However I think that there is a definite need for accountability in education, and as someone who hopes to teach in public schools for years to come, I am perfectly willing to submit myself to a standard. Personally, I like having a bar to start from, but that doesn't mean that I want to teach to the bar. I want to challenge my future students to reach new levels of learning that they never dreamt of before stepping into my classroom. I want to challenge students to create and to do something with what they are learning. I always learned the most in classes where my teachers asked me to respond to something and not just learn it, and I loved those classes more than my lecture classes.
As someone who never attended a private school until college, I think that the public school system produces fine students. I was lucky to have parents who encouraged my learning outside of school and pushed me to realize my best in my faith, my physical well-being, and my artistic abilities. I would love to experience Sudbury and Summerhill to a fuller extent than I have in just the two-hour video and discussion that we had my class, but until last Thursday, I did not even realize that these schools existed! Thank you for the thoughtful comments I have received so far and I hope that you'll understand that I totally agree with you, I'm just the kind of person who needs some structure. :)
3 comments:
It's funny that you say you are a person who needs some structure. One of the most interesting twists of perception versus reality about democratic schools is the impression that they are unstructured.
They are actually very highly structured, but in a way that is hidden from most people's view because they don't know where to look for the structures that matter. Traditional classroom schooling (I grew up in public schools, like you) consider adult control over children's activities to be "structure." And furthermore the adult's taking control over children's activities is presumed to be "educational."
But, focusing your attention on the control of activities hides in the background the real structure that determines how each individual's character is influenced in that context. Individual character is a result of the role that person plays within the group and the range of options they have for playing out their role. The classroom only provides for two roles, student and teacher, with a range of characters that are typically available within each of those roles. Students can be the class clown, a brain, a bully, teacher's pet, etc. Teacher's also have a range of character traits that are easily recognized, tough but fair, pushover, plays favorites, drone, etc. These roles are not necessarily consciously chosen, they are an emergent quality from the interactions that occur.
What democratic schools like Summerhill and Sudbury do, in my opinion, is to shift the context in a way that allows the members of the community to focus on solving problems, pursuing goals, and having fun, instead of wasting their time playing out a narrow range of predetermined roles. Where problems are the circumstances that cause non-optimal states of mind, goals are individual experiments for achieving optimal states of mind and fun is the default human species social experiment for engaging everyone in the game of attaining optimal states of mind.
I wrote about Democratic Schools in this series on my web site. The starting point of the series is contrasting images of the ideal of teacher controlled instruction versus the apparently chaotic world of democratic schools. In the intro I have links to different artilces, videos and a pod cast that exemplify the contrast.
When I started off I thought I would address the presumptoin that adult control is "educational" but since this is already long I refer you to the definition of education page on my site.
You might also be interested in my article entitled, "Debunking the Myth That School Is A Classroom."
I recently saw a post on my AP List serve in which a long time teacher achieved standards by not giving a grade until the work was up to expectations. Instead he gave an I(ncomplete). There was no passing with a D, C, B, whathave you. He was teaching to the bar, but it was set high. He's also a track coach.
Falstaff
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