From the dawn of institutionalized schooling until now there have always been reformers, who want to modify the way schooling is done. For the most part, such reformers can be scaled along what might be called a liberal-conservative, or progressive-traditionalist, continuum. At one end are those who think that children learn best when they are happy, have choices, study material that is directly meaningful to them, and, in general, are permitted some control over what and how they learn. At the other end are those who think that children learn best when they are firmly directed and guided, by authoritative teachers who know better than children what to learn and how to learn it. Over time there has been regular back-and-forth movement of the educational pendulum along this continuum. But the pendulum never moves very far. Kindhearted progressives, viewed as softheaded by the traditionalists, push one way for a while, and that doesn't work very well. And then hardnosed traditionalists, viewed as petrified fossils by the progresssives, push the other way for a while, and that doesn't work very well either.
The pendulum never moves very far before it is pushed back in the other direction, because neither type of reform works. Progressive policies, inserted into a system in which children are still expected to learn a certain pre-specified set of skills and body of knowledge, don't work because children on their own don't choose to learn the specific curriculum that is expected of them. The no-nonsense policies of the traditionalists have the advantage of making it clear to children what they are supposed to do and learn, but those policies don't work because they preclude creative thought and most strongly interfere with children's natural ways of learning. Children may learn the rote material needed to pass tests, but they don't remember it or use it in daily life because it has no meaning to them.
Such back-and-forth nudging of the pendulum is the stuff of continuous debate and of countless books written by professors of education. The people writing the books and doing the nudging call themselves reformers, but these slight pushes are not real reforms.
What do I mean by real educational reform?
Real educational reform, as I see it, requires a fundamental shift in our understanding of the educational process. It requires the kind of shift that I have been advocating in the whole series of essays that constitute this blog.
For starters, it requires that we abandon the idea that adults are in charge of children's learning. It requires, in other words, that we throw out the basic premise that underlies our system of schooling.
Essentially everyone involved in the educational enterprise--progressives as well as traditionalists--holds strongly to the premise that adults are in charge of children's learning. Progressive educators see teachers as clever manipulators of the child's environment, setting things up and subtly directing so that children will play the right games, explore the right questions in the right way, and learn the right answers, ultimately so they can pass the tests (see Rousseau's Errors). Traditionalists aim for a more direct route to imparting the right answers, without the games. Both sides believe that good learning is a function of good teaching; they just disagree on what constitutes good teaching. Both sides also believe that it is adults' responsibility to decide what children should learn and to test children, in one way or another, formally or informally, to be sure that they are learning the right things.
The idea that children are and should be responsible for their own learning is the thesis that runs through most of the previous essays of this blog. "Freedom to Learn." Children come into the world intensely motivated to learn about the physical, social, and cultural world around them; but they need freedom in order to pursue that motive. For their first four or five years of life we generally grant them that freedom. During those first few years, without any teaching, they learn a large portion of what any human being ever learns. They learn their entire native language, from scratch. They learn the basic practical principles of physics. They learn psychology to such a degree that they become experts in how to please, annoy, manipulate, and charm the other people in their environment. They acquire a huge store of factual knowledge. They learn how to operate the gadgets that they are allowed to operate, even those that seem extraordinarily complex to us adults.
They do all this on their own initiative, with essentially no direction from adults. In fact adults can't stop children from learning all this, unless they shut them away in closets. It is not just a few special "geniuses" or uniquely self-motivated children who do this; all children do it, except a very few who have real brain damage.
But then, at school age, we do the equivalent of shutting children into closets. We force them into settings called "schools" where we deprive them of their natural ways of learning, so they can't learn much on their own, and there we give teachers the task of "teaching" them. So, of course, in those settings whatever the child manages to learn is very much affected by the teacher. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you force children into settings where they can't learn on their own, then learning is necessarily dependent on teaching.
Children learn wonderfully without anyone systematically or deliberately teaching them, but yet, we adults do have, or should have, the responsibility of providing the conditions that allow children to take charge of their own learning. Real educational reform, in my view, is reform that provides those conditions.
The most important condition is freedom. To learn on their own, children need unlimited time to play, explore, become bored, overcome boredom, discover their own interests, and pursue those interests. To learn what they need to know to become highly effective, productive, moral members of the larger society they also need a rich environment within which to play and explore. By a rich environment I mean an environment that brings them into meaningful contact with the valued tools, skills, ideas, ethical principles, mores, and meaningful debates of the larger culture. Such an environment is, among other things, an age-mixed environment, in which younger children learn new skills and ideas by observing and interacting naturally with older children and adults, and where older children learn to nurture and lead by interacting with younger ones.
In hunter-gatherer bands, all of this was provided naturally, with no particular effort, because children were automatically immersed in all of the activities of the band (see The Wisdom of Hunter-Gatherers). The Sudbury Valley School and other schools modeled after it have shown that it is possible, with some thought and effort, to provide all this for children in our culture--at far less expense and trouble than the current cost and trouble of public schools--with wonderful educational consequences (see Lessons from Sudbury Valley). Many unschooling families, likewise, have figured out ways to provide the sort of rich environment needed to allow their children to educate themselves marvelously.
Real reform is not possible from within the existing conventional school system.
