Tuesday, September 20, 2005
A challenge to American schools & a model that works
I've just read Dennis Littky's book "The Big Picture, Education is everybody's business" and I think anyone interested in the way we school our children ought take a look at it; everyone: parents, teachers, principals, school board members, legislators.
Littky's book challenges the traditional philosophy and practices of American schools. And we deserve that challenge. We are raising kids in dysfunctional schools, dysfunctional even when we believe they are working satisfactorily. At the most fundamental level the philosophy upon which the schools are based, a philosophy laid down in the Nineteenth Century designed to train people to fulfill the needs of industry, has not changed. The problem is that training is not educating. Defining the success of schools by standard tests, the method used to upgrade the dysfunctional system by No Child Left Behind only serves to make the dysfunctional system worse. America's children need a better system.
Littky, after thirty or more years of work in public schools as a principal has turned the old philosophy out the door. His objective is to lead children to love learning and that leads to radically different kinds of schools. In his schools parents are closely involved with the work in every way. Students and teachers work in small groups focusing on projects that cultivate the interests and the skills of the students. School bells do not ring interrupting the process of learning. Students open themselves to the learning process, develop confidence and the needed basic skills of writing and mathematics in the process of doing the projects that fascinate them. Learning becomes joyful. Teachers then become not loaders of information but leaders, fellow learners, who help the child develop the information necessary to the learning process. And, yes, to do this schools must be smaller than we have come to make them in the last fifty years. Huge consolidated, impersonal schools have failed. Littky demonstrates how much more effective small schools are at every level.
The results speak for themselves. Over ninety percent of the children who leave Littky's schools go on to higher education and most of those students when they come into his schools are children who have failed to flourish in traditional schools. For this and a dozen other reasons, Littky's challenge to American education is a powerful book that must not be ignored. Besides, it's a good read. The man speaks to us and we hear his passion for learning. He is his own model for the philosophy and the practice he would inculcate in his students, their parents, his teachers, and us.
American education needs a model that works. Littky offers us that model
Littky's book challenges the traditional philosophy and practices of American schools. And we deserve that challenge. We are raising kids in dysfunctional schools, dysfunctional even when we believe they are working satisfactorily. At the most fundamental level the philosophy upon which the schools are based, a philosophy laid down in the Nineteenth Century designed to train people to fulfill the needs of industry, has not changed. The problem is that training is not educating. Defining the success of schools by standard tests, the method used to upgrade the dysfunctional system by No Child Left Behind only serves to make the dysfunctional system worse. America's children need a better system.
Littky, after thirty or more years of work in public schools as a principal has turned the old philosophy out the door. His objective is to lead children to love learning and that leads to radically different kinds of schools. In his schools parents are closely involved with the work in every way. Students and teachers work in small groups focusing on projects that cultivate the interests and the skills of the students. School bells do not ring interrupting the process of learning. Students open themselves to the learning process, develop confidence and the needed basic skills of writing and mathematics in the process of doing the projects that fascinate them. Learning becomes joyful. Teachers then become not loaders of information but leaders, fellow learners, who help the child develop the information necessary to the learning process. And, yes, to do this schools must be smaller than we have come to make them in the last fifty years. Huge consolidated, impersonal schools have failed. Littky demonstrates how much more effective small schools are at every level.
The results speak for themselves. Over ninety percent of the children who leave Littky's schools go on to higher education and most of those students when they come into his schools are children who have failed to flourish in traditional schools. For this and a dozen other reasons, Littky's challenge to American education is a powerful book that must not be ignored. Besides, it's a good read. The man speaks to us and we hear his passion for learning. He is his own model for the philosophy and the practice he would inculcate in his students, their parents, his teachers, and us.
American education needs a model that works. Littky offers us that model
