英文本 何为学校

GUESS WHAT? Yesterday was your last day of school. What do you want to do?” This is something Ken Danford, co-founder of North Star Self-Directed Learning for Teens in Hadley, Massachusetts, says regularly to kids who want to learn but have found school frustrating, alienating, and uninspiring. How do they react when Ken tells them that they don’t need to go to school any longer? “They’re stunned,” he told me. “They say things like, ‘Really? If you do that you can still go to college and still get a job and the world will still likeyou?’ No one has told them that before.”

Ken didn’t start out as an iconoclast. He went to college to become a teacher and got a job in a junior high school in Amherst, Massachusetts. He’d always liked school himself, so he wasn’t prepared for what he discovered when he began to stand in front of the class. “It was dreadful. These kids didn’t want to be there. I was trying to sell them U.S. history that they didn’t want to learn. I was reading them the riot act: ‘If you don’t learn U.S. history in eighth grade,you won’t be able to do whatever.’ I thought I was an idiot listening to myself. I was arguing with them about hats and tardiness and bathroom passes—and if I wasn’t mean about those things, the school was getting on my case. I just couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t say these things seriously to these kids and make such a mountain out of a molehill.

“I read The Teenage Liberation Handbook, and that book described homeschooling and un-schooling as the land of nonconformist school people who just said, ‘I’m gonna do something with my life. I don’t have another day to waste. I’m not waiting until eighteen to get started—I’m going.’ It turns out that people who do that and embrace living thrive. So I started wondering what it would take to not go to school. How about asking them what they want to learn? Do you want to be here today? Where do you want to go? With whom? For howlong? They don’t want to do history with me? OK, don’t do history with me. They don’t want to read? Then don’t read. How do you do that? You do it by creating something that is not a school. You create a community center. You create a program. You tell people, ‘I’m gonna help you and your parents be in charge of your life, and we’re gonna have this cozy, happy place, and you can come here as much or as little as you want. You can do what you want while you’re here, as long as you’re nice. You can come and go as you please. And guess what? It’ll probably turn out OK.’” North Star is a center (Ken and his colleagues are very conscious about not

calling it a school, because it is not accredited as one) that helps teenagers discover a passion for learning that has either been derailed or tamped down in a major way. While it is not a regular “school,” it serves very effectively as one for many. “North Star is principally for teenagers who are in school and miserable, who don’t want to go. Some are getting straight A’s. Some of them have hobbies. Some of them don’t know up from down and have all kinds of problems.

“There’s a thing about letting people be—about letting them choose for themselves—that’s so profound. There was no way to get that when we were teaching. What do you want to do and what do you want from me to help you? They don’t know yet, so they have to try everything to figure it out. That might include saying no to everything and emptying out their lives and seeing what happens if they do nothing for a while. It’s glorious fun.”

While it might sound as though North Star is fast-tracking dropouts, the opposite is true. Most North Star participants go on to college, including MIT,Brown, Smith, UCLA, and Columbia, among others.1 Participation in North Star is often seen as an asset by admissions directors, because North Star kids have a history of being self-directed and intellectually curious. Ken gave a particularly compelling example.

“We had a student who came when he was in seventh grade, after being homeschooled. He hung out, talked to people, tried to keep his life open. He’d trudge around with his math textbooks and he had a tutor here. At fifteen, he signed up for calculus at the community college and aced it. He had to go to the University of Massachusetts in order to take Calculus 2. He aced it. He took another couple of classes over the summer at UMass, two post-Calculus 2 courses. By this point, he’d turned sixteen. He could no longer get into the classes he wanted as an external student, so he goes to the admissions office andsays, ‘Look, I’m sixteen years old. I don’t have four years of this, three years of that. I’ve never taken the SATs. All I know is I need to get enrolled in UMass so that. I’ve never taken the SATs. All I know is I need to get enrolled in UMass so I can sign up for these advanced math classes.’ So they put him in the Commonwealth program, which is supposed to be for valedictorians. By the time he was twenty, he graduated with a double major in math and Chinese.” Not all North Star students have experiences like this one, but they usually find a level of engagement that they never found in conventional school, and they regularly leave the center ready to do something positive with their lives. The North Star model has led to the creation of Liberated Learners, an outreach program helping others create centers based on the North Star model.

Ken and North Star understand that learning comes in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, that kids can’t all be taught the same way, and that when students are taught in a way that best fits the way they learn and what interests them most, they can make enormous leaps. While it is an unconventional model,its success suggests a need for all schools to think in new ways about the way they serve their students.

Rules with Room

I often hear people say something like, “Our district would love to cater to the individual needs of our students, but the state/federal government won’t let us.”Certainly, as we’ve already noted, state and federal programs, with their focus on standardized curriculums and high-stakes testing, impose significant restrictions on the flexibility of local school systems. One of the actions we’ll come to later is the need to press for radical changes in these policies. But it’s also essential to make changes within the system as it is. As Laurie Barron,whom you met in chapter 1, showed at Smokey Road, and as many other examples in this book illustrate, there is room for maneuver and innovation already, based on the four principles of organic education.

Opportunities for change exist within every school, even where the emphasis on high-stakes testing has become extreme. Schools often do things simply because they’ve always done them. The culture of any given school includes habits and systems that the people in it act out every day. Many of these habits are voluntary rather than mandated—teaching by age groups, for example, or making every period the same length, using bells to signal the beginning and end of periods, having all of the students facing the same direction with the teacher in the front of the room, teaching math only in math class and history in history class, and so on. Many schools, a good number of which are dealing with adverse conditions and were once in considerable trouble, have used that space

adverse conditions and were once in considerable trouble, have used that space to innovate within the system, often with inspiring results. Innovation is possible because of the sort of system that education actually is.

A Tale of Two Systems

I said earlier that to transform any situation you need three forms of understanding: a critique of the way things are, a vision of how they should be,and a theory of change for how to move from one to the other. Let me give you two examples of national reform movements that differ fundamentally on all three points and have had very different outcomes from each other.

In 1983, the U.S. Department of Education published a report on education that galvanised public and political debate. “A Nation at Risk” was written by a blue-ribbon panel of educators, politicians, and business leaders. The report warned that standards in American public education were disastrously low and continuing to fall. “We report to the American people,” the authors wrote, “that while we can take justifiable pride in what our schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to the United States and the well-being of its people, the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur—others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.” In a startling comparison, the report went on, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.”

The response was dramatic. President Reagan said, “This public awareness—and I hope public action—is long overdue. . . . This country was built on American respect for education. . . . Our challenge now is to create a resurgence of that thirst for education that typifies our Nation’s history.”4 In the years that followed, hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on initiatives to raise standards in U.S. schools. Following his election, President Clinton picked up the education gauntlet and announced the centerpiece of his reform strategy,Goals 2000. This was a national initiative to build consensus on what should be taught in schools, in what disciplines, and by what age. Under the leadership of Education Secretary Richard Riley, a program was put in place to develop national standards that states could adopt at their own discretion. For all its ambitions and some significant achievements, Goals 2000 withered in the face of opposition from many states who argued that the federal government had no place telling them what their schools should do.

Following his election in 2000, George W. Bush enacted No Child Left Behind, which gave rise to a massive expenditure of money, time, effort, and a pervasive culture of national testing and standardization. This strategy has been largely adopted by the Obama administration too. Overall, the results have often been dismal. As I write this, the United States is still battling high rates ofnongraduation, largely unchanged levels of literacy and numeracy, and widespread disaffection among students, teachers, parents, business leaders, and policymakers alike. Whatever their best intentions, many of the reform initiatives in the United States have not worked even on their own terms. And they won’t, not for as long as they are rooted in the wrong story.

The critique that underlies the standards-based reform movement is that traditional academic standards are too low and have to be raised. The vision is of a world in which academic standards are very high and as many people as possible have college degrees, and there is full employment as a result. The theory of change is that the best way to do this is to specify exactly what the standards are and to focus relentlessly on them through an insistent process of standardized testing.