Every year in early June John came to school to chat with me about his son. John was a gentle, intelligent man, warmly supportive of his son Dan, who attended the school. But John was also worried. Just a little. Just enough to come once a year for reassurance.

Here’s how the conversation would go.

John: “I know the school’s philosophy. and l understand it. But l have to talk to you. I’m worried.”
Me: “What’s the problem?” (Of course, I knew. We both knew. This is a ritual, because we both say the same thing every year, five years in a row.)

John: “All Dan does at school all day long is fish.”
Me: “What’s the problem?”

John: “All day, every day, Fall, Winter, Spring. All he does is fish.”
I look at him and wait for the next sentence. That one will be my cue. John: “I’m worried that he won’t learn anything. He’ll find himself grown up and he won’t know a thing.”

At this point would come my little speech, which is what he had come to hear. It’s all right, I would begin, Dan has learned a lot. First of all, he’s become an expert at fishing. He knows more about fish —their species, their habitats, their behavior, their biology, their likes and dislikes—than anyone I know, certainly anyone his age. Maybe he’ll be a great fisherman. Mavbe he’ll write the next “Compleat Angler” when he grows up.

When I reached this part of my spiel, John would be a little uncomfortable. A snob he wasn’t But the picture of his son as a leading authority on fishing somehow didn’t seem believable.

I continued, warming up to my subject. Mostly, I would say, Dan has learned other things. He has learned how to grab hold of a subject and not let go. He has learned to value the freedom to pursue his real interests however intensely he wants, and wherever they lead him. And he has learned how to be happy. In fact, Dan was the happiest kid at school. His face was always smiling; so was his heart. Everyone, young and old, boys and girls, loved Dan.

Now my talk came to its close.
“No one can lake these things away from him,” I said. “Someday, some year, if he loses interest in fishing, he’ll put the same effort into some other pursuit. Don’t worry.”

John would get up, thank me warmly, and leave. Until next year. His wife Dawn never accompanied him. She was happy with Sudbury Valley because she had a child who radiated joy. Then one year John did not come in for our annual chat. Dan had stopped fishing.

At fifteen, Dan had fallen in love with computers. By the age of sixteen, he was working as a service expert for a local firm. By seventeen, he and two friends had established their own successful company in computer sales and service. By eighteen, he had completed school and gone on to study computers in college. He had saved enough money for his tuition and expenses. Throughout his years at college he was employed as a valued expert at Honeywell. Dan never forgot what he learned in his many years of fishing.

Many people have written volumes about the wonders and beauties of fishing. We have seen it for ourselves at the school. Kids love to fish. It is relaxing and challenging. It is outdoors, rain or shine. Standing on the bank of the school’s millpond, you are surrounded by the rustling trees, the soft grey granite buildings, the rushing stream under the mill dam. Most of the kids who fish see the beauty. All of them feel it.

Fishing is social. They fish with friends, or learn from their elders. Every year we see a new generation of five and six year olds struggling to learn the ropes. Fishing can also be asocial. You can be alone, if you want to. No one will bother you. It’s the code. Often someone will go out for a day with a rod and reel just to be alone, to think, to meditate. As if Fishing, in a quiet way, were an important part of life at school. I often wonder at how lucky we were to find a campus with a pond.

My experience with Dan and John happened in the early days of the school. It made me think about the school and what it means. So I was completely comfortable when my youngest son started to fish all day long. It was déjà vu. And I knew that he knew what he was doing.

(Daniel Greenberg, is a founder of the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts)

One might even question if economic success has ever depended on education? Russia’s, and before that the Soviet Union’s, economic successes, what there was/is of them, depended and depends almost entirely on oil and natural gas riches, and wasn’t much helped by what was, in the Soviet Union, an excellent school system (at least for the relatively few who were the beneficiaries).

One might make a case for education being all important in the continued economic success of, and especially, Germany and Japan, but also of the other developed countries, but when one looks more closely at these countries one sees that it’s much more the culture and the traditions of the people that explain the work ethic, which in turn is most behind their successes.

In America there are other, much better explanations of our economic success than as Krugman would have it, our schools. Three come immediately to mind, (although no one of them would be sufficient by itself): The wealth of natural resources (also present during pre-Colombian times when substantial economic success was unknown), democratic governance, and a free market permitting and encouraging the creation and exchange of unlimited quantities of both goods and ideas.

But even these three by themselves would not be enough. Take Canada, for example, which hasn’t known our economic success in spite of a wealth of natural resources, democratic governance, and the free market of goods and ideas.

What is lacking in Canada is people. And in fact one might say that immigration, of all the factors mentioned, most accounts for our economic success. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of people have always freely come here, pell-mell as Tom Wolfe would say, and more than anything else have been responsible for this country’s economic growth and prosperity.

Look out! Some of our politicians are trying to stop this. As if we could do without the constant resupply of people who most want to be here, and who are ready to work in order to obtain for themselves what we already have. We can’t do without them and we certainly should stop trying to keep them from coming here.

Krugman is right in that the overall performance of our schools is unsatisfactory. But this has always been true. This is not more prevalent now than in the past.

But he is outright wrong to put down the real achievements of our schools (more about this below). And he is wrong to say that more money is what the schools need. The debate about the importance of additional funding in school reform efforts has been over for a long time. It’s not important.

But Krugman’s greatest mistake is to overlook that small segment of our school population that has always done extraordinarily well (and accounts for our economic success?). And is he even aware that many of these children who have done best of all have been the children of immigrants to our shores? This in itself is an extraordinary success story.

Was it the schools, or the strong work ethic and ambition that these children brought with them that most accounted for their success? My vote would go to the latter.

In any case, regardless of our failure to educate many of our young people in our K-12 public schools, especially those of the inner city, we do have a highly successful, probably the world’s best, system of higher education. Our colleges, and in particular our graduate schools and research universities occupy 17 of the top 20 places in the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), 37 of the top 50.

This is today. This situation is not in decline. Bright young men and women continue to flock to our graduate schools from other countries, making up nearly one half of our graduate student population. And many of these students will choose to remain in this country, thus strengthening our economy and contributing not insignificantly to its success.

One might even say that our universities most account for our economic success, but only because they are continually resupplied by the world’s best and brightest young people, and, no less important, because our democratic political system, our emphasis on individual rights and responsibilities, and our active promotion of a free market exchange of goods and ideas encourages them to remain here and go to work.

What is one to think, other than we must be doing a lot of things right when we read, as we have just recently that the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine goes to three Americans (two women to boot), that the Nobel Prize in Physics goes to three men, all with U.S. citizenship, two of whom did their Nobel work at the Bell Laboratories in NJ, and that the Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to two men, one American, one Brit, and an Israeli woman?

O.K. The prizes were for work done years ago, but is there any indication that similar good work is not going on right now in our public and private work spaces and laboratories? Somehow our educational system, with all its faults, and with its admittedly great failure to educate all of our young people, is in some all important ways leading the world into the future. And no other country is doing this as well as we are.

Schooling and education are not the same thing, but, unfortunately the distinction between them is rarely if ever made.  And instead the one word education is regularly used to include both, resulting in an absolute confusion accompanied by a plethora of opposing opinions among educators, and educational writers, regarding what steps might be taken to improve — what? well the schools.

Because schooling, as opposed to education is easy, that is what we spend most of our time tinkering with. And in fact reforming “education,” that is really schooling, has become an inevitable and unending process, no less certain than death and taxes.

Furthermore, whereas schooling has an infinite number of variations or forms, education has only two, like an electric light bulb. It’s either on or off, or by means of a dimmer, the talent, the ability of the learner, somewhere in between.

Schooling, and in particular what takes up so much of our time and money, the place, the physical environment of the school, can be made almost perfect, as say in Kansas City, when, subject to a earlier court ruling, the school leaders had to agree that by the mid 90s they would have made the changes necessary in order to considerably improve the educational outcomes for the kids.

As ordered by the courts improvements were made. There was no doubt about that. Large amounts of new money bought higher teachers’ salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal.

To read more about all this go here, from where the above description was taken.

But did more learning (education) take place? The conclusion, now some ten years later, is that no, it didn’t, and still isn’t. But, at least, one might ask, as a result of this experience, has the constituency for throwing more money at the schools been seriously weakened, if not done away with?

No, not at all. For, in fact, under the current surplus spending plan of the President, some $100 billion has now been set aside, targeted for the schools. And never once during the discussion of this plan as far as I know, was the distinction made between schooling and education. For our representatives in the Congress the two are the same.

Educators, more famous than I, and certainly more well read, have made the distinction I’m referring to. Although in the case of one of them, the Chicago philosopher and Great Books proponent, Mortimer Adler, the distinction he makes is a bit different from mine.

Adler distinguishes between schooling which is for kids, and education which is for grown-ups. Schooling for him is a kind of training. Forget about getting the kids to think for themselves while in school. It mostly doesn’t happen.

I conclude this entry with Adler’s own words in response to his interviewer when he makes clear the difference between kids and adults in regard to education, and what is possible and not possible for the ones and the others. How many educational reformers have read Adler? From their words about the subject I’d say few if any.

(Go here to read the entire interview.)

Weismann: I have heard you say that schooling is not education. This is at least a very provocative statement, particularly today when all over America parents are screaming about the poor education their children are receiving in schools. Please explain and help us to understand what you mean by that statement?

ADLER: I am going to begin my answer with an even more provocative statement, or should I say “fact,” and that is “only adults can be educated.” So before I answer your question, we must first discuss “adult education.” Let me explain. The word “education” has come to have so restricted a connotation that it is misleading. When most people think of education, they tend to think of the development of their children, not of their own development; they think of learning in school, not outside of school. A serious result of this is that the phrase “adult education” is generally misunderstood. Because we think of education as something done primarily with the young and in school, “adult education” comes to be a queer kind of thing, some-thing which you usually think of, if you think of it at all, as for the other person, not yourself.In years of thinking and working in the field of education, the insight that I am going to try to communicate to you is one which is basic to the whole theory of education. It not only changes our conception of what should go on in the schools, and what should be done with children, but it also changes our conception of what each adult must do for himself to sustain his own life of learning.

I can hardly remember what I used to think when I had the mistaken notion that the schools were the most important part of the educational process; for now I think exactly the reverse. I am now convinced that it is adult education which is the substantial and major part of the educational process — the part for which all the rest is at best — and it is at its best only when it is — a preparation.

WEISMANN: We know only too well that words can be mischievous and treacherous. Those of us who are engaged in adult education have been thinking for some time of how to avoid using the words “adult education,” because in the minds of the general public they have such an unfortunate connotation. How can we correct this misconception?

ADLER: You are quite correct about words, and if by issuing an edict, I could get everybody to use words the way I would like them to, I would try to set up the following usage: use “schooling” to signify the development and training of the young; and “education” (without the word “adult” attached to it) to signify the learning done by mature men and women. Then we could say that after schooling, real education, not adult education, begins. This is my main point.

WEISMANN: From my own long experience I am sadly aware of the misconceptions in the minds of almost everybody which prevents this basic proposition from being understood. Would you indicate for us the major misconceptions that must be rectified.

ADLER: Most of us, and most professional educators, hold a false view of schooling. It consists in the notion that it is the aim or purpose of the schools — and I use the word “schools” to include all levels of institutional education from the kindergarten to the college and university — to turn out educated men and women, their education completed or finished when they are awarded a degree or diploma. Nothing could be more absurd or preposterous. This means that young people — children of twenty or twenty-two — are to be regarded as educated men and women. We all know, and no one can deny, that no child — in school or at the moment of graduation — is an educated person.

WEISMANN: Yet it seems this is the apparent aim of the whole school system — to give a complete education. At least this is the current conception which governs the construction of the curriculum and the conduct or administration of the school system; it is also the conception of most parents who send their children to schools and colleges.

ADLER: That is correct. This error about education being completed in school is widespread…

Truth number one. Public, as in public school, doesn’t mean public. The word, a poor choice from the beginning (common was better but not much) probably should be  banned.

Why? Because the word is divisive, it sets up a false opposition between public and private, rich and poor, town and gown… A false opposition because learning, when it does occur, is exactly the same in private or public circumstances. The word school by itself would have been better.

Truth number two. Schooling is not education. The assumption is made that it’s enough to go to school, and to eventually complete the school’s program, to become educated.

Everyone who has been to school (now this means just about everyone) knows that this is not true. One’s education or learning is always the result of one’s own efforts, wherever they are made, and not necessarily while in school and in class.

Truth number three. Virtue can’t be taught. From a reading of the mission statements of public and private schools alike (which, by the way are not all that different) Plato was evidently never taken seriously in this regard.

But even someone who surely had read Plato’s Meno, in this case Thomas Jefferson, could make a statement like the following: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

I don’t think Jefferson meant that without school civilization was not possible but his words have too often been interpreted by educators ever since to mean that school, by dispelling the natural ignorance of the people, would thereby create the proper basis for an enlightened American civilization.

Does anyone seriously believe that the citizenry today, after nearly 200 years of compulsory schooling, is somehow better, say, than the citizenry of 200 years ago? Or even that people today are more knowledgeable than people at the time of Horace Mann and the first Common School? There is absolutely no evidence that this is so.

On the contrary, the schools may have, if anything, by defending the status quo, retarded the real progress our country has made in many areas, in regard for example to women’s rights, the rights of African Americans, Native Americans and other minorities, the improved conditions of the work places etc.

It’s simply not true that we can look to the schools to make us better people. We should stop doing so. Perhaps by recognizing this simple truth we would do a better job with what the schools should be all about, the transferal of skills and knowledge to a new generation of young people. We wouldn’t expect that to necessarily dispel their ignorance, for probably only real life experiences can do that.

Truth number four. Parents and teachers, the adults in children’s lives, have only so much influence, and in the now too many cases when they are absent, almost no influence at all, on the lives of children.

Parents (and probably teachers also) would do much better to give their children some space, get to know them from a little distance, find out what their children’s interests and talents are, and then support what they see, not what they would like their children to be.

For in regard to the latter they will inevitably fail, and in the very worst cases bring the children down with them.

Judith Rich Harris, in an article published in the Psychological Review in 1995 (Vol. 102, no 3) asks the question whether parents have any important long-term effects on the development of their child’s personality and concludes that no, they don’t. From my own experience I would agree.

Truth number five. Not everyone should go to college. This truth flies in the face of today’s political correctness in regard to public education. Correctness tells us that everyone should, or at least should have the opportunity to go to college.

And when faced with the young people before us in the classroom, and when we know that their future chances, in particular their earning power, will be significantly improved by college attendance, how could we not allow them that opportunity?

The conservative Charles Murray, and the progressive Howard Gardner, for widely different reasons, would both agree, I think, with my conclusion that not everyone should go to college.

Murray makes it clear that college preparatory schools emphasize word and number proficiencies and that achievement in these areas is not evenly spread among the school population, and that only those registering on the right side of a normal or Bell Curve representing their test scores would be able to satisfy the academic demands of college.

Gardner persuades us that all kids are intelligent and should have the opportunity if they want of following their particular talents and interests, their own brand of intelligence, into a higher education environment.

But to say that all should have the opportunity to go on learning is not at all to say that all should go on to a traditional liberal arts college, what we usually mean by the word college. The artists, musicians, athletes, the craftsmen, even some of the technicians, and many others representing other interests and talents, should not be pushed onto a traditional college prep track.

Truth number six. Testing, and especially the debate over testing has taken on much too much importance. This debate is, I believe, a Red herring or attempt, perhaps in too many instances deliberate, to change the subject and thereby place other and more important educational issues on the back burner.

Those who take up arms against testing would divert attention, it seems to me, from how and what children learn, that which any educational debate should be mostly about, and instead make the testers their target, the tests the object of debate.

Too bad, for testing does have its legitimate place, and should be allowed that place without undue discussion. It should never have become, as now, the main issue that separates progressive and conservative thinkers on the subject of children and the schools.

___________________________________________________________________________

So much for what I call the negative truths about education, those things about education that should not be. On the positive side are these other truths, truths that ought to get the lion’s share of our time and money, but, helas!, do not.

Truth number seven. Learning is always by doing. John Dewey was right. In fact, there is no other way to learn. The irony is that, in spite of Dewey’s real insights into how we learn best, for most kids activities in school mostly tax their powers of memory, not their powers of thinking.

From one day to the next while in school kids do much too little in respect to exercising what they are asked to learn, be it reading or speaking a foreign language, researching a topic in science or history, applying mathematics to problem solving. For them and the teacher remembering is easier than doing.

Truth number eight. The circumstances of the child’s life, the big example being poverty, need not be destiny. But they need to be addressed, for otherwise the school and the teacher will have little chance to undue the unfavorable life circumstances the child has brought with him into the school and classroom.

In the so-called “no-excuses” schools, those mostly “public charter” schools where the kids are not allowed to make excuses for not being on time, for not having done the homework, for not paying attention in class, the “circumstances” are left at the door to the school, and as a result the child is able to listen and learn. His circumstances will not determine his destiny.

Truth number nine. In life the readiness is all. In learning especially is this so. And in school being ready means being interested, being motivated. And it follows from this that motivating kids ought to be every educator’s number one priority.

Helas! It is not. In the current discussion raging about how the education stimulus money should be spent I haven’t heard the word readiness mentioned.

The discussion, instead, is all about societal funded “paths” to education (new school buildings, better equipped libraries, smaller class sizes, not to mention testing and accountability and all the rest) not about the kids themselves, about their motivation level and how any new monies might, if at all, favorably influence that motivation. For without that there will be no learning.

Now we’ve been made aware over and over again, at least for a generation or more, that these same school systems, now confronting the necessity of huge budget cuts, have failed to educate, or provide with needed job readiness skills, huge numbers of mostly poor and minority students. The budget cuts now upon us suggest that these failures will become even more pronounced.

More money for the schools has always been the holy grail for the school people, for school committees, school superintendents, administrators, and teachers, and most of all teachers’ unions. For these groups more money could solve widespread and deeply entrenched problems such as the high dropout numbers and widening racial and class achievement gaps. Whereas less money would inevitably grow and intensify these same problems.

Now, when more money is the only answer, there seems to be no solution to our public school woes. For even without the present budget cuts there will never be enough, never enough money. Schools like wars will always cost too much. And school people like war people will never have enough. Why haven’t we learned this?

There has always been but one answer to the never ending problem of school costs and inadequate school budgets. And that is the following: We ought to abandon our emphasis on schooling, for which there will never be enough money, and instead concentrate on education. For schooling doesn’t mean (why haven’t we learned this?) education. And while schooling is expensive — it will always need schools and teachers at the very least — education is cheap. It will never need more than someone who wants to learn.

And in fact that’s why societies have, up until now, progressed. Not because of schools, but because there have always been those who, with or without schooling, want to learn, and there have always been those who have done so in spite of the clear failure of the schools which they may or may not have attended.

What if we began to help children, and adults, to learn, provide they with real opportunities to learn, that which doesn’t mean simply sending them to school? In my own experience the so-called immersion methods work best. How might we provide more of them?

We know that very few people have learned to speak a foreign language by sitting in language class? And we know that many have learned that same language by being with those who spoke and used the language, by immersion. Why don’t we provide more of such opportunities? In Tampa where I live we put English speaking children in Spanish class where they learn little Spanish while all about them large numbers of the population are speaking that language.

The language model could be extended, as it is now in regard to things that children really do and do well, such as play a musical instrument (in band or orchestra), act in a play, be a member of a basketball, lacrosse or other team, to mention only a few instances of how children learn best.

Where schools fail is where they do not take into account the student’s wanting to learn or not, usually not in the pre-algebra class, the American history class, the English literature class. In all these classrooms (that are very expensive) the students are there but not there, and no changes brought about by additional monies will be likely to change things in the direction of more learning.

Once again, learning, or education is cheap, because this depends entirely or almost entirely on the learner, the one who wants to learn. The learner makes learning happen. Schools, schooling, even teachers by themselves (for the most part, for there are exceptions, there are unvengeful pied pipers among them), even in good times with all kinds of money available, do not.

Indeed, the truth of what he says stares us in the face. Yet there are those school people who go on acting as if Montaigne’s truths had never been said, or as if they had not read them.

What Montaigne said in his essay on the Education of Children ought to have been, and go on being, incorporated into everyone’s thinking about education. But this has not happened and we go on making the same, for too many children, fatal mistakes.

What are some of these truths, as fresh and important today as when they were written? Perhaps now they are even more fresh and important because of all we have learned in their support since Montaigne’s time.

Here are just four:

This first one directly addresses the public school classroom, still ubiquitous in our country, and still the subject of endless, and mostly failed reform efforts.

“If, as is our custom, the teachers undertake to regulate many minds of such different capacities and forms with the same lesson and a similar measure of guidance, it is no wonder if in a whole race of children they find barely two or three who reap any proper fruit from their teaching.”

Montaigne clearly says that teaching for understanding is the only kind of teaching we should be doing. Now, some 500 years later, although the professed goal of our elite schools of education, there are very few schools where this kind of teaching takes place. Instead, test preparation is still what mostly goes on in our schools.

“Truth and reason are common to everyone, and no more belong to the man who first spoke them than to the man who says them later… So with the pieces borrowed from others the student will transform and blend them to make a work that is all his own, to wit, his judgment and understanding.”

(That is, he will if his education has been successful.)

Montaigne knew that interest and motivation, what he calls appetite and affection, are essential, that without them nothing important will happen to and with the student.

“There is nothing like arousing appetite and affection; otherwise all you make of your students are asses loaded with books.”

This last citation is not from Montaigne, but from Montaigne quoting Horace (Ars Poetica, 311), who says:

“Master the stuff, and words will freely follow.” Montaigne further explains, “When things have taken possession of the mind, words come thick and fast,” or “the things themselves carry the words along.”

Here we’re reminded that if our students are not equipped with substance, that is with ideas of their own that have sprung from their own efforts and experiences, they will have nothing to say, and if they do write they will write nothing of value. But when they are well equipped the writing will flow of its own.

It’s not enough to teach kids to write, whatever that means. Montaigne reminds us that they first of all need things to write about. And we don’t help them nearly enough with that.

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

Two

Schooling, not education, is what mostly goes on in those places we call schools. for schooling as a rule has little direct relation to learning. When learning does take place it’s usually in spite of, not because of the school. What happened that schooling and education have grown apart? (Were they ever together? Perhaps in schools for adults. Perhaps at Plato’s “school” in Athens.)

Education, or learning, is what life and the best schools are all about. Learning, which is life long, depends primarily on just two factors, the teacher and the student.

Now most educational reformers think that by positively impacting other factors, such as class size, length of the school day, standardized testing, school uniforms, disciplined classrooms, progressive classrooms, the degree of school autonomy etc. student learning can be given a boost. It can’t, of course, as has been abundantly shown by the history of failed school reforms.

A good teacher and a motivated student are the only two factors that can by themselves significantly boost the amount of learning that goes on, in school, or more commonly, in life. For learning to take place the teacher (which could also be a good book, work of art, or even the natural world itself… Lincoln’s teacher was a book, Darwin’s was nature) needs to be both knowledgeable and caring. The student needs to be ready, to listen and to want to learn. Absent either one and learning does not take place.

The tragedy of our schools stems directly from the fact that they are not primarily concerned with recruiting the very best teachers and with arousing the curiosity and interest of their students.

OK, that’s not easy to do, and there’s the rub. But rather than work on the “hard problem” (teacher recruitment and student motivation) we busy ourselves with endless “solutions” to the “soft” or easy problems mentioned above, length of school day, order in the school and classroom etc.

What happened that we have now in our schools so few excellent teachers and so few motivated students? For the first the answer is easy. Our country early on gave its respect, and resulting monetary rewards, to those who care for our bodies, our doctors, to those who protect our contracts, our lawyers, and to those who grow our economy, our business men, not to mention our media and sports celebrities. To those who would “school” our children, care for their minds, we gave, and continue to give as little respect and dollar recompense as possible.

Why we did this is not so easy to answer. Perhaps it was because those of us who made it to the highest levels of power and influence in our
country always knew how little our own success depended on what we had done in school. Schooling was a minor factor in our lives so why should we by our tax payments heavily subsidize an industry whose major function seemed only to be holding children safely and securely in a place apart, in school, until they were of age and were ready to enter society.

So in regard to the one factor, the teacher, things will not change until we decide to give the teacher the respect and monetary rewards that the importance of the position (being close to the child during the child’s formative years) demands.

What about the other factor, student motivation? What happened that most students in our schools, most often before they reach the fourth grade and ten years of age, will lose their natural curiosity and interest in everything they encounter in the classroom? What happened that so many of them by the time of Middle School have little or no interest in what their teachers are doing and saying?

Many have tried to answer this question. The most common answer is hormones. The advent of puberty. The child’s interest in his or her body, in sex, trumps the beginning algebra, foreign language, history and literature classes. The real question is, given this fact of the child’s interest and preoccupation with other than school subjects, why do we act as if it were not so?

The right teacher may somehow get through the child’s growing physical awareness of body and self to the child’s mind. This is what happens to those children with particular aptitude and talent for the lessons of the classroom and who are naturally obedient. We call these the “good students” of whom there are always a few in every classroom, their presence enabling those teachers who do remain, to remain. This is not, however, what happens with most children.

Is school destined to fail because it doesn’t give proper place and importance to the physical changes taking place in the child’s body, let alone to the popular culture that most occupies the child’s time everywhere but in school?  There are those who would put middle school aged children to work on a farm, especially one with lots of animals, and where bodily functions may be readily and openly observed and discussed. And there are those who would bring popular culture into the classroom. But both “reforms” have failed to make schools also a place of learning.

Most of all in regard to the second of our two factors, the child’s motivation to learn, we need to give the child a lot of slack, and not pretend that the child is with us when he’s not. We need to take into account and deal with the fact that the child is only a little bit with us in the classroom and a lot more somewhere else. The classroom lessons in math, science, literature and history while endlessly fascinating in themselves are probably of little or no importance, probably boring, to the child.

What is important to the child, especially in the tween and early teen years, are the “life lessons’ that they are experiencing all the time. These “lessons” may stem from their close contacts with their friends, from the many hours spent with their games, from the music, films and other forms of the popular culture that surrounds them, from their trips to the mall, shopping and just hanging out.

It’s not at all that children are not able and ready to learn. In all the respects just mentioned they are far more knowledgeable than we are. There is no question about their ability to master what interests them. Ask them about the things they are curious about and are motivated to learn, their music, their computers, their video games, their interactions with their peers, and they will quickly lose us, as we lose them in our classes, but in this instance because of our absolute ignorance of what they are knowledgeable about.

Children are of course learning all the time. That’s what being alive means. It’s just that very little of that learning goes on in the places we call schools.
There are schools, both public and private, that do stress good classroom behavior and don’t worry about whether the students are learning, knowing that the latter will not take place until the students themselves are ready.

Children do, as we’ve already noted, come to school with their interest and motivation in place. Everyone has seen the great delight that small children take in learning their words and numbers in the elementary classroom. The greatest difference between schooling and learning is the absence (schooling) or the presence (learning) of interest and motivation on the part of the student.

But everyone has also seen kids’ interest and motivation fall away by the fourth or fifth grade when their awareness of themselves, and most especially their growing awareness of their relationship to others, become the principal and driving forces in their lives.

For here begins the process when learning turns into schooling and the content of the lesson becomes confined to the classroom, when what is most vivid and most alive for the kids is no longer words and numbers, as it may have been during the first years of school, but the physical, their bodies, and the social, their friends, thereby relegating the subject matter of the classroom to at best a few minutes of homework squeezed somewhere in between friends, family, sports, television, video games, computers and other such modern distractions.

Three

Ask your own children who wrote the Declaration of Independence, what were the Federalist Papers, who was Jim Crow, and you will see that even your own kids may not be learning, or at least not retaining information about their own country, the very things that school was supposed to teach them.

Then try to carry on a conversation, say in Spanish, the “easy language,” with a third, or fourth year Spanish student in a typical American high school, perhaps with your own child if he or she fits the description. You will very quickly see that the schools (as in teaching Spanish or American history) are clearly not doing what they say they are doing.

Now what we seem not yet as a nation to have fully recognized, is the fact that in our schools, especially our middle and high schools, very few things are learned in the sense of acquired, or made one’s own, — a grounding in American history, or conversational ability in the Spanish language, as in our examples.

Our elementary schools, those schools that have been around since the time of the earliest settlers on the Atlantic seaboard, are probably best at what they do. In part because of their long history. And in great part because what they do is still highly relevant to kids’ lives outside of school. At earlier times and probably still today most if not all elementary school kids do learn to read and to count.

The situation in our middle and high school classrooms, however, is something else. Only for the last 60 or 70 years have most of our young people been subjected to schooling during these years. And the jury is still out on how well we have succeeded, even whether it was such a great idea that all kids be in school for some 12 or 13 years. But they are, and we have them.

The success of the elementary years is probably best explained by the fact that the subject matter, mostly the learning to read and to count, is not limited to the classroom. The kids, at least those who do learn, go on with both activities outside of school. And those who don’t probably don’t learn.

Totally different from the situation of the middle and high schools, where what goes on in class is usually not something the kids take with them and do at home. Rather it’s something, in spite of books and notebooks crammed into knapsacks, that the kids at the end of the day mostly leave behind them in school.

Is it any wonder that just months let alone years after these classroom lessons, perhaps even weeks or days, the kids cannot solve an equation like the one they solved in class, can’t
respond in Spanish to a question put to them in that language, can’t tell you much if anything about the US constitution and the separation of powers, can’t even accurately place the Civil War on an American history time line.

And the reason is not that the schools have failed, as so many echoing the urgency of those who gave us A Nation at Risk in the 80s would have us believe. The schools haven’t failed. The kids, perhaps. But they have failed to learn, not so much because of what went on in school, what the teacher did or didn’t do, but because the “languages” spoken in the classroom, the ones they were supposed to learn, be they math, science, history et al, are just not spoken outside of the classroom.

And math, science, history et al are languages, no less than Spanish and Chinese, and need to be spoken, and read, somehow “used,” given life, if they are to be learned. For John Dewey was right. We do learn by doing, much more than by listening. Lectures and language tapes are not enough.

Try to learn Spanish or any foreign language when you hear only words in that language from your teacher (or on a tape) while sitting in class along with some 25 others who are as ignorant of the language as you are. What language can possibly be learned in this manner, other than by the rare student with exceptional intelligence, a photographic memory, or both?

Now all this is not to say that middle and high school students are not learning in school. They are learning, and many of them are learning a lot, but little or nothing (in respect to what they might have learned) of the academic subjects that are still at the heart of the typical middle and high school curriculum.

What they are, in fact, learning, and this should come as no surprise to anyone, is what they are doing in school (or out of school) with interest and motivation. You can put a kid in a classroom, of course, but that’s it. So far we haven’t been able to make him or her learn.

What kids are learning may be music, as in playing a musical instrument in the school band. It may be art as in designing sets or murals. It may be acting as in the school theater group, or it may be bodily strength and coordination, plus cooperation with others, as in participating in one or more team or individual sports activities.

What kids are learning may be any number of other things including shop, automotive mechanics, and other voc ed activities. Schools, in order to stay in business, learned long ago that play, art, music, voc ed and all the rest were no less important, I would say essential, to kids’ lives, to their mental and physical health and well-being, than college prep and advanced placement courses. Indeed, if you want to see even greater “failure” than you think you see right now in our public schools limit schooling to college prep. (This being for some what the No Child Left Behind Law is effectively doing to the schools.)

Currently there is, and has been, almost from the time of Horace Mann and the Common School over 150 years ago, a sharp, verbal battle between those who would give the public schools failing marks and those who would defend the schools, claiming that they are doing just fine the way they are.

I would say that this battle need not ever have been. The sides could have come together because they are not so much apart as they are talking about different things — the ones about the low academic achievement of public school students (that which has probably always been low), and the others about the real success that the common school has had in reaching all, or nearly all of our youth.

For the defenders of the public schools correctly say that now no one is left out, and that all are given an opportunity to continue their education through high school, college and beyond, even though only a minority of them  will actually do so.

There are many things we could say about our schools that might help to go beyond the school battle I refer to. Most important both groups ought to understand that learning is not what schools are mostly about. For the kids just have little, often no interest, in what the schools are teaching. So why blame the schools. It can hardly be their fault if the kids are not ready to learn.

Although life itself is all about learning, and although kids are learning all the time and everywhere, for the most part they are just not all that interested in what we are teaching, in particular, in math, science, history et al, all those subject matters that we tell them are all important and that they will need, to go on to college, to get a good job, to make a lot of money.

Those who attack the schools say that at one time things were different. At one time in the past, they assure us, kids did learn, — math, history, foreign language and all the rest. But a close look at the past, a close look at student achievement in earlier periods makes it clear that this is not so.

Gerald Bracey and others have shown us that in the past kids, at least the relatively few of them that were in school, did not learn anymore then than their peers are learning now. Kids are kids and the educators who should most of all know this most of all seem to forget it.

In fairness to those who attack the schools they do have a number of reforms in mind. One of their reforms is to make both kids and teachers accountable. First test the teachers, then the kids. Hold the kids to (national) standards. Make them fear for their lives after their schooling if they don’t work while in school.

But of course the threats don’t work. Because the kids, even if they work more in class, and are given additional class time, still don’t take what they are taught in class into their lives, that is, where these things they are taught might be learned.  Equations, American history, and the spoken foreign language are still not a part of their lives outside of class.

The kids are into other things. The schools don’t take this enough into account and go on confusing schooling, what is going on in their schools, with education, that is not going on. Our schools would be just fine if our goals for the schools were things that schooling could accomplish. But too often our goals are in need of an education for which our kids in middle and high school are not yet ready.

What could the kids be learning in school? Good classroom habits for one, such as listening to the teacher and other students in the classroom, speaking up and thereby contributing to the class discussion, being on time, being equipped with whatever is necessary for the orderly classroom activities, such as pens, notebooks, texts, even laptop computers. But instead of doing this sort of thing where we might be successful we go on pretending to teach (math and history) and the students go on pretending to learn.

Four

We still labor under the mistaken notion that education, and worse, education for democracy, is what goes on in the schools. It isn’t, and never was, and could not be. This mistaken notion has led to most of the “problems,” (read dropouts, achievement gaps, discipline, algebra for the middle school, advanced placement etc.), and most of the “solutions” (read reforms, failed for the most part).

What we call education in the schools can never be anything more than the acquisition of certain skills,  to begin with in the primary grades building mostly on skills that the child has learned outside of school, the two principal ones being walking and talking, not necessarily in that order. And if the child has not already learned to walk and to talk outside of school school will fail in what it sets out to do.

No one better than Mortimer Adler understood all this, what he called the difference between education and schooling. Here he is speaking in a 1995 interview:

“I can hardly remember what I used to think when I had the mistaken notion that the schools were the most important part of the educational process; for n
ow I think exactly the reverse. I am now convinced that it is adult education which is the substantial and major part of the educational process — the part for which all the rest is at best — and it is at its best only when it is — a preparation.”

“[school] at its best only when it is … a preparation.” What does that mean? Certainly not education for democracy, not even the start of life long learning, certainly not the knowledge of oneself, in fact none of the major and traditional “goals of education.”

School is a preparation. In Adler’s words, “use ‘schooling’ to signify the development and training of the young; and ‘education’ to signify the learning done by mature men and women. Make this important distinction between education and schooling.

On this point I would disagree somewhat with Adler. I would say that he ought to have said “liberal education” for learning done by mature men and women, rather than education. Because education doesn’t wait for adulthood. (It may even happen in school, although usually not the result of the school’s and teacher’s efforts.) Education doesn’t wait for anything. That’s why we do have extraordinarily precocious children.

However, Adler is mostly correct that schooling for most does come first, and only later education, well after the school years. But he readily admits that we’re not going to change the present understanding that education does take place in the schools by simply saying it isn’t so.

What if we could change the present understanding, what if in everyone’s eyes “schools” suddenly became as for Adler places where schooling, not education, goes on, education becoming in everyone’s eyes something else entirely, maybe just another name for learning, that which is always going on, mostly not in school and at widely varying rates depending on the learner?

A bit further into the interview Adler says that “nothing could be more preposterous” than the assumption,  that to graduate from school, college, or even beyond, means to have become educated. This being one more widely held and incorrect assumption that we’re not able to dispel.

“Imagine’” Adler then says, “this brightest student in the best of all possible colleges spending four years industriously, faithfully, and efficiently applying his or her mind to study. I say to you that at the end of four years, this student, awarded a degree with the highest honors, is not an educated man or woman, and cannot be, for the simple reason that the obstacle to becoming educated in school is an inherent and insur-mountable one, namely, youth.”

So there you have it, youth itself is the inherent and insurmountable obstacle to becoming educated. Those who have been close to their own children during their children’s very first years should not, will not be surprised at this.

What were those stages of psychological development that Freud tells us all children pass through, the oral, anal, phallic/genital stages, taking the child through puberty and beyond? Placed along side these real drivers of the child’s psychic energies the high sounding educational goals of our schools are mostly without influence on the actual psychic life of the child.

But if children cannot be educated in school (for they lack a real independent and responsible life experience on which to draw — to illustrate this Adler compares the classroom behavior of the GIs back in school on the GI Bill following their war experience with their not much younger college classmates)… they can be “trained,” that which ought to be the proper activity of the school.

Again, forget about education for understanding, education for democracy, the essential school movement, all that sort of thing, and instead use schooling to help the child acquire skills and information appropriate to his age and abilities.

Such skills such as speaking and reading foreign languages, gaining a familiarity with the languages of math, and music and art, as well as the skills acquired through such combined physical and mental activities as athletics, art and theater, any number of vocational pursuits, all kinds of science experiments.

And then there is the acquisition of all kinds of useful information, the knowledge of the past, the knowledge of the earth, and the creatures of the earth including man, the knowledge of the universe to mention a few. All of this is more than enough for the child in school.

But, while it’s true that children can, much more easily and more rapidly than adults, acquire the skills and knowledge mentioned, it’s not enough, as more and more the schools and teachers have recognized, just to simply stand up in the front of the classroom and teach. The center of the effort to learn from the very first has to be the child.

Therefore, as much as the teaching of skills and of knowledge the principal and primary role of the school and teacher has to be to motivate the child. Up until now that has not been the case as, for example, for every 100 or more curriculum papers we have one or fewer papers on what it takes to arouse the motivation and interest of the child.
….
At the end of his interview with Max Weismann Adler makes a common mistake regarding our nation. We are, he says, a nation at risk, because there is so little of what he calls education going on. But education, especial the liberal education of a lifetime of which Adler is most of all speaking, has always been rare, perhaps mostly non existent in prehistory, and we are probably no more at risk in this regard than we have ever been.

Of course this sort of thing never happens. the world is not changed, Helas!, by what we do to the kids in school. Would that it were! Schools do not make kids more virtuous. Nor do they make them more democratic.

Such organizations as The Forum for Education and Democracy, working to promote education for democratic life, are at best naive, and at worst terribly wasteful of people’s time and energies.

Do you want to teach democracy? Take the kids outside of school and throw them into life, into real life situations where they have to make choices and decisions. They will quickly learn the difference between dictatorial and democratic organizing principles.

The only way that good things happen in the schools, that is, the only way that real learning takes place, has to be through the efforts made by the kids themselves. School administrators and even teachers are clearly of secondary importance in the pursuit of learning.

I think of my own grandson. “What did you do in school today?” “At recess I played soccer, I think I’m an excellent goalie.” Not a word about Spanish, math, language, science, or history classes.

I know he’s taking these classes, but somehow they don’t reach his consciousness, or if they do they don’t stay in his consciousness beyond the final classroom bell.

Most of what kids learn in a single day proceeds not from the classroom, but from their time outside of school doing things of their own choice, things that reflect their own interests.

In my grandson’s case, these things are computer dependent activities, such as adding to his store of jokes and riddles by doing Google searches, playing games and watching movies, then away from the computer, playing Othello and 52 Pick-up with me, and outside, taking long walks all the time playing practical jokes on his grandfather.

All of course only after he has done his 30 minutes of homework, which for him is kind of the dues he has to pay in order to free himself to do what he wants.

So far after two years of classroom Spanish my grandson does know a few words. But in French he’s bilingual, fluent in the language, because that’s mostly the language he hears and has to communicate in when he’s in our home.

Schools just don’t seem to get the nature of language learning, nor math, nor science…. Immersion is the only effective technique of learning anything. And yet immersion, be it in math, science, or writing an essay, is nearly absent from our classrooms and schools. So far no one knows how to hold 20 to 25 kids under water at the same time.

The educational theorists don’t make things happen, any more that the physicists by their own thinking determine the nature of matter, nor the biologists the structure of the cell nucleus. At best the theorists uncover what’s there, but what’s there determines the course of our lives.

In schools what’s there, or what’s “in the kids” determines what’s learned. The kids more than the teachers make things happen, or that’s the way it should be. In society people more than politicians make things happen, or that’s the way it should be.

The tragedy, or better comedy, in which we now live, is that educators and politicians, rather than kids and people, are the driving forces. And in most cases they’re driving us off the road.

The fact is that up until now kids have pretty much escaped all the educational systems into which we would enclose them, nor have they been much influenced by the endless series of educational reforms to which we have subjected them.

I’m reminded of this every day….

Smart, motivated kids would come to us, more and more as we became better known in our community north of Boston, and at best we didn’t by our actions switch off their motivation and they learned. When they left us they were still smart and motivated and we didn’t reject the credit that wrongly came to us for this outcome.

But of course we couldn’t take the credit for the one or the other. Neither the smarts nor their motivation were our creations. Both had been with them from the start, and remained the most important factors affecting their school experience througout the time they were with us.

Not so smart and not so motivated kids also came to us. And we didn’t undo their “unsmartness,” nor did we motivate them to learn. They left us, four to six years later, still not so smart and not so motivated.

Right from the beginning such considerations as these made me want to shut down the school because the two things kids will most need in life, smarts and motivation, were not much influenced by what we were doing.

If we didn’t shut down (and we didn’t and the school is still alive and “well,” now, some 36 years later) it was probably much more because of the teachers who liked to teach and the parents who loved their children than because of the kids themselves, who never in my eyes made a convincing case for the validity of what we were doing to them and with them.

So why school at all? For the radical educator John Holt, “School is a wrong idea from the word go. It’s a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life.”

I actually have an answer to the question, why school, stemming from the following considerations. Children, we agree, are learning all the time. And most if not all of what they are learning follows from what interests them, what they spend their “own time” doing, probably more out of school than in.

Children are observant, and they will even observe what goes on in school because they have no choice, because they have to be there. It follows from these considerations that the school’s principal responsibility is to make sure that good things are happening in the school where the children are.

By good things I mean all those things that lend truth, beauty, and goodness to our lives.  Music (bands, choruses, ensembles, orchestras), public speaking (presentations, debates, student teaching), the sounds and rhythms of English and other languages, athletics (team and individual sports activities), discussions (of books, countries, historical periods, current events) and of course literacy and numeracy activities of all sorts. I don’t mean test prep and test taking.

The result of this school environment will be, not that the children grow in smarts and motivation, but that they become aware of at least a few of those intellectual, artistic, bodily, and other activities that throughout recorded history have brought men such great joy.

So why school? School may still be the best place to introduce kids to the best of what has come before. By and large the culture and popular media do not do that.

Yet the schools, from this country’s beginnings in the 17th century, have always placed their students into whatever size classroom groups the particular circumstances permitted. And the circumstances have never allowed a one-on-one learning relationship, perhaps the only one that is truly effective.

Classroom learning in comparison is wasteful and ineffective. Witness the numbers of people who, when they want to learn something, and have the means, will go to a tutor, will find someone who knows the subject matter or skill and is willing and able to teach what he knows.

Schools have always been a compromise between how students learn and how teachers are able to teach or help them learn. Always a compromise because if we talk to Tom we know that Jerry may not be listening, and vice versa. Imagine what it’s like in a class with ten times that number, probably the average size classroom in the country’s 97,000 schools. How many are listening to the teacher at any given moment?

I still ask the question, did it have to be this way. Did students have to learn in a classroom with 20 of their no less ignorant peers?  In any case, that’s now the way things are. If we’ve accepted the situation isn’t it because whether the students learn what we’re teaching them or not is not all that important. We’ve known for the longest time that what we teach them has little relevance to their daily lives.