Month: April 2018

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Summerhill Three

Photo Credit: Paul-W Flickr via Compfight cc

For the past two weeks I have been writing about Summerhill School, the Free School/Democratic School movement, and I still find there is more to write and think about.

The schools systems of today focus too much on skills and knowledge. Yes, there is the customary, perfunctory mention of emphasizing values and attitudes, but let’s face it, it’s really just all about grades — even if the teachers, the principal or the school owner says otherwise, the system itself speaks louder than all of them. Get good grades and you’re ok. Get bad grades and you’re out. Get very high grades and you’re a superstar.

I also do not understand this idea of teaching values as a subject and giving grades based on it. For example, a school might have an item on the report card that says “Honesty.” How in the world can a teacher grade that unless they follow each child every minute of their lives?

Children easily see through falseness and hypocrisy. One day, my elementary kid came to me and asked, “Why is it that during school accreditation, the restrooms are extra clean and suddenly have soap and toilet paper? And why is  everyone cautioned to not be loud and boisterous, and to smile and greet the visitors?”

And it doesn’t only happen in my child’s school but in a lot of major private and public schools. In fact, fictionist Gilda Cordero-Fernando wrote a short story about this phenomenon decades ago entitled “Visitation of the Gods” and captures to perfection the tragically comic way school personnel and officials pander to the “gods” of accreditation.

How can a school talk about honesty when it does things like this? Children get the message loud and clear and it doesn’t matter how many lectures the teachers give on honesty.

Or how about “reverence to God?” How do you measure that? How do you know if that merits an A or a B or a C or even a D? And what if the child believes in another god, or a goddess, or gods, or doesn’t believe in any god at all?

Words are cheap, and words in a lecture are even cheaper. The best way to teach is by example and experience.

This is why the self-government structure of Summerhill intrigues me. Everyone, even 5-year olds, get a vote — and teachers don’t get more votes than students. At a very young age, children learn that their voice matters. They learn to express their thoughts and ideas. They learn the value of cooperation, agreement, and keeping their word. They design their own laws, their own system of rewards and punishment, and even their own system of enforcement. By experience, not just by textbook, they learn how democracy works.

That is the central system and structure of  a free school — not the subjects — those are left for the students to explore by themselves according to their interest. I think it is a far better teaching method than any bunch of lectures can provide.

I read about a teacher’s account of a student who came from a traditional school (I’m not sure whether this was Summerhill or some other democratic school — I cannot find the source anymore). When that boy found out that he could do anything he wanted in this school, he promptly went to the couch and slept.

That’s all that he did for the entire year. Every day, he would come to school, go to the couch, and sleep — and no one bothered him about it, not the teachers or other students. He was exercising his freedom to do it, and he wasn’t bothering anyone or impinging on someone else’s freedom. So he was left alone.

The following year, he proceeded to do that again. Until at around the middle of the year, he approached a teacher and asked how one becomes president of the self-government system. The teacher tells him that he has to get others to vote for him.

“Well, I want to be president,” this boy says.

“And how do you expect people to vote for you if all you do is sleep all day? People have to hear you. They have to know what you can do for them. They have to see that voting for you will be in their best interests,” replied the teacher.

So from that day forward, the boy stopped sleeping on the couch and began doing other things and interacting with the other student. He became active and popular and yes, he indeed became president shortly after.

Sometimes, like plants, all children need is space and time to grow and mature. All the nudging and shaping that we do often doesn’t really help and might even cause resentment and fixation on that which was denied them.

Let me leave you with this little food for though from A.S. Neill himself, “There is no case whatever for the moral instruction of children. It is psychologically wrong. To ask a little child to be unselfish is wrong. Every child is an egoist. The world belongs to him. His power of wishing is strong; he has only to wish and he is king of the earth. When he is given an apple his one wish is to eat that apple. And the chief result of mother’s encouraging him to share his very own apple with his little brother is to make him hate the little brother.

Altruism comes later, comes naturally if the child is not taught to be unselfish; probably never comes at all when the child is taught to be unselfish. The young altruist is merely the child who likes to please others while he is satisfying his own selfishness.”

 

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

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Summerhill Too

Photo Credit: oiZox Flickr via Compfight cc

After writing last week’s short piece on Summerhill, I reflected on the state of education and employment in our country and could only begin to wonder what it would be like if we had more Summerhill-type schools. Career and college education mismatch is a problem, not just here but also in the United States (not that it should surprise us as our educational system is patterned after theirs — and so its problems will predictably be ours as well) and the numerous studies concerning this proves that there is indeed an issue.

Several educators have noted that schools have a factory-like, cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all approach. The school bell, for example, is similar to the factory bell, used as a way of signalling breaks and changes in shifts. Students are grouped into “batches.” Schools talk about “producing” graduates of different majors — business, accounting, chemistry, engineering — as if they were specialized parts designed to fit the societal machine.

Of course, there are those who object to this comparison saying it is a misleading comparison of the history of the educational system — as there are no hard references to schools being modeled after factories or of producing graduates primarily for the purpose of being employed in these factories. Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post contends that even if there are indeed factory-like conditions in schools, removing these will not solve the main problems of education, which she asserts are disengagement and shallow learning.

In her view, “Young people would rather be socializing than learning, and though some learning can happen through play, much of it can’t. Young people, like adults, would also like to avoid exhausting and effortful work; but thinking is hard, and much of learning involves thinking. Finally, young people aren’t naturally interested in many of the things we want them to learn in school; yet as long as school is designed to serve the needs of society and not just the desires of the individual, much of education will involve steering students away from what they are naturally interested in and towards something else.”

So the solution, she says, is “great teaching” which involves “cultivation of environments of trust and care. It means finding adequate space for play and for hard work. It means nudging and cajoling students, pestering and praising them. It means uncovering puzzles and conjuring mysteries. It means drawing connections to student interests, engaging with the real world, and cracking the occasional joke. Masterful teachers know this. And their classrooms are places of wonder. No observer would ever liken them to factories.”

While I would agree with her assessment that we need masterful teachers who can transcend the limits of the classroom’s four walls, those teachers are few precisely because they have been molded in an educational system that doesn’t look too kindly at those seeking to test its borders. It is unrealistic to expect a lot of out-of-the-box thinkers from a system that trains people to be in the box.

What attracted me to democratic schools like Summerhill is that students are really free to pursue their interests, and the teacher’s role is not to say, “Oh, that’s not very useful for society. What you need to do is study so you can become a lawyer, banker, doctor or engineer,” but rather to help the child process and maybe think through their desires and even helping them along with what they want.

I remember reading the account of one of the teachers of such a school. He had a 14-year old student who said that he wanted to be a mortician someday. Instead of steering the kid away from that path, what the teacher did was to contact the local funeral parlor in town and then asked the manager if he would be willing to take on a young apprentice. The teacher had to drive the student to the funeral parlor and then pick him up every week. That student eventually opened his own funeral parlor when he became an adult.

Now, try doing that in a traditional school.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

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Summerhill

header image of the Summerhill School website

I first heard about Summerhill school around a decade ago. The school was founded by Alexander Sutherland Neill in England in 1921. Its distinct feature is that students go there and can do anything they want, as long as they do not impinge on other people’s freedom — the maxim for this being “freedom, not license.”

There is no required curriculum, no exams, no grade levels and no grades (unless so desired by the student perhaps as a means of feedback).

Their website proudly declares: “Summerhill is a school of personal choice, where students must decide each day how they will use their time… they can play, they can involve themselves in a variety of constructive social situations, they can be by themselves to read or daydream, they can engage in self directed group projects and activities, and they can choose to attend formal lessons… each day the children define themselves by choice and action… this is a profound experience that leads to a strong sense of personal and responsibility and self knowledge.”

Summerhill is the first of the free school movement, which has spread to many parts of the world. It is a “free” school not in the sense of being free of tuition or fees, but in the sense of being democratic.

The school practices self-governance in which everyone has one vote, whether student, teacher, staff or administrator. Everyone participates in a weekly meeting to discuss and vote on any current issues. The community itself creates their own rules and they can also vote to remove the same rules, if later found to have unwanted consequences.

For example, students voted on a rule to remove bedtime (Summerhill is a boarding school where students and teachers live on-campus), but they later voted to reinstate it when someone complained that he kept waking up due to the noise that other kids made.

The beauty of this system is that children are taught at a very young age to direct their own lives and to be responsible. Contrast this to the standard educational system where adults make most of the decisions and all kids do is to follow and conform to what the “older” people want — for example, decisions as to what to study and what to learn, how fast they should be able to learn, for example, one year for algebra and another year for geometry and then another for trigonometry — which may be too long for some and too short for others.

How about kids who want to learn how to draw or animate? How about those who want to learn about raising farm animals? How about those who want to learn how to print shirts, or how to grow a garden, or how to fix broken plumbing, or build a treehouse, or be a world-class poker player?

Who decided that children HAVE to learn Math, English, Science, Filipino, History, and so on, and to what degree? I remember when I was teaching before at this school in Manila, I saw some of my students studying their chemistry notes. I looked over their notes and was surprised because the difficulty level was as if they were chemistry majors and not high-schoolers — and most of these kids would not even take chemistry-related majors or careers. What’s the point?

Children, when properly motivated to learn, can pick things up very quickly. Some kids approached a teacher and said they were interested in learning math. So the teacher said okay and set some conditions (like attendance in classes, and so on) and everyone agreed. In a few months, they were able to finish several topics. When this teacher met with a friend who taught in a regular public school, he shared the experience. The public school teacher was surprised. He said, “How did you finish in a few months? Those topics that you mentioned comprise our entire 6-year curriculum!”

Neill himself wrote, “You cannot make children learn music or anything else without to some degree converting them into will-less adults. You fashion them into accepters of the status quo – a good thing for a society that needs obedient sitters at dreary desks, standers in shops, mechanical catchers of the 8:30 suburban train – a society, in short, that is carried on the shabby shoulders of the scared little man – the scared-to-death conformist.“

A school must facilitate the child’s natural inclination to learn what he wants, and not force the child into dreary conformity on what the school thinks the child ought to want.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

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Who Said What

I have always enjoyed witty sayings and statements that make you pause, think or laugh because of their cleverness. I remember way back when I was still teaching (there was no internet then), and whenever I would come across something interesting, I would write those in a journal that I kept.

Later on, I compiled these quotations and typed them up on a page layout software called Pagemaker, printed them out on board paper, then cut them into small 4×5 cards. I would shuffle the cards, pick out one, and pin it on my corkboard at the faculty area where it would stay for a few days until I got tired of it, and I would pick another one to replace it.

Then the internet came along and memes became popular, and people would post quotations along with who said them. I noticed some of them were from my old collection, but sometimes they were attributed to other people.

There was one time when an entire speech was misattributed to the famous writer, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. If you’ve been around long enough, you’ve probably read it or heard about it also. It was supposedly delivered by the author as a commencement speech to the M.I.T. class of 1997. The speech spread like wildfire via email (social media being virtually nonexistent at that point in time).

Australian film director Baz Luhrmann got the idea of using the speech in the hit single, Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen). When he sought out the author to ask for permission to use the words, he found out then that Vonnegut didn’t actually write the speech, but a Chicago Tribune columnist named Mary Schmich.

It turns out that many famous quotations have been misattributed or even misquoted. Perhaps the original was a bit bland or dated so someone sought to make it more poetic.

For example, the famous line “the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” is guilty of both. Do an image search for this phrase and you will see various memes. Some attribute this line to Lao Tzu and some attribute it to Confucius. The truth is that neither of them actually said this line. The original sentence is found in the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu and it translates roughly as “the journey of a thousand li begins beneath one’s feet.” (The li is a Chinese unit of measure and a thousand of them converts to roughly 400 miles).

So the exact original phrase would be something like “The journey of 400 miles begins beneath one’s feet.” Then again, that wouldn’t look as good on a meme.

Sometimes, a person is quoting someone else and that person is attributed as the source of the quote. For example, do another image search for “Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school” and you will see many memes attributing this quote to Albert Einstein.

The truth is Einstein was not the originator of this statement as he was only quoting someone else, in and this case he did not name the person but just called the person as “some wit.”

Here is the passage as published in On Education: Excerpts from an address by Albert Einstein to the State University of New York at Albany, on the occasion of the celebration of the tercentenary of higher education in America, 15th October, 1931:

If a young man has trained his muscles and physical endurance by gymnastics and walking, he will later be fitted for every physical work. This is also analogous to the training of the mind and of the mental and manual skill. Thus, the wit was not wrong who defined education in this way: “Education is that which remains, if one has forgotten everything he learned in school.”

The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations and the Routeledge Dictionary of Quotations both attribute a slightly similar phrase “Education is what remains when we have forgotten all that we have been taught” to George Savile, Lord Halifax as far back as the late 1600’s, but no actual textual reference can be found.

If you are interested in more of these stories, you can pick up The Quote Verifier by Ralph Keyes. And remember, as Abraham Lincoln once said, “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.”

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.