Free School Teaching: A Journey into Radical Progressive Education

PREFACE

vii PREFACE “But, traditional school worked for you! You turned out okay!” I often get this response from people when I propose the idea that perhaps school in America is doing more harm than good for children and for our society. This declaration has given me pause a number of times, but I’ve finally come up with a question in rejoinder—“Am I, or other ‘successful students,’ really okay? Or would I be a different, better, person had it not been for how school shaped me?” Very few people, most particularly those who were the “winners ” in the school game, ever take the time to contemplate if our schooling experiences may have molded us in negative ways, ways that run counter to our society’s highest intellectual, political, and moral ideals. “Success” in school can leave one uncritical toward this institution, which in turn tends to make one a supporter of traditional schooling, arguing that “I turned out okay, so something must be right.” The winners in the schooling game rarely take into consideration those who are the losers; to the winners they are invisible or are collateral to the winners’ success. When a winner in the school game does get a glimpse or an idea of something not being quite right with schools, she can be thrown into a turmoil of sorts, for there is no widely understood language in the mainstream for understanding the deep, underlying paradoxes of American education. With no language and little substantive public discussion on these issues, any problems one has with our education system become personalized—one feels that she or some other individual is to blame. For example, the individual student believes that he is at fault for not working hard enough or being smart enough, or that his teachers are out to get him; the individual teacher feels that he is not gifted enough, can’t understand all of his students’ issues, doesn’t have the “right” methods, or didn’t get “good” students; the individual parent feels that she doesn’t understand what the teacher wants, or that she is at fault for her child’s failure because she doesn’t have the time to work with the child on schoolwork; the individual voter believes that if schools are “failing,” then it is the fault of the school board or principal for lack of effective leadership. By personalizing problems with schools, we fail to see the entirety of the system that exists and thus fail to understand that the interconnections between the different components of this system are inevitably what lead to the problems that arise. And by not seeing the systemic context, we only conceive solutions viii PREFACE that merely “tweak” the system in an attempt to “fix” the individuals or individual factors within that system. We need to understand that the traditional system of American schools is one choice among many possible approaches to education; once we grasp that idea, we can begin to see that other choices, other possible structurings of the system, exist. At that point, we can question whether our educational system is taking us, as a society, where we want to go. And if our response to that question is no, then we must move beyond merely “tweaking” the system; we need to begin exploring fundamental reconceptualizations and alternative visions of education— different ways of conceiving what schools are for, how they should be structured and run, who should be involved, what sort of individuals we should be helping to nurture, and so on. Without such a systemic and visionoriented approach, we will remain locked in a personalized blame game about American schooling and will fail to progress in any substantive way. I speak from experience on this issue—I have traveled this road and made a journey from success in school, to problems with it, to individual blame for these problems, to individual answers, to systemic examination, to exploring alternative visions. This journey is in no way complete, nor should everyone travel the same path as I have, but I do believe that we, as a society, need at least to embark on this road if we want to see significant change in how we educate and in the results of that education. This book is the story of my journey: it is a critical examination of my own life in schools, my successes as a student, my challenges and frustrations as a teacher, and my attempts to find answers at both...