as they please, and to use the school's resources as they please, as long as they don't break any of the schools rules, which students and staff create together democratically. Now, 41 years later, Sudbury Valley serves as a model for many other "Sudbury" schools throughout the world. For 41 years Greenberg has continued as a staff member at Sudbury Valley--elected each year to the staff through the one-person-one-vote procedure--and has authored many books and countless articles about the philosophy of the school and the experiences of students and former students. His books (in some cases co-authored with others) include: The Crisis in American Education, A New Look at Schools, and Turning Learning Rightside Up (on educational philosophy); Kingdom of Childhood and The Sudbury Valley School Experience (about life at Sudbury Valley); and Legacy of Trust and The Pursuit of Happiness (both based on systematic follow-up studies of former students of Sudbury Valley).
The perspectives and specific ideas of these three thinkers are in many ways quite different from one another, but there is a good deal of overlap. These are all people who stepped out of the box to observe schooling as it commonly exists in the United States and concluded that schools as we know them do not serve well the interests of children. Children need freedom in order to learn effectively and joyfully, and schools as we know them severely restrict freedom.
My own perspective--developed in the whole series of posts in this blog--does not match precisely that of any of the above three thinkers, but it too shares that area of overlap. I have come to my view partly from family experiences (such as watching my son and step-children grow up and observing their reactions to schooling); partly from my observations of college students in my 30 years of college teaching (which are similar to Greenberg's observations); partly from my observations of classrooms at a variety of public schools; partly from my analysis of the entire corpus of psychological literature on child development (as author of a general college textbook of psychology); partly from my formal (published) research and informal observations of learning at the Sudbury Valley School; and partly from my analysis of the anthropological literature on children's learning in other cultures, especially hunter-gatherer cultures.
