There are a lot of articles these days on the undoing, reforming, turning around, rethinking of schools across the nation. We are not satisfied with what we have done or are doing. But at the same time, we don't seem able to learn from our mistakes. There is an overwhelming desire to control, control, control that classroom and have uniformity, uniformity, uniformity as we teach children we encourage to be different, different, different.
I remember when the best schools in the nation were the one room school houses in the far outback of the western Midwest. These schools produced the highest test scores and their students found their way into more good colleges than any other schools in the nation.
The big moneyed "to do" schools of the east produced conflict. The big fancy schools in the west produced a love for nihilism while the Midwestern kids to the center stage of learning and produced our thinkers, our movers and our shakers.
So as we look into the future, what are we looking forward to? One political position is to increase government and therefore the size of unmanageable schools. Another political position is to reduce the size of government without plan.
As a grass roots person, I believe if you want to do it right, do it yourself. If you wait for government, you are waiting for a pipe dream. Government is good for one thing - arbitration. In the rest of the world, it's like a giant oaf. If government was a person, he or she would be locked up either in jail or a home for the deranged.
So, not wanting to wait for government, we started with six students and $160.00 and went off to build our own school. Our primary question was "What CAN children do?" Second question was "What WILL they do?"
What we discovered, and why we are so successful, is simple. We built a small school for the children. We did not build with any other thing in mind. We did not draw from other schools. Other schools drew from us. We did not copy curriculum from books; we used our own skills to teach. We did not plan our days according to "developmentally appropriate" practices because this theory retards growth.
Here's what we discovered:
Three year old children simply want to experience learning without actually making a commitment. They want to be around learning. They want to dabble, try for a time, and take home something wonderful that they made or half made. Their skills are developing slowly, and they want to do a lot of play. But they don't really know how to play, so being around older children during play reaps a positive reward. No three year old likes to nap. And we found that threes will memorize a lot.
Four year old children are usually ready for a lot of the usual kindergarten work. They love the paper work and think they are big when they can do it. They think fast, do things quickly, and absorb with an alacrity most college kids would envy. They are spunky, and energetic and take great pride in being included in the play. This is the time when handwriting, letter learning and pre-reading skills dominate a child's life, because they simply WANT to know. Reading is a little like that rock climb. They are ready and willing.
At five, children are ready for ideas. They tire easily of paperwork, sitting and the same old same old day after day. So sprinkling their lives with stories, play acting, science, foreign language, geography, fine arts fits better than anything else. With the reading and writing under their belts, they can begin to explore in independent study. This is the real foundation builder for their adult lives. At five, the child's answer to nearly everything is "more, more, more, please!"
Now how do you translate this into big government schools?
If I were to rebuild what needs to be rebuilt, it would be this: I would design schools to have a pool of fours, fives and sixes who I would call "poly wogs" in every public grammar school. I would divide these into small groups of about twelve children. Some children excel quickly, and some do not, so as a child learns and develops reading and writing skills to a point he or she is proficient, I would launch him or her into the mainstream school any time of the year that it happens - to first grade. This allows for the individual approach to caring for our children. It also allows for the brighter child to advance. It allows for the struggling child to get some time to understand. During the school year, some children would advance out of one class and into another across the school. Age is not a determinant for ability. Some children reach out and learn and some don't. By having fluid learning, the curriculum could fly. Every child in every room would be up to the learning bar by his own choice and work. This way, there is no disgrace in remaining in one class for a second year because the fluidity of movement is at the discretion of the teacher.
At the other end of the spectrum, the early birds who may only be fifteen or sixteen at the end of their high school years and are emotionally too young to go off to college would have a year or two of independent study. These children could either work half a day or begin to learn what it means to pull knowledge together into a real project. Internships of one kind or another would be an option. Attending bussed classes in near by colleges would be an interesting idea.
From an administrative point of view, there is no increase in anything including building space or teaching staff. There are no test scores that would not be good because the children learn at their own pace, and the curriculum is more interesting because every child is on target.
Just a thought for a Thursday...
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