Proceed with Passion

Chapter Two: Engaging Students: A Seven-point Plan

11 Chapter Two Engaging Students: A Seven-point Plan Hamm: We’re not beginning to . . . to . . . mean something? Clov: Mean something! You and I, mean something? (brief laugh) Ah, that’s a good one! — Samuel Beckett We do not know where we are going But we are on our way. — Stephen Vincent Benet Every human being seeks meaning in life. We hunger for a sense of significance, importance, some higher purpose to our lives. Students also crave a higher purpose in their education. What they do eight hours a day, five days a week and between 160–200 days a year needs to make sense in the long run. Telling students at each stage that “you need to do well to be admitted to the next stage, in order to eventually get a job, to buy a home, etc.” is not enough to satisfy their hunger for meaning. Purely pragmatic arguments deprive students of the more significant reasons for ordering and enhancing their lives. Life is short and school is part of life. As a talk show pop psychologist once said, “Life is not a dress rehearsal.” Similarly, each stage of schooling should not be mere preparation for the next stage. Each level should be an end in itself; a meaningful experience for every child. School must touch the students where they, at each stage of development, feel life most intensely. If we want students to buy into the process, then at least some portion of their day, and week, needs to deal with issues that concern them. The statement that meaning ought to be the goal of educational experience brings up several problems for educators. The quest for meaning is complicated by: Proceed with Passion 12 1. The inherent limitations of language — compounded by 2. the inevitable subjectivity of each individual, which means that fully accurate communication is never possible — compounded by 3. the apparent relativity of statements of value that appear to be relative to time, place, speaker, and the power of the speaker. Nevertheless, I am choosing in this book, either cowardly or wisely, to bypass these problems and simply assume that most readers will agree that certain values are essential to human survival. These standards are themselves the yardsticks by which we measure all other values and actions. Among these are justice, fairness, preservation of biodiversity, and survival of the planet and all life forms. Within this book, these value-assumptions trump linguistic, psychological and relative statements about meaning. It is these values which I believe give meaning to our educational ventures. The question which immediately looms is, “how?” How do we structure and design our schools to communicate these values and to meet the fundamental human need for meaning? Clearly, students need to be engaged in the process. This goal is impossible to achieve if they are bored, apathetic, hostile, tuned-out or otherwise dis-engaged. Educators have an almost Herculean task, for the mainstream of American classrooms, primary and secondary (and college, I believe) have lost vision and a sense of direction. The proof is in the disintegration of school systems in both the suburbs and inner cities. There is a general and widespread feeling that we have no national purpose other than our expanding consumerism and materialism. Students, even when caught up in the shopping mall mania, must recognize that something is missing. Preparing for tests, amassing GPAs and SATs and APs is not living life at its fullest. In addition to the problem of educating students in a drifting and fragmented society, especially in demoralized schools in decaying inner city neighborhoods, there is the problem of balancing traditional and progressive styles of education. The older forms of education are imposed from above and from outside the process. The newer forms educational philospher John Dewey suggested come from “an 13 intimate and necessary relation between the process of actual experience and education” (Dewey, 20). What Dewey forcefully articulated is that if we do not consider the powers and purposes of those taught and if we ignore their age-appropriate experiential capacities, then we will lose too many of them. When this disconnect occurs, learning is accidental: “Those to whom the provided conditions were suitable managed to learn. Others got on as best they could” (Dewey, 45). Little has changed since Dewey penned these words in 1938. Some students learn in conventional classroom setting with conventional drills, tests, homework assignments, but many...