Factories, Schools, Creativity and Fascists

I had a lovely lunch with one of New York state’s newest teachers this week.  We talked about our summer program, chatted about jobs and friends, and – as can be expected – complained about the pressures facing teachers in the current educational environment.    Students are expected to drill and drill, in order to excel at a standardized test – all their work and knowledge rendered down to a number.  And teachers are expected  to robotically fulfill Common Core requirements, spending much of their time proving they are “performing” according to an externally determined plan (for the Annual  Professional Performance Review), rather than teaching.  As a philosopher, I couldn’t help but see the underlying world-view motivating educational “reform” in the United States.  We act as if schools are factories, inhabited by bustling workers (teachers), churning out well-tuned and tested machines (students).  If students were automobiles, then we could standardized the way we produced them and we could test them carefully and discard the lemons.  A quality control officer could discover where mistakes are made and the factory workers (teachers) could be judged by how efficiently they worked.  That would be great if students were automobiles – but they aren’t.

                Teaching is an art.  Students are complex, self-moving people.   And – most importantly – what each child brings to school each day is variable and outside of the teacher’s control.  If teaching is an art, we might compare students to lumps of clay that the teacher molds into beautiful and useful objects.  But there is more than one kind of clay, with variable plasticity, differing porousness, color, etc.  And if you don’t get your clay from an art store, already highly processed, there will be sticks, pebbles, roots, and other debris in it.  The same is true of our students.  Each child has her or his own qualities, strengths, and weaknesses.  Some come to us highly “processed” – like clay from an art store.  Perhaps they spent the first 5 years of their lives surrounded by books, talking to college-educated parents, playing on computers or tablets, and visiting museums.  But other children come to us with great natural intelligence that has not been processed and prepared in the same way for the school system.  A teacher needs to meet children where they are, adapt to their abilities and interests and assist them in discovering the world.  But students are more than clay.  Unlike clay, which the potter can control, children can resist, redirect, misunderstand, and, in general, respond to teaching in surprising ways.  This is a good thing!  We want children to be engaged learners who take on the project of gaining knowledge as active participants.  We do not want children to sit passively and repeat what they are told.  Tape recorders can do that – but children are people, not machines.

                When I first became a teacher, I met with the usual frustrations.  Students didn’t respond to my lessons the way I had intended.   They took up assignments in ways I hadn’t anticipated.  They found every loophole in my rules.  Like many new teachers, I responded by tightening up my instructions, filling in the loopholes, mandating conformity.  I could feel the resentment from my students and I was uncomfortable in the role of police officer.  And still they didn’t act the way I had planned for them to act.  Tightening my grip only made them slip through my fingers more.  I might get outside conformity, but I knew I was losing them.  With time, and confidence, I began to let go.  I took on the unexpected as a good thing – I gave more open assignments, solicited student input, and began to look forward to the surprises my students would bring me.  And learning started happening – both for the students and for me.   I am fortunate enough to teach on the college level, where state mandated testing and performance evaluations do not constrain me.  What I learned, however, carries over to primary and secondary education – learning and conformity do not mix.

                Today’s public school teachers do not have that freedom.  While the teachers I know are creative and confident and could easily engage their students as individuals and really teach them – they are being forced to conform by state and federal controls and they, in turn, are forced to make their students conform as well.  As I said to my friend at lunch, we are raising good fascists, but we are not teaching.