Anarchy in education

Ra Energy Fdn.
Raleigh Myers
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Blog
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The Sudbury Town Crier
Contrary indicators: Anarchy in education
By Richard Payne/ Crier Columnist
Thursday, December 2, 2004

My son, who was probably around 20 at the time, once asked
me, more out of exasperation than curiosity one suspects,
"how come you know so much?" I assured him in all modesty
that it wasn't really true but that in any event it was
because I had received a decent basic education.

John Ritchie no doubt will think that one "over the top" but
please don't get me wrong. Jonathan is a perfectly admirable
young fellow, smart and accomplished and with achievements
at a disgustingly early age that I have never aspired to.
Perhaps indeed he is a living endorsement of the theory
promoted by such educational luminaries as Dan Greenberg and
Alfie Kohn that least is best in education. It is an
interesting theory that speaks volumes to the society we
live in and that most thinking people I suspect will find,
as I do, slightly batty.

I was reminded of this once again when I picked up a slim
book by Alfie Kohn at the library entitled "What does it
mean to be well educated?" On the back cover of the book is
a quote from the Washington Post: "The most energetic and
charismatic figure standing in the way of a major federal
effort to make standardized curriculums and tests a fact of
life in every US school." Take that, George Bush.

Ah, that old chestnut "standardized tests." The adjective
plays the same role as socialized in "socialized medicine."
Unabashedly pejorative it was an essential component of the
hysterical reaction to the introduction of the Massachusetts
Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), which thankfully now
seems to have subsided. For now anyway.

Kohn is the guru of anti-traditional modes of education, a
fierce opponent of achievement testing in all its forms,
grades, SATs, achievement itself, formal education, period.
As such he is well known to educators -- and not a few
parents -- who generally seem to love what he has to say. He
doesn't believe in offering praise to children nor does he
think that teachers should be rewarded with merit pay. It is
an anarchist view of education in which least is best and
perhaps, pursuing the concept to its logical conclusion,
nothing at all is best of all.

Dan Greenberg is also well known in these parts as the
founder of the Sudbury Valley School and a regular columnist
in the MetroWest Daily News where he frequently writes on
the subject of unstructured education (my term.) At the
Sudbury Valley School so far as one can determine the pupils
are free to come and go as they please and are not obliged
to participate in any formal lessons but rather indulge in
whatever takes their fancy. Harking back to my own dim and
distant schooldays, I would have to rate that philosophy an
open invitation to disaster, total and complete.

What are we to make of it all? Do people really pay to have
their children moon away their formative years? I guess they
do. No doubt those who have been through such a system will
be especially inclined later in life to ask their parents
the kind of question my son addressed to me.

What indeed does it mean to be well educated? Kohn answers
the question posed in the title of his book. He talks about
his wife Alisa, a Harvard graduate whom, he tells us, he met
when she was "putting the finishing touches on her doctoral
dissertation in anthropology." Her intellectual bona fides
thus firmly established he then reports that she cannot come
up with the answer to eight times seven.

"Forget about grammar" he assures the reader "('me and him
went over her house today' is fairly typical.)" Hard to
believe. "After a dozen years," he tells us, "I continue to
be impressed with how much she doesn't know." One wonders if
Alisa has read her husband's book and, if so, what her
immediate reaction might have been?

Kohn then goes on to pose the interesting question: "So what
do you make of this paradox with whom I live? Is she a
walking indictment of the system that let her get so far . .
. without acquiring the basics of English and math? Or does
she offer an invitation to rethink what it means to be
well-educated since what she lacks hasn't prevented her from
being a deep-thinking, high-functioning, multiply
credentialed, professionally successful individual?"

But scarcely well-educated. On Kohn's own testimony she
cannot figure the cost of what she is buying at the
supermarket. Nor can she properly articulate her thoughts
and hence by extension cannot adequately commit them to
writing. There are many paradoxes like Alisa around, people
with high achievement in a very narrow field and the
colossal handicap of neither being able to write decent
English nor do simple mental arithmetic.

Greenberg's theory of education is if anything even more
extreme than Kohn's. Not only does he dispense with
"standards, grading and other follies" (in the words of
Kohn's subtitle) but also all structure and formal teaching.
"If you come to Sudbury Valley, the first impression you get
is that of a regular school in recess. You notice children,
outdoors and indoors, freely going on and off campus, freely
walking about, moving from room to room, changing from group
to group, talking, interacting, reading, playing."

But who taught them to read?

Reading Greenberg's writing one quickly realizes where he is
coming from. Like the freedom to bear arms it is about
so-called personal liberty. American public schools run
counter to the freedoms inserted into the Constitution by
the Founding Fathers. It is libertarianism run amok.

He tells us "Both society and the individual in modern
post-industrial America require that schools be an
environment in which children are FREE, and in which
children can LEARN HOW TO USE FREEDOM, how to be
self-governing, how to live together as free people in peace
and harmony and mutual respect" (capitals in the original).
But at the end of the day Johnny does not have the basic
tools he needs for survival in a competitive world.

He goes on: "The school is governed by a School Meeting in
which four-year-olds have the same vote as adults. Every
decision in the school is made by that School Meeting." Really?

There is a piece of Kohn/Greenberg in our much-loved high
school today. The ruckus back in the sixties and seventies
was precisely about the open campus and allowing students to
come and go as they please. Today's faculty opposes the MCAS
on principle and believes that 'love of learning' rather
than measurable achievement is what counts. Our schools of
education were taken over and politicized by wild-eyed
radicals with very odd ideas forty years ago. Their
influence may have waned. But the philosophy is not dead.

The quotes attributed to Dan Greenberg are from his essay
The Sudbury Valley School "School For a Post-Industrial
Society" at http://www.spinninglobe.net/carnegiesva.htm

Richard Payne is a research laboratory manager and a
longtime resident of Sudbury. He can be reached at
mailto:rpsudbury@msn.com

--
Dan Clore

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_Detective Comics_ #608



Ra Energy Fdn.
Raleigh Myers
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Blog
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