英文本 教育宗旨

Steve Rees was an architect in Kansas City with grown children. One day he was invited to a career lunch at DeLaSalle Education Center, a charter high school dedicated to addressing the needs of the city’s at-risk students. Steve knew going into the lunch that many DeLaSalle students had been kicked out of other schools and that a fair number of them had troubled pasts. What he discovered at the lunch was that these students had a far greater desire to do something with their lives than he would ever have guessed.

“There was a large number of kids who had not been able to find a course that worked for them,” he told me. “There were kids that had learning and emotional issues and social issues, but there was a lot of potential there.” Steve decided to take an active role in the school. He set up a program for some of DeLaSalle’s seniors that allowed them to take junior college classes. He also set up a mentoring program where he paired DeLaSalle students with adults in the Kansas City business community. These adults volunteered to take a student to lunch, spend time with the student in the volunteer’s workplace, and then have a follow-up lunch. The kids gained a glimpse into their potential futures, and the mentors forged emotional ties that many of them didn’t expect and that they found hugely rewarding.

The program made an impact, but Steve felt that it was just a start. Around this time, he sold his architectural practice and left the country for two years. He never stopped thinking about DeLaSalle, though, or the effect the kids had on him. “They had quite a bit of grit, even if it was misdirected.”

When he came back to the area, he returned to DeLaSalle and asked the school’s administrators if he could teach a class in creativity and entrepreneurial studies. The school quickly agreed. “We did things like build a bridge out of toothpicks and think about how you would write a book or how you would do any number of things. It was just to get them to start thinking about process. What would it mean to run a barbershop? If you wanted to make $80,000 a year,how do you do that running a barbershop? The kids would read The New York Times business section to each other.”

This was a very positive step, with a strong level of student engagement. But the real breakthrough was just around the corner. Steve is a self-described “car guy,” and one of the things he would do with his students was design vehicles at the conceptual stage. “We would design the body, not the real workings. The kids would do their own small models, and we would pick one and do a full-size model out of Styrofoam. The kids started saying, ‘Why can’t we build a realcar?’ They weren’t afraid to ask ridiculous questions. I kept saying that we couldn’t do that, but after about a hundred times, I thought, ‘These kids are thinking outside the box and I need to find a way to make that happen.’”

Steve tracked down an old Indy racing car that had crashed, and he had it delivered to his students. They moved from imagining with toothpicks and Styrofoam to doing something much more tangible: restoring the car. Because it had been used for racing in a former life, the car was extremely lightweight. Steve realized he could teach his students environmental responsibility and new technology at the same time by helping them to turn the racer into an electric vehicle.

At this point, the program was more than DeLaSalle could handle, so Steve turned it into a nonprofit organization and named it Minddrive. He received some sponsorship money from Bridgestone, who also took that first car to their testing facility and found that it was operating at the equivalent of 445 miles per gallon. “Suddenly the kids felt that they’d done something significant. They felt empowered. And in the process, they learned something about mechanics,technology, and building a team.”

As I write this, Minddrive’s students have built four cars—a recycled 1999 Lola Champ Car, a recycled 2000 Reynard Champ Car, a 1977 Lotus Esprit, and a 1967 fully converted, electric Karmann Ghia. In 2012, they drove their Lotus from San Diego to Jacksonville, making forty charging stops along the way and doing presentations at every stop to audiences including school groups, trade schools, civic groups, and the Sierra Club.

In 2013, they drove another car, their Karmann Ghia, from Akron to Washington, D.C., this one equipped with a device that turned mentions on social networks into “social fuel.” A wide range of social media picked up the campaign, news programs in several foreign countries carried their story, and public figures like Richard Branson and Nancy Pelosi even wrote posts about it.

There are students from seven other area schools involved in Minddrive now. “All of these kids are interested in cars because it represents freedom,” Steve said, “and they’re all interested in the Internet because it’s an inexpensive way for them to communicate. We started out getting students from the counselors at the schools. Then we started getting word of mouth, and we now have issues over how to select kids for the program. We went to DeLaSalle this last year and just put up a poster saying we were going to have a meeting at the gym at ten thirty. Out of the 180 kids at the school, 53 showed up. These are kids that are willing to give up their Saturdays to get involved in this.

“In our program they gain confidence in being able to do something, and they find it somewhat amazing. We always try to do something extraordinary as anendgame, like going cross country in an electric car. When they get it done,those kids feel like they can do anything, and it’s influencing other kids in the school. They’re seeing these Minddrive kids as success stories in the hall. Our kids feel special. They wear their T-shirts to school.”

While the accomplishments of the Minddrive students are fascinating enough in themselves, what makes the accomplishments more instructive is that they are coming from kids who for years had been written off as low achievers. “These were at-risk kids from the lower 20 percent of education. We’re getting our students kind of late in the game, and if they come into our class as juniors and can’t even read a ruler, that kind of tells a story right there. We’re having an influence even on students that have very little academic capability. We find that they’re able to have a different vision of their future; they’re able to find apassion, and make some pretty amazing changes in their lives. We have a girl who went from having F’s and everyone telling her she had no chance to being on the honor roll and going to college.

“The true value is borne out in their core school. Just about across the board, the kids’ grades have gone up. This year, we had twelve students who were seniors. They all graduated, and 80 percent of them are going to college. We don’t really care if they go to college or not. Life sustainability is really our goal. We want kids to have a family, a home, and a car.”

Alternative Education

A few years ago, I was invited to a meeting in Los Angeles of alternative education programs. These are programs that are designed to reengage young people who are either failing in school or have pulled out of it altogether. The people who are either failing in school or have pulled out of it altogether. The meeting included all sorts of programs based in technology, the arts,engineering, community initiatives, and business and vocational projects. For all their differences, these programs have some common features. They work with students who are doing least well in conventional education: the low achievers,the alienated, the ones with low self-esteem and little optimism for their own futures. These programs offer these disaffected young people a different sort of learning experience.

Often they work on practical projects or in the community helping others, or on artistic productions and performances. They work collaboratively in groups. Along with their regular teachers, they work with people from other fields as mentors and role models: engineers, scientists, technologists, artists, musicians,business leaders, and so on. Often these alternative education programs have spectacular results.

Students who’ve been slumbering through school wake up. Those who thought they weren’t smart find that they are. Those who feared they couldn’t achieve anything discover they can. In the process, they build a stronger sense of purpose and self-respect. Usually, their achievements in conventional schoolwork improve enormously too. Kids who thought they had no chance of going to college find that they do. Those who don’t want to go to college find there are other routes in life that are just as rewarding.

What struck me is that these programs are called “alternative education.” If all education had these results, there’d be no need for an alternative. Of course,the success of alternative education projects like Minddrive is not automatic or guaranteed. It takes care, passion, and expertise on the part of the adults, and trust, willingness, and commitment from the students. Each program, each relationship has to be as carefully handcrafted as the cars the Minddrive students make. But these programs show vividly that these students are not incapable of learning and are not inevitably destined to fail. They were alienated and marginalized by the system itself. So are many others, including many who stay in the system. The essential reason is that mass education operates on different principles from those exemplified by Minddrive. So what are these principles and how did public education get to be this way in the first place?

Industrial Education

In the developed world, we take for granted that children start school around the age of five and go through about twelve years of compulsory schooling. Going to school seems like the natural order of things, like driving on the right (or left) to school seems like the natural order of things, like driving on the right (or left) side of the road. But mass systems of public education are a relatively recent innovation. They mostly came into being in the middle of the nineteenth century as part of the Industrial Revolution, which began to gather force in Europe about a hundred years earlier.

In earlier times, the vast majority of people lived in the countryside and worked on the land. Cities were mainly small centers of trade and commerce. In sixteenth-century Europe, about 5 percent of the total population lived in cities.

The rural majority lived and worked under the feudal rules of the old aristocracies. Their lives were shaped by the rhythms of the seasons and the rituals of their beliefs. They were mostly illiterate and had little education beyond learning whatever craft or trade they practiced to earn a living. Schooling was for the wealthy and those who joined the church.

The Industrial Revolution changed everything. From the middle of the eighteenth century, a succession of technological innovations transformed traditional methods of making goods and materials, especially wool and cotton. They also led to entirely new sorts of products, made from iron and steel. Machine tools and steam engines forged revolutionary forms of transport that carried people and products farther and more quickly than ever before—on railways, over iron bridges, and around the globe on mechanical ships. Industrialism generated a massive demand for energy from coal and gas, and with that demand, whole new industries arose in mining and refining raw materials. Tidal waves of people surged from the countryside to the cities to work in factories, shipyards, and mills. Others dug underground for the coal and ores on which the factories depended.

As the Industrial Revolution barreled forward in the nineteenth century, a new sort of society began to form. At its base was a new urban working class ofmen, women, and children who sold their physical labor to turn the vast machinery of industrialism. The working classes often lived and worked in pitiless conditions of dire poverty, ill health, and the constant risk of physical injury and accidental death. They were the faceless infantry of industrialism.

Between the working classes and the old nobility there emerged a new “middle class” of people who prospered in the new economies. They included the owners and masters of industry; lawyers, doctors, and accountants; and entrepreneurs and the investors and financiers on whom they often depended. Some in the middle classes had risen from poverty through their own flair and determination. Overall, these middle classes had high aspirations for themselves and their families, and they had the money and the means to fulfill them. For and their families, and they had the money and the means to fulfill them. For different reasons, both the working and the middle classes began to press politically for a greater say in how they were governed. As they did, the feudal grip of the old aristocracies began to slacken, and a new political order began to take shape.

As it did, numerous institutions sprang up across Europe and North America to promote commerce, trade, technology, and the flow of ideas between the arts and the sciences. At the same time, new philanthropic institutions tried to alleviate the often appalling conditions of the working classes with charitable programs in health, education, and social welfare.

It was in all these tumultuous circumstances that the demand grew for organized systems of mass education. Income from taxation and the growing spending power of the middle classes made it possible to pay for them. These systems were shaped by many forces.

Industrial Purposes

Industrialism needed armies of manual workers for the repetitive and exhausting labor in the mines, factories, railways, and shipyards. It needed more-skilled technical workers in engineering and all the associated trades and crafts of mining, manufacturing, and construction. It needed cohorts of clerical and administrative workers to manage the new bureaucracies of trade and manufacturing. It needed a smaller professional class of lawyers, doctors,scientists, and academics to provide expert services to those who could afford them. Some industrial countries—especially Britain—had extensive colonial interests for which they needed an even smaller ruling class of diplomats,ambassadors, and civil servants to run the business of empire at home and overseas.

From the outset, mass education had strong social purposes too. In the UnitedStates, it was intended to produce an educated citizenry for the well-being of democracy. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

Some saw mass education as a mode of social control. For many, education was a means of promoting social opportunity and equity. For some, going to the right school and mixing with the right people was an essential process of social grooming for the children of the middle and upper classes. And it still is.

All of these interests are evident in the structure and organizational principles of mass education.

Industrial Structures

Industrialism needed a lot more manual workers than it did college graduates. So mass education was built like a pyramid, with a broad base of compulsory elementary education for all, a smaller sector of secondary education, and a narrow apex of higher education.