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In his EDWeek article, “Lets Abolish High School,” Robert Epstein lists four “fatal legacies” from the past.
They are:

1)    The school system by and large does not take into account the child’s readiness to learn. Whereas every piece of steel is “ready” to become a fender not every child is ready to read.
2)    The mass productive techniques of the factory have given us mass education. Whereas effective learning—learning that benefits all students—is necessarily individualized and self-paced.
3)    The schools would cram learning into the first two decades of a child’s life. Whereas we know that real learning, or education, is a life-long process.
4)     Schooling is compulsory in most states up until age 16. Two more years, up until age 18, is usually enough to obtain a high school diploma. But how much time one spends in school or other learning situation ought to be directly proportional to the time needed to acquire the desired skills and knowledge. It’s not of course. There is in fact little direct relationship between the time spent in school and the competencies acquired thereby. Witness the highschool senior who has studied French or Spanish for four years.

I have just a couple of things to say about all this.

First, as Epstein points out, effective learning has to be individualized and self-paced. Furthermore, the teachers, as well as the students as they get older, know this. But they do nothing. Epstein says that unacknowledged awareness is the “elephant in the classroom.” A big object that you pretend is not there.

Epstein might very well have said that the other three “fatal legacies” are no less “elephants,” or “bodies” that occupy most of the learning space, but are never directly confronted by the teacher and students, leaving thereby little or no space for real learning to take place.

When one looks at our educational system, oblivious to these “legacies,” it does seem incredible, doesn’t it, that our schools go about their business as if the readiness, or the motivation and interest of the learner were not all important, as if learning could be anything but “individualized and self-paced,” as if one’s learning were limited to one’s time in school, and as if time in school (“she has perfect attendance,") rather than acquisition of competencies were the best measure of school success.

Second, what ever happened to competency based learning? Epstein tells us that a 1852 Massachusetts law required that all young people between the ages of 8 and 14 attend school three months a year—unless they could demonstrate that they already knew the material; in other words, the law was competency-based.

Boy, have we come a long way from that! Why so? Growth in student competencies are what all reforms would bring about. The failure of all reforms to do this is perhaps their failure to recognize increased competency as the true goal of their efforts, substituting for the acquisition of competency such things as school choice, a longer school day, national standards, better teacher training, etc. as the principal ends of school reform. They’re not.

What typically does the teacher now do when she sees that her 25 different students are approaching the day’s lesson from 25 different perspectives? There will be those who already understand, have even mastered the lesson materials. There will be those who will probably need additional class of other help just to grasp the rudiments. And there will be all the others at different points in between.

The teacher will avoid this classroom elephant, that is, the widely differing degrees of readiness of her students, and speak instead to the level of understanding of this or that student, and of course during the process more or less losing the others.

Under a competency based system this wouldn’t have to happen. Schools could be structured around their students acquiring competencies, in school, out of school, at home, or elsewhere, not as now based on their students being present in class for some five or more periods a day, during a six hour day and a five day week. 

In a more reasonable and more realistic school structure, one that recognized kids as they are, the “elephants” would have to be acknowledged, one after the other and all together, with the result that schools as we know them would probably disappear.

Perhaps this is what keeps any real reform from ever taking place. It would be too big a change in the status quo, thus raising the resistance of the present holders of power. Also, there is probably too much that is not known about what would happen if we publicly acknowledged the elephants. There would be the inevitable unexpected consequences, and this makes us afraid.

Why if kids were ready to learn, if their education were individualized and self-paced, if their learning were not confined to the school building and to the first years of their lives, and finally if they actually became competent in this or that skill or subject matter area, there would then be no stopping them.

As in the middle ages we might now see a real children’s crusade, as the kids, no longer only being a burden or charge on the rest of us, took back their rightful position among us, standing from a very young age as they once did, on the ground along with us, interacting with us, teaching us as well as learning from us. Once again, there would be no stopping them. Nor would we want to.

Everyone is familiar with the point of view that goes more or less like this:

“Students spend a relatively small number of their waking hours in school, and even fewer hours in classrooms.  Their education, if not their schooling, mostly takes place out of school. As a result their learning, or their not learning, depends more on what they bring with them to school than on what happens to them in school.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s in a 1995 essay for Daedalus is one of many writers who points to the fact that schooling and education are not the same thing. For too many, he says, "education is conceived narrowly as schooling.”

What is less generally known and recognized are the particular out-of-school societal conditions that most affect the student’s in-school learning. For Harold Howe such conditions are the following:

* A rapid decline in the time spent with adults by children across the full social and economic spectrum.

* Growing parenthood among teen-agers unaware of its responsibilities.

* A rapid growth of poverty in young families.

* An unexpectedly large, new wave of immigration since the Vietnam War.

* A major shift in the learning demands of well-paying jobs with an impact on middle-class children as well as the poor.

* A human rights revolution in the lives of racial and cultural minorities, with a serious lag in delivering its promises.

* The concentration in cities of poor and minority families along with well-hidden, similar problems in rural areas.

* The erosion of neighborhood activities to enrich children's lives as the need for them mounts because of growing poverty.

* Similar erosion of the capacity of health agencies and other services as demand exceeds supply.

As Howe points out such a list could go on and on, but this one is “sufficient to back up the assertion that non-school-related educational services are standing in need of prayer.”

In other words the out-of-school” conditions of kids’ lives are in desperate need of corrective action if we would expect schools to become places of real learning. This is the position of a number of educational writers from Jonathan Kozol, who speaks eloquently of the tormented lives of impoverished, inner city children, to David Berliner who makes it clear that poverty, joblessness, broken families, lack of health insurance, and other such conditions stand as insurmountable obstacles to kids’ learning in school.

This was my understanding of why public schooling was failing large numbers of minority and immigrant children living in impoverished urban and rural areas of our country. Then I read Robert L. Hampel’s “A Generation in Crisis” from Daedalus of September, 1998.

Hampel paints another picture entirely. Schools, all schools fail to educate large numbers of their students not principally for the reasons given above, although this is not to say that we might forget about improving the impoverished conditions of many children’s lives. This should still be a priority of government.

Hampel says that the real culprits to learning in school are what the kids are doing during the greater number of hours spent outside of school. If they do any homework at all it’s only a few hours a week. Whereas they spend inordinate amounts of time with television, video games, computers and other electronic media. They spend probably no less time “chatting” and being influenced by their friends and peers. And, as the get older, they will hold down part time jobs, for as many as 20 hours a week.

We look at our kids and see them with computers, friends, and part time jobs, and are most of all relieved that they’re not over eating and getting fat, trying drinks and drugs, not engaging in premarital sex and getting pregnant, not members of gangs, not,heaven forbid, contemplating suicide. We support them in what seem to us healthy activities. We buy them computers, encourage them to be with their friends, even help them to secure a job.

But what happens, as Hampel makes clear, is that school and classroom learning cannot compete for their interest and attention.  Their games, friends and weekly pay checks are much stronger influences in their lives. School is definitely out of the running.

Hampel doesn’t ask what we should do. What can we do? What has happened is that schooling has lost its way. For the most part it is no longer concerned with what the kids care most about.

It may very well be the mission of the school to:

“produce responsible, self-sufficient citizens who possess the self-esteem, initiative, skills,  and wisdom to continue individual growth, pursue knowledge, develop aesthetic sensibilities, and value cultural diversity by providing intellectually challenging educational programs that celebrate change but affirm tradition and promote excellence through an active partnership with the community, a comprehensive and responsive curriculum, and a dedicated and knowledgeable staff.” *

But this is not the “mission” of the kid. He is on a mission of his own and for the moment, anyway, there seems to be no connecting link between his mission and that of the school.

*The mission statement of the New Rochelle, NY, public schools of June, 1987

I read as much or more than I write. And in my reading I’m always encountering others’ expressions of my own ideas, that which stops me in my tracks, as it were, from going ahead and writing down my own thoughts. For what I was going to say, as I find in so many instances, had already been better said by someone else.

Progress may very well be standing on the shoulders of those who have come before and thereby seeing further yourself. But from where I stand on others’ shoulders I see still others onto whose shoulders I first have to climb before I can even begin to see for myself. A process with apparently no end.

One such article, “Let’s Abolish High School,” by Robert Epstein, articulating many of my own thoughts, appeared just recently in “Commentary” on the back page of the publication, Education Week. Now I find my own thoughts about school and school reform thoroughly embodied by what Epstein has to say.

Epstein writes, “about 10 years ago I noticed—I couldn’t help but notice—that my 15-year-old son was remarkably mature. He balanced work and play far better than I did, and he seemed quite ready to live on his own. Why, I wondered, was he not allowed to drive or vote, and why did he have so few options? Simply because of his age, he couldn’t own property or do any interesting or fulfilling work, and he had no choice but to attend high school for several more years before getting on with his “real” life.”

Well I have an almost 10 year old grandson. He spends a couple of nights a week at our house which is near his school. When he comes in he sits right down and does his homework, that which is currently mixed numbers and improper fractions along with reading assignments from Time Magazine for kids on which he has to answer a few questions.

His homework may occupy him for about 30 minutes, a little longer if he needs to ask me a question. Once finished he goes to his computer in the big upstairs room where his grandmother and I also have our computers and are working. My grandson, while listening to some of his favorite rap or hip hop music downloaded from iTunes, plays Neopets, the online virtual pets game which allows him to create and take care of one to four of 54 species collectively called neopets.

If I were asked to determine from which activity, homework or Neopets, he was learning the most it would be Neopets hands down. On his own he has to care for his neopets, keep them alive and well by feeding them virtual food obtained by means of Neopoints which is the currency of the game. all of which taxes his numeracy, powers of memory, and judgment, as he seeks to master the intricate world of Neopia.

While watching my grandson I conclude that school and homework is just a small part of this 10 year old’s growth and development, a small part of his education. I sometimes think that school and homework are most of all restraints that prevent the child from doing the things that are most interesting and meaningful to him. In that way school may even be and often is a major obstacle to learning.

What Robert Epstein is saying about his 15 year old son is essentially true for my 10 year old grandson. Simply because of their age they’re not allowed to do the things they would probably choose if left more to themselves. Instead they have to follow adult prescriptions as to what is best for them, in the case of my grandson that being improper fractions rather than the intensive, long term care of a virtual pet.

But I’m not so much saying that Neopets ought to take the place of school. Rather that school ought to give more place to what’s most interesting and stimulating in the life of a 10 year old boy. This particular boy is not excited by mixed numbers. (Neither am I.) All this is not too different from having the boy listen to Mozart while the “music” that he is hearing is Rap. Shouldn’t we go more with what he hears than with what he is supposed to be listening to? In general we want them to hear, but we can only make them listen.

Finally, of what is my 10 year old grandson capable? In my experience the 10 year old’s mental abilities are much more advanced than the demands placed on those abilities in school. We’re not tapping into what kids are capable of.

For example, the other day I asked my grandson how he could be like all children, like only some children, and like no other child.*  Why "Bonpapa," he said, "like all children aren’t I human, and like some children, I’m fast, or slow, or maybe crippled, but I’m really not like anybody else."

Try asking that of one of your adult friends. Then see if his answer is as well formulated as that of my 10 year old grandson. (He also correctly gave me the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx the first time I asked.)

*See Clyde Kluckhohn and Henry A. Murray, "Personality Formation: The
Determinants," in idem, eds., Personality in Nature, Society, and
Culture (New York: Knopf, 1950), pp. 35-48. "Every child, to is like
all other children, like some other children, and like no other child."