The cheerless depictions of our public schools from the 1800s are famously etched in our minds by writers like Charles Dickens and memorialized in countless black-and-white photos of pupils staring forward, blankly, with arms folded, behind rows of wooden desks. As we fast forward a couple of centuries, these images have been replaced by a more colorful assortment of engaging lessons and student interactions more befitting a 21st Century education.
Yes, yes, have no worry. It is true that across the wide landscape of public schools we have made progress in discovering greater collaboration among children, richer technologies in use, and even deeper relationships among teachers and students. The monochromatic curriculum and routines of the past are harder to find, and that is a good thing.
Still, here’s the rub.
Many kids still don’t like school, in large part because they perceive school as something they must endure and not something to be enjoyed. Though largely unspoken, the uncomfortable reality remains that school is something each of us must conquer to gain access to a professional, middle class life that most of us seek. If we are not careful, this can lead to large swaths of children completing assignments they neither enjoy nor appreciate within subjects they neither selected nor endorsed. As I have stated previously, it is hard to ask students to name a favorite subject when they didn’t pick the subjects.
Alas, it doesn’t have to be this way.
In its purest form, standardization is a method we have in place to ensure that students across schools, districts, and states have access to similarly challenging curricula and lessons. In a strange way, standardization by design is also associated with uniformity, conformity, and compliance. In fact, schooling has been standardized in large part to provide equitable access for children to college and career options beyond high school. Of course, this supposes that access is synonymous with success in the same way that arriving to some destination is the same as thriving once you get there.
In his famous essay Lilies that Fester, C.S. Lewis makes a compelling case for some balance between what is demanded by the teacher (i.e., standards) and what is desired by the student, things like personal exploration, authentic debate, and original thought. Lewis claims that a child’s path to intellectual maturity is paved by conformity in the way a child can calculate, consider, recite, and rebuff in such a way as to sound like everyone else. “The boy will not get good marks unless he produces the kind of responses, and the kind of analytic method, which commend themselves to his teacher.”
Of course, there is nothing wrong with this as long as you’re the teacher. Still, it is fair to question whether a new generation of entrepreneurial young scholars will arise from a system where children are “trained in the art of simulating orthodox responses.” For those who like to debate such things, I explore this in greater depth in Chapter 4 of my first book, The Instructional Soul.
In Search of Free Expression…and Hand Turkeys
If we were fair and honest in our assessment, we would say that children in the 21st Century have more access to quality, rigorous instruction than ever before. We would also say that we have traded away some measure of intellectual freedom, personal exploration, and creative expression. If we were fair and honest, we would admit that somewhere lost in all the talk about higher-order thinking and complex tasks is the very real possibility that some children are racing home as we speak (on their bikes, I presume) with their tickets out the door in one hand and their textual evidence in another, though I pray they are not.
We might even celebrate the victories among us when an unsuspecting young person teases out the smallest nuances in a text or an equation or surgically applies brackets and parenthesis in appropriately sourcing their evidence. Even if we cannot resolve whether or not this is progress, we can certainly agree that these skills will make them college-ready by successfully mimicking their professors.
Just as it is fair to question what in God’s name a teacher is thinking in having little girls and boys create hand turkeys, it is equally difficult to weigh the brilliance in play among the genius child who just aced her district progress monitoring quiz with the dullard who took first place for his satirical rant and the delinquent who made the audience weep whilst reciting his spoken word poem. Maybe all of these decisions are best left to others who are more prominent than we as to which student talent and award is more prestigious than another, as long as we remain steadfast in our support for the girl with perfect attendance as there is nothing more gallant than someone who endures such a thing. Bless her heart.
No matter what becomes of our current pedagogical trends, I can only hope that the hand turkey might again be in vogue when each one can be printed on the school’s new 3D printer and entered into the district STEM competition. Still, what are we to know? In light of full disclosure, let me say that the uninformed conclusions expressed herein are just hunches as I have not yet uncovered enough randomized controlled studies to consider any of this evidence-based.
Alas, it doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, many schools are experimenting with innovations in curriculum design and student agency in ways that would erase the chalk board and wooden desk from our memories forever.
In his book Orbiting the Giant Hairball, creative thinker and artist Gordon MacKenzie relays a sad story about his visits to elementary schools during his time working at Hallmark. He would ask students in the earliest grades how many artists there were in the room and nearly every hand shot up. When he asked the same question of students in 3rd grade, a few would waive their arms. By sixth grade, only one or two students would slowly and sheepishly raise their hands. School, like the rest of society, had imparted its will upon children to “be normal.”
MacKenzie writes, “My guess is there was a time – perhaps when you were very young – when you had at least a fleeting notion of your own genius and were just waiting for some authority figure to come along and validate it for you.
But none ever came.”
Alas, it doesn’t have to be this way.
Lest you fear otherwise, we should be clear that the monochromatic scenes from the 1800s are harder to find amid our modern public schools. Still, one must wonder if being monochromatic in thought is worse than being monochromatic in appearance.*
In the final analysis, I fear that it is.
*Strangely, they never write child protection laws about such things.
