February 25, 2006

• Topic: Why I write

  
  

  So…I took a day off from work on Friday to visit Fieldston, a nice little progressive school in the Bronx.  Met a guy named Joe, who teaches at University Heights, a public school in the Bronx, who brought some students along from his writing class there.  He’s a poet, and has changed the lives of a few students by getting them involved with poetry slams, where they perform their free-flowing writing on stage.

  
  

  Three students from University Heights, 4 students from Fieldston, the Fieldston Dean of Students, my friend and fellow school critic Roger, a woman named Amy who runs a not-for-profit that goes into schools and runs writing programs, and myself, sat together and were asked by Joe to write for 7 minutes about this, “Why we write?”

  
  

  I won’t go too much into what people wrote, except to share that after writing, everyone in the room, students, teachers, and myself, all shared and “gave feed” on each others writings.  It was a wonderful opportunity to see the barriers of student-teacher eliminated, and to see how this unique opportunity to write without any censorship, had quite literally saved some of these urban students from gravitating towards a life of crime and violence, instead of words.

  
  

  I have also recently received quite a bit of feedback about the intro to my book.  My confidence in my ideas and writing has been raised by sharing both with people close to me who I was previously hesitant to share with.  There were certainly criticisms, some harsh, but even those have taught me valuable lessons, including how to remove emotional attachment from such criticisms, as well as to see where my views need adjusting, or clarity.

  
  

  Ultimately, as I’m working on tightening my arguments about education, I’m recognizing that it’s important to be able to show how my arguments are beneficial for everyone.  In my writing I’ve made many efforts to cover all my bases, and although at times it takes me a while to dig them up, I believe I have covered most.  One part of my argument is to allow the positive aspects of school to remain, but to improve on those that are counterproductive to the goals of school.  For example, some have expressed concern that eliminating grades will also eliminate the benefits of knowing how to survive in the real world where people must compete in order to gain and keep jobs.  I can find common ground with those people, because I do believe people should have a drive to secure necessary opportunities in life such as work, but when it comes to grades, this is not the only way to motivate students.  Students have an innate drive to succeed, and when placed in a job environment will quickly learn how to swim or sink.  Grading shifts that motivation of surviving at work, to an artificial end of surviving in school, since grades in school are considerably less important than how one is evaluated at a job.  Those who support grades because they believe the pursuit of grades will ultimatley help students survive in the real world, should support something even more likely to help students, such as calling for less academic schooling, and more time interning on a real job site.  I received 2 classes worth of credit for a summer internship, but some schools like Antioch are 100% real-work based.  Maybe that’s a model to work towards?

  
  

   Another argument I’ve heard is that doing things in school that you don’t like such as sitting through classes you don’t like, doing the grunt work of studying and writing papers, and feeling the pressure to meet those obligations even if you don’t care about them, is all preparation for the real world.  When it comes to your job, you may be asked to spend your days filing, sitting in on boring meetings, working long and eratic hours, and working on assignments that you’re not all that interested in.  So, since that’s how the real world works, if you try to make school all about what students want, then you’re setting them up to fail in the working world.

  
  

  There’s a couple of points to address on this argument.  The primary purpose of school is not to prepare students for the harsh realities of the workplace.  This is not to say that students should not be exposed to these realities.  To get off-track onto another idea for a moment, part of the problem with schooling is how schooling is “framed.”  What do I mean by this?  By framing I mean how the experience is put-forward to students.  For example, if on day 1 of college, students were told, “We expect that you won’t like some of your classes, and many of your assignments you may not want to do, and you don’t want to be graded, but, we will be requiring you to experience all of these things because we believe this will assist you in the working world,” I would be more likely to accept the notion of schooling.  The reason is, is that the mission of school and the focus of students would be in-line.

  
  

  This is not the case.  Students don’t pay to go to college so they can prepare themselves for the stresses of the working world.  Students who want to acquire those experiences find them in jobs and internships. Most people I know worked various jobs during college, including myself.  So we got a taste of the attitude it takes to both secure and not get fired from a job.  Students pay to go to college in order to obtain what they believe will be the essential knowledge and skills to help them in the working world (although, ultimately, most students pay in order to put down “college graduate” on their resume)

  
  

  So, I think I’ve addressed some of the concern of those who don’t like the idea of getting rid of grades, or allowing students more control over their own education.  Let me return now to the question, “what is schooing for,” or a different question, “what is the message students should take away from school?”

  
  

  Clearly, there are mixed messages that students receive about schooling.  I need to work to develop my own clear message, although I hope that the various messages I write about come through to people.  But, on the whole, I would say that the general message that students walk away from school is, “School is boring.”  That’s fairly universal.  This is not to say that the ages up to 21 are boring years, but this is to say that formal education, is generally boring. 

  
  

  Why is this so important?  It’s important not only because it turns students off to future learning, but it’s also important for the very reason some people say it is important, in that it prepares peopld to accept a boring life.  For those who don’t know, one of the reasons that students sit in rows and often do nothing but listen during school, is because in the early 1900′s, this model of schooling took off in order to develop a large number of people to be well-behaved factory workers.  To give students more control over learning, would be to allow them to truly develop their creative minds, which would benefit those individuals, but would be harmful to large corporations who need obedient and thoughtless workers.  If students began questioning those in control of distributing diplomas, they may begin to question those in control of distributing wealth or sending people off to war.  It’s not a stretch to see how the origins of our form of schooling were in the interests of corporations, not students (there was a great op-ed in today’s Times about the blatant power of faculty at Harvard over the interests of their $41,000/yr. paying students, which just further highlights how in almost every situation, schools fail to serve the interests of those they claim to serve). 

  
  

  I don’t think it’s that deliberate anymore that corporations influence education to the detriment of students, although there is pleanty out there to read about this.  I say that because most jobs do require workers who can not just react like robots, but who can think and be creative.  Just look at how Google has taken off by hiring creative computer geeks, and how our automated factory and accounting jobs are getting shifted to cheap labor markets like India and China.  This issue of allowing students more freedom to control their own education and develop their creative and critical minds, is now in the best interest of all parties.

  
  

  So, in conclusion, school should serve the needs of students by helping them to develop their intellectual and personal interests.  Schools should assist students in critically examining their own lives, their society, as well as critically examining the various assumptions they have about both.  Schools should empower students, so that they feel they matter, and that they have a voice.  Schools should also help prepare student for the real world, by educating them about their physical health, mental health, and financial health.  Avoiding teaching these things because of bureaucratic reason or controversy simply means we’re allowing the status quo of obesity, depression, and poor financial decision making to continue.  We do need activist schools who are working to advocate for the well-being of their students’ futures.  Schools should give credit for work and internships, because it is in those experiences that students will best be prepared for work after college, and because there is as much learning in those experiences as a classroom experience.  Schools should not grade their students, to ensure that students are instead focussed solely on learning and developing a love for intellectual success, rather than superficial grade and diploma success. 

  
  

  To do some of these things, schools should all students to work with teachers to design classes.  Students should be free to take any classes they want.  Ultimately, this may “water down” the value of a degree, but the value of a degree is already so vague, that any efforts to strengthen or tighten the ability to obtain a degree, only serve to work against the interests of students.  For example, there’s currently talks of issuing national standardized exit exams for students to graduate college.  The motivation for this is to ensure that students are learning, but measuring learning can almost never be obtained through a test, and once again, making testing an issue only undermines what it is that schools should be trying to do, which is to foster critical thought and the whole laundry list of things I just mentioned.

  
  

   

  • 5:29 pm
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