|
|
|
The Trouble with Pure Freedom: A Case for Active
Adult Involvement in Progressive Education
by Alfie Kohn
Keynote Address at 2005 AERO Conference [www.aeroconference.com]
Author, Punished by Rewards & The
Schools Our Children Deserve
[In his opening comments, which were not
recorded, Kohn invited those in the alternative
education movement to consider whether they want
to continue being thought of as “alternative.”]
. . . . I would love nothing more than for the
stuff I believe in to become the mainstream.
Sort of like that old bumper sticker about
dreaming of the day when bake sales have to be
held to fund the military, while schools get
hundreds of billions. Similarly, I dream of the
day when people doing direct instruction and
constant testing and punitive discipline become
the alternative and have to hold small
conferences in Troy, New York.
But the question then becomes, what do we have
in common? To the extent that we are all
alternatives to the status quo at this point,
what do we share other than a distaste for
traditional kinds of instruction, control,
testing and the like. We would not be the first
group of people who are quite disparate except
for what we don’t like.
In what was, sadly, the final issue of a journal
called Paths of Learning, Ron Miller
said:
Nearly everyone is off in their own cozy little
worlds. Homeschoolers hang out with each other.
Montessorians read their own publications and go
to their own conferences, the Waldorf movement
inhabits its own tiny corner of the universe,
charter and magnet school advocates think
they’ve found the answer to the problems of
education, those in democratic schools celebrate
the freedom they enjoy in their minuscule
enclaves, and progressive activists see all
these groups as enemies against their struggle
to save public schools. As a holistic thinker, I
am convinced that the whole is greater than the
sum of its parts, and that if these various
movements and communities would come together,
learn from each other, and appreciate each
other’s contributions to a movement for
educational rights, we would have a political
and cultural force that could seriously contest
the reign of the educational empire. (Miller,
2005)
I thank Ron Miller for putting it so well, and I
thank Jerry Mintz for putting this conference
together.
Now, when I think about educational practices,
the ones I like and the ones I don’t like so
much, I often think in terms of what the
ultimate criterion is – the standard against
which we measure what we are doing, or what
other people are doing. I am interested
primarily in what I think benefits children,
what promotes their social, intellectual, and
moral development. I’m also interested in
furthering a democratic society: not just
teaching kids how to live in one but
increasingly how to create one where it doesn’t
really exist.
You may have noticed that most parenting books
begin with the question, “How do we get kids to
do what we want them to do?” And not
surprisingly, many of the things they come up
with don’t even reach that rather un-ambitious
goal. I’m interested in asking, “What do kids
need, and how do we meet those needs?”
The snapper is that some folks don’t regard this
as the ultimate criterion. There are some for
whom the main goal is freedom, or autonomy, or
liberty; they may even be guided primarily by an
anti-government sensibility. And I want to
suggest that there may be some light in between
those two sets of goals, such that pursuing a
consistent, one might even say fervent, desire
to advance the cause of Freedom-with-a-capital-F
may not be the same thing as figuring out what
kids need and how we can meet those needs, or
helping to further their intellectual, social,
and moral development.
The possibility that autonomy or freedom may not
be the only good is a particularly relevant
challenge to pose to libertarians. For me, there
are other goals even in a political or social
framework, for example the idea of community.
When autonomy is valued to the exclusion of
other goals, we run into problems of different
kinds. Today, my concern is primarily about what
that means for kids, especially in an
educational setting.
The question I’d like to pose is whether
authoritarians and educational libertarians may
have a very curious and paradoxical connection
that would discomfit them both — namely, a
shared belief that all authority, all adult
involvement in the lives or learning of kids,
must be top-down, controlling, manipulative, and
indeed autocratic. The two groups differ only on
whether that’s a good thing. For educational
libertarians, adult involvement — especially
when the adult takes the initiative to create
with kids, or in some cases for kids, a
curriculum, a set of principles, and other
things that form brackets around education —
must be bad. And therefore the only way to
escape bad control is to keep the adults at the
periphery of the picture for as much of the time
as possible.
I don’t share that view. While I’m not
completely allergic to dichotomies, it strikes
me as unhelpful to contrast a traditional, old
school, punitive, autocratic approach with utter
freedom. And so I want to talk for a bit about
what I see as a third alterative, or a spectrum
of alternatives. But I don’t want to talk as
long as I usually talk, in part because many of
you are every bit as opinionated as I am. I
would like to poke you and prod you and goose
you a little bit, and then invite response so
that most of the session is spent in
conversation.
The question I want to pose is, “How can adults
be involved in accomplishing three things:
fostering kids’ intellectual development,
fostering their social and moral development,
and fostering social change so that kids become
critics of the status quo?” Let me say a little
about each.
I’ll start with the intellectual kind and begin
with a story. [Kohn describes
a first-grade math lesson which the teacher
presents in such a way that the children must
play an active role in inventing, rather than
merely absorbing and applying, the concept of
standard units of measurement. This is described
in his book The Schools Our Children Deserve
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), pp. 134-35;
borrowed from Deborah Schifter, “A
Constructivist Perspective on Teaching and
Learning Mathematics,” in Constructivism:
Theory, Perspectives, and Practice, ed. by
Catherine Twomey Fosnot (New York: Teachers
College Press, 1996), pp. 73-76. He then asks
the audience what they noticed about the lesson.
Responses include “They keep going.” “It was
experiential.” “Student-led pace.”]
The teacher did not direct and control them. The
lesson was collaborative; it was not each kid
learning separately. Much of the learning was
not just active but also interactive, which
points up the critical role of peer learning as
opposed to each kid’s being on his or her own.
The kids were engaged from the beginning because
of the task that the teacher chose, the way she
set it up to invite them in, in a way that would
pique their curiosity, and of course she did not
control the discussion. The learning was
experiential, but it was more than that. It was
not just hands-on; it was minds-on. And that is
a notion that often eludes even some teachers
who pride themselves on their non-traditional
approaches. There was something genuinely,
richly challenging, engaging, generative about
the kinds of things that went on here.
Now when I describe this lesson to most groups
of educators, my primary objective is to invite
them to think about how the best learning
requires that the teacher be a lot less
controlling than most teachers are, to give the
kids the opportunity to take the lead and
grapple with the questions not only at their own
pace but in their own way. But for some of you I
have a different objective, and that is to
emphasize the critical role played by an active
adult in framing the lesson. The extent to which
learning is deep and rich often requires adults
to be involved from the beginning in taking the
initiative. When is it too much initiative? At
what point does the teacher crowd out the kids’
ability to explore things in their own way? That
is the art. But if we focus only on kids’
freedom, we miss out not merely on community as
a potential objective but also on some critical
intellectual development.
Notice what this teacher did: The kids thought
they had solved the problem, and twice she said
“terrific, but,” and then she threw what Eleanor
Duckworth memorably called a “monkey-wrench”
into their ideas. She artfully complicated their
thinking in a way that wouldn’t have happened if
she wasn’t involved. She pushed them to think
more deeply, to reflect at greater length about
the respects in which their solution might not
have gone far enough.
Carolyn Edwards, another constructivist thinker,
once said we shouldn’t just be “facilitating”
kids’ learning. That word originally meant “to
make easy,” as in facile. Rather, she says, we
need to stimulate and guide and support their
learning “by making problems more complex,
involving, and arousing.” So the kind of
intellectual development that seems ideal
requires — among other things such as freedom
from standardized curricula
and tests — a bunch of kids learning together
and a teacher who helps to set up and complicate
the curriculum.
That’s intellectual development. Now let me
suggest that something analogous is true with
respect to social and moral development. Leaving
kids on their own to figure out how to get along
with other people can be problematic. I have
seen examples where teachers simply say, “Now
that you are free to explore what you will, you
will probably want to find somebody else to
explore with you.” But that doesn’t always
happen, and lots of kids miss out on critical
social and moral development if there is no
structure that provides collaboration as a
default condition of learning.
Here I must digress only for a moment to point
out the important distinction between control
and structure. Again, the people who tend to
conflate those two are often either
authoritarian types who claim they are giving
kids structure but are really controlling the
hell out of them, or extreme freedom folks who
also assume the two are the same and therefore
if we don’t want to control kids we must provide
no structure either. The third alternative, more
consistent with the progressive education
tradition of Dewey and Piaget and Bruner,
suggests that in many respects, kids, especially
little kids and especially kids of a certain
personality and disposition, do thrive best
within certain forms of structure – though not
with control.
Now some teachers might say to their students,
“Why don’t we do this activity in our groups?”
and then remind them to “cooperate” – which, not
surprisingly, they often forget to do. Well,
it’s not that they forget; it’s that no one
helped to provide them with a way of thinking
about what cooperation means and doesn’t mean,
or even, dare I say it, some lessons to help
them acquire the skills necessary to listen
carefully, to make eye contact, to disagree
without putting people down, to figure out how
sometimes it’s appropriate to argue, as opposed
to staying silent or being nasty. Kids sometimes
don’t collaborate in a way that’s healthy
because they need some adult involvement to make
that happen.
A different example: I have seen teachers who
asked their students to generate some rules for
the classroom and are very proud that they asked
the kids to do so. Their next question is, “What
do you think we should do when people don’t
follow our rules?” I don’t know if you’ve ever
been in such a classroom, but trust me, kids
come up with hair-raisingly harsh consequences.
To that extent, the teacher, logged into the
usual formula, is forced either to go ahead and
apply those consequences or to say that these
kids were not mature enough to be involved,
giving the teacher permission to go back to
making up the rules and consequences on her own.
Some kids, when left to their own devices, will
naturally respond with harsh consequences
because after having been taught that when you
do something bad, something bad has to be done
to you, they’ll then use their imaginations to
come up with really ingenious ways of applying
that principle. The role for the adult is to
help kids think beyond what they’ve already been
exposed to. Thus, a teacher might begin the year
by saying to a class, “If, sometime this year,
you did something you weren’t proud of,
something that really hurt someone else, what do
you think we as a community could do to help
you?” – and then really invite them to reflect
on the significance of this question as an
alternative to dreaming up punitive
consequences.
If you asked each kid to reflect on how people
could help her if she totally lost her temper,
the next step then is an opportunity for her to
reflect on what if someone else lost his temper.
How could we help that kid? Having been invited
to think about how punishment ain’t going to
help me, she begins to wonder why we would we
use it on anyone. And now the kids are beginning
to construct an alternative to what they’ve been
exposed to for years. Now they’re thinking
beyond consequences.
If a teacher asks a minimal question – “What
should happen to people who don’t follow our
rules?” – you’re in a “doing to” environment,
and you’re going to get “doing to” back in
spades. The teacher has to become more involved,
not less, but more involved in the direction of
promoting and sparking kids to reconstruct the
way people in a community live with one another,
to challenge widespread and deeply held
assumptions about rewards and punishment, about
learning and motivation, about the nature of
schools and human beings. All of which requires
an amazingly artful structure, knowing when to
shut up and when to speak out.
Again, there is no formula for all of this. But
it’s all about building a sense of concern for
others, the teacher in many cases suggesting
activities that will develop an organic sense of
community in the room. That teacher must play a
role that goes far beyond being a passive
observer. Observing is great, especially when it
is observation in the service of kids’ needs, as
opposed to observation in the service of more
ingenious control, as is the case with
mainstream classroom management programs. But
observation isn’t enough for social and moral
development — unless you believe, consciously or
unconsciously, that human beings are like acorns
that need only a bit of water and sunshine and
they will grow into oaks all on their own. We
get to very basic questions that go beyond
classroom arrangements here, questions about
what is required for optimal development and
what optimal development consists in.
My third issue, beyond intellectual and
social/moral development, is the question of
helping kids to become questioners and
challengers of the status quo. I worked a long
time ago at a school in a very conservative
community, and I was very young and very keen on
establishing myself as the rebel. On the first
day of school I wore a yellow button on my shirt
that said, “Question Authority.” The kids
literally didn’t understand the concept. They
misread the syntax of it – kids were asking me,
“Who made you the question authority?”
That’s what we’re up against. Given that we do
not raise and teach kids in a vacuum, it falls
to us if we are interested in challenging
oppressive institutions and social mores to help
this process in important ways. Because if the
adult is not involved in promoting and actively
fostering that disposition to question and
challenge — and helping to teach the skills to
bring it off — not much of that is likely to
happen. And here is where we come across one of
the most fascinating paradoxes of all. Adults
may stand back, committed to being respectful of
kids’ autonomy, but the kids have already
absorbed and internalized the norms of this
society and are not even aware of the extent to
which this is true.
Here, a sentence for me that stood out like a
jewel, is from a book I hope many of you know:
Schooling in Capitalist America by Sam
Bowles and Herbert Gintis: “Of course, education
can recognize the sanctity of the individual’s
experience, but it cannot leave it intact.”
Let me give you a couple of examples. By the
time they’re in second or third grade, most
kids, if told that the class had the opportunity
to decide what field trip to take, what snack to
have, what book to read next, or what to put on
the walls, would almost instantly suggest that
they vote. Voting, for me, as for political
theorist Benjamin Barber, is “perhaps the least
important act in a real democracy.” Voting is
what I like to call “adversarial majoritarianism.”
It’s not about real democracy; it’s just about
winning and losing. “How many want to go to the
museum for our field trip? OK, thirteen. How
many want to go to the zoo? Eleven. Right. We go
to the museum.” Democracy in action!
Excuse me, but no real democracy happened here.
The best thing that can be said about this
exercise is that it didn’t take long. Well,
maybe that’s not fair. At least the teacher
didn’t decide unilaterally. But now you’ve got
11 kids going to a place they expressly
preferred not to go, and you have 24 kids who
never had to listen to one another, never had to
do the hard, messy, improvisational work of
forging a consensus, hashing out a compromise,
imagining the perspective of other people to try
to imagine how they look at the world, learning
what they find so damned interesting about a
stupid museum. You don’t get the guts of
democracy when you just vote and the majority
wins.
The question then interestingly becomes, What
can be done in order for the adults to introduce
a concept of, say, consensus building, to which
the kids otherwise would never have been exposed
and which would never have occurred to them? If
you simply follow the kids, they are not only
less likely to grow intellectually and grow
morally, but less likely to challenge the things
in our society that live inside us.
Another, closely related example is competition
itself. You get really little American kids at
recess, one of the few places in most schools
where they have a little autonomy, and they will
often play competitive games. Why? Because they
have thoughtfully arrived at the conclusion that
the best way to have fun is to sort themselves
into winners and losers, and that recreation
requires people to try to defeat each other? No!
Because they’ve probably never been introduced
to cooperative games.
Terry Orlick of the University of Ottawa did
just that, exposing a bunch of kids to those
games as well as to traditional sports. The
result was that two thirds of the boys and all
of the girls preferred the cooperative games
when they were given a choice. The decision to
play win/lose activities can’t be considered an
informed one until the adult helps children to
see that there is an alternative – and that’s
something that people in our culture may live
their whole lives without realizing. That’s why
lots of people stare at me blankly and ask, “How
could you play a game without winners or
losers?”
We’re trained along those lines from our
earliest days. The first game I ever learned
featured n children scrambling for n-1 chairs
when the music stopped. A prototype of
artificial scarcity. Orlick suggests that we
play cooperative musical chairs instead, where
you take away a chair in each round, but now the
objective is for all the kids to fit on a
diminishing number of seats. So at the end you
have 7 or 8 kids, all still in the game, mostly
giggling, trying to figure out how they can all
squish themselves onto one chair. Everybody has
a good time.
But a seven year old’s probably not going to
come up with that on his own, especially when
every televised reality show is all about
beating other people; when every field you drive
by in your home town consists exclusively of
games where each group of children is working to
defeat the other. And it runs as a thread
through our economic system and our political
system and, god knows, our schools, with awards
assemblies and spelling bees.
The paradox, again, is quite simply that a
stringently hands-off, follow-the-child approach
may be insufficiently radical if we’re committed
to creating a more just society.
I wrote an article recently called, “Challenging
Students . . . And How to Have More of Them”
[available on
www.alfiekohn.org] in which I gave a bunch
of examples of the kinds of things that people
can do to promote a posture of questioning
authority, especially in a classroom context.
For example, progressive educators have long
talked about learning by doing, experiential
education, as opposed to just sitting there
passively listening. But I don’t see much talk
about teaching by doing, in which the teacher
actually demonstrates stuff. That is beginning
to make its presence felt in the teaching of
writing, where some of the gurus urge us to
write in front of kids. Show them rough drafts,
show them the process – on a blackboard or
overhead projector – so they can see you compose
things and scratch stuff out because it was not
what you intended; they can see you move
sentences around and try again.
The main justification that’s offered for doing
this is that kids learn to write better that
way. OK, I’ll buy that. A few people even
mention something that you rarely see in the
educational literature: It helps them want to
write; it promotes a disposition and not merely
a skill. But I have another reason: When you
teach by doing you make yourself vulnerable, you
teach kids that writing, especially good
writing, does not drop down from the heavens
fully formed. This empowers kids to challenge
the stuff they’re reading. Some teachers
deliberately ask kids to rewrite stuff in the
published books they’d been assigned to read,
especially stuff they didn’t like that much.
We all have our little language pet peeves,
those of us who are teachers. Mine is the use of
“they” to refer to a single author. Not because
it’s grammatically incorrect, but because “they”
obscures the fact that the book was written by a
person with a point of view, a bias, and
sometimes a propensity to make mistakes. “They
say on page 276. . .” – No, it’s not “them”!
It’s, I don’t know, “Bill Schwartz.” Who is Bill
Schwartz? What else has he written? How can we
learn to talk back to the book? One way is by
demystifying the process of writing so kids can
see how it’s done, as a way to help them want to
question what they’re presented with.
The same is true in mathematics and science.
Typically, teaching by doing in math consists of
a teacher working through some problem, step by
step, or a science teacher demonstrating an
experiment, knowing exactly what the results are
going to be. That’s not what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about where the teachers actually
tackle problems, or attempt experiments, when
they are not sure how it’s going to work out.
And they model for the kids that iffy
proposition of how real scientists do real
science. Again, the underlying message is
always: We adults don’t always know what’s going
on; we don’t always know how to do it.
With morality, too, we adults might have to do
more than just set an example of good
decision-making for our children; we might need
to take kids “backstage” so they can see what we
do, and what we think, when we’re faced with a
moral dilemma. Anybody can say, “Be honest” or
“Be kind,” but what do you do when telling
someone the truth will hurt her feelings? We
need to help kids see how we wrestle with real
problems, to demystify the process of ethical
judgment, the process of writing, the process of
thinking about mathematical and scientific
truths.
John Holt put it very well, as he often did: “We
adults so often present ourselves to children as
if we were gods – all-knowing, all-powerful,
always rational, always just, always right. This
is worse than any lie we can tell about
ourselves. So to counteract this, when I am
trying to do something I am no good at, I do it
in front of students so they can see me
struggling with it.”
You can see why most adults don’t do that.
Precisely what makes it so powerful is what
makes it so scary for us – to be vulnerable. But
again it’s not just an accidental witnessing of
something when they happen to be around us. One
must contrive it to some extent, yet without its
becoming too contrived, if that doesn’t seem
contradictory.
The challenge here, I’ve been arguing, is to ask
basic questions: What do we think learning is
about? What do we think human beings are like?
And what are our goals? If our goals involve
intellectual development and social development
and helping kids to question the world as it is
presented to them, then I think we are obliged
to reject the traditional autocratic approach
that is so depressingly pervasive in our
society, but also to reject its mirror opposite
of pure freedom where the adult merely observes
or follows. Instead, we need to do the much
harder work of figuring out how to bring kids
along, when to follow and when to lead, when to
tell and when to ask and when to shut up.
And that’s all I’m going to say, so now you say.
Copyright © 2005 by Alfie Kohn
Question & Response after Alfie Kohn’s Keynote
Address
|
|
