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CHAPTER 1
What Is a School?
Often during my three decades in the City and Country School I have thought we should have a doctor on hand at all times. Not for the children (we took care of that) but for innocent visitors to our classrooms. Sometimes, emerging from a morning of observation, they have seemed visibly to be suffering from shock!
This was not likely to be true of mothers — a mother more often came away from her first visit with a look of bewildered pleasure. She had watched a group of happy children without always knowing what they were happy about, but for the moment it was enough that they were happy.
Occasionally a father looked jolted, worried; how, in that turmoil, would his son ever get ready for Harvard?
But the sharpest reaction could be counted on to come from the good teacher whose entire life had been spent in a traditional classroom.
"Do you call this a school?" She would ask the question in terms more or less politely veiled depending on how far her principles had been outraged. And I could sympathize with her, having served my time in the kind of classroom where each child sits on a bench nailed to the floor, at a desk as firmly fixed in its place, incommunicado as far as all the other children are concerned — and the teacher at the front of the room sternly bound to maintain the discipline without which, it is assumed, the work will not get done.
I have put such a teacher among, say, our sixth graders, the Elevens, to share a part of their full and busy day. By contrast to the nailed-down dependability of her own classroom, here nothing was fixed, nothing stayed put, not even the furniture — above all, not the children!
Some would be in the print room, turning out a job. There they were anchored at least to the presses; yet through the wide doorway there would be a constant movement of active young bodies round and round among typecases and stock shelves, with a chatter of voices as continuous as the hum and clatter of the presses. Orders, comments, criticisms, a shouted question to the teacher from the foreman of the week: "We finished the Sevens' reading work — shall we start on the library card order or the Parents' Association letterheads?"
Within the classroom itself there would be no stillness, either visual or auditory. Treble howls of disagreement might be rising from the corner where the editorial committee of the Elevens' magazine, soon going to press, debated the literary merits of a nine-year-old's story — or a Thirteen's, the more sharply criticized because of the author's advanced age. A pigtailed Eight bounded into the room, her small face solemnly on duty bent, a canvas mail pouch hanging from her shoulders; postman from the Eights' post office, she carried a special delivery letter, an invitation to the Elevens from the Tens to attend a performance of their play in the gym the next morning. Two Elevens returned, laden with packages of paper, pencils, notebooks, jars of bright paints, supplies bought for the group at the school store run by the Nines. A tall Twelve, splotches of mimeographing ink competing with the freckles on his nose, carried in a stack of copies of The Yardbird, the weekly newspaper published by his group, to be sold later at 1¢ apiece. (The price, I understand, has recently risen to 3¢ — another case of rising costs of production.)
Half a dozen Elevens might now bang in from work in the science room, the clay room, the shop, and you could tell which, for the marks of their labors would be plain on their worn and stained dungarees. With the new arrivals there would be a shifting of tables and chairs, a foraging in lockers to get out an arithmetic book which needed correcting, a linoleum cut to be finished, a topic — Astronomy in the Middle Ages — to be written up in a notebook. The teacher might be asked, "How much time before Yard?" but rarely, "What shall we do now?" Each child apparently knew what unfinished work he had on hand and promptly applied himself to it. From the class treasurer of the week, pushing a lock of brown hair behind an ear while she worked on her accounts, there might come a piteous wail — "We'll have to stop losing pencils! If we have to buy pencils again this week we can't afford the trip to Chinatown!"
And swirling around the visitor's head, beating against her unaccustomed ears, there was noise, until the walls of the room must bulge with it. Of twenty souls in the room, only one was quiet — the teacher.
Of course the visitor was right in her complaint: this did not look or sound like any schoolroom. But it was very much like something else. It was like a segment of grown-up activity, an office, a small factory, or perhaps office and factory combined. Nor did these children look like schoolchildren, starched and clean-faced, the boys in white shirts, the girls in crisp frocks. These children wore work clothes, dungarees or overalls, boys and girls alike (occasionally a dress, the exercise of individual prerogative), and they and their work clothes bore the evidences of their work. "Do they have to get so dirty?" mothers have been asking for thirty years. But was there ever a printer without ink on his trousers and his cheek, a cook without flour on her elbows and aprons?
This classroom was a place where work was done. The workers could not be fastened down; they had to come and go about their various jobs, fetch supplies, seek advice, examine, compare, discuss. The work got done, not in proportion to the silence in the room, but in proportion to the responsibility of each worker to his job and to the group. Some were more able, more responsible workers than others — as among adults. And, as among adults, there was a supervisor (not a boss, however) directing, counseling, channeling the abundant energies of these young workers, keeping the balance among personalities, keeping the schedule of the day's program and its constantly varying tasks, checking the accomplishment of both group and individual.
No wonder the visitor was confounded. The movement bewildered her; the noise came between her and the work. But she was the only one in the room who was bewildered. She could not see the pattern, so unlike the traditional one with which she was familiar, so much more complex. Yet it was an obvious and familiar pattern, seen everywhere except in the traditional schoolroom. It was the traditional pattern, rather than this one, which was strange and unfamiliar. This one was the normal pattern of human activity, adult or child. Because these were children, the noise was louder, the movement more explosive. And because these were children, the task of the teacher and her student-teacher assistant was so much more than merely that of a shop foreman or a supervisor in an adult project that here, in truth, the analogy breaks down. This teacher had a task so subtle, so exacting, that a traditionally trained teacher could scarcely hope to comprehend it at a glance.
And if she asked us, as in one way or another she always did, is this a school — we could ask in our turn, what is a school?
To answer that a school is a place of learning is no answer at all, but only another way of stating the question. A place of learning what? A place of learning how?
I was seventeen when I taught my first class — a one-room school in the country — and I had had none of the benefits of normal school, teacher training, nor even, possibly, had ever heard the word pedagogy. What I did have was a deep conviction, unspoken, indeed unconscious until much later, that a desire to learn was as natural and inevitable in children as the desire to walk in babies.
How could anyone doubt that it was? Once beyond the eating-sleeping stage, every day, every hour of a young child's waking life is devoted to adventure, exploration, discovery of the world around him. His fiercest struggles are to learn — to turn over, to sit up, to walk, to climb; later, to grasp a toy, to shake a rattle, to roll and recapture a ball; still later, to investigate the working of light switches, telephones, clocks. ("Why must he be so destructive?" protests the dismayed mother, but our forefathers had to see their houses burned down before they knew how fire worked.) His greatest frustrations, aside from his own limitations, are the restrictions placed upon him by the adult world in his effort to touch, to feel, to see and smell and taste. And his method of learning? The first and best one, the one used by Neanderthal man and by the atomic scientist — trial and error.
No one who has watched a baby return to his lessons day after day — and persist in them despite bumps and bruises — can doubt the drive of the young human being to learn. And indeed if man did not have this compulsion to explore, to understand, and to conquer or at least come to terms with the world in which he lives, including his own person, he must surely have disappeared from the earth ages ago, along with the millions of other forms of life which have vanished, even the mighty dinosaur.
But something happens, alas, to this great driving force. All but a very few men and women in the world, a few unique beings touched with some kind of genius, have lost the urge to learn.
They lost it, in fact, long before they were grown. They lost it while they were still little children, while they were still spending their days in the place of learning, the school — perhaps that was where they lost it!
A visitor from out of town — not an educator, merely a perceptive and sensitive mother — told me something once which I have never forgotten. She had spent an hour or two in the school, and sat down with me afterward to talk about her own boys, who were pupils at a fine traditional private school.
"When they were six they were so busy, so active, so alive!" she said. "They had so many interests, wanted to do so many things — and did them! Now they are eleven and nine, and it's all gone. They have no interest, no curiosity, no initiative or imagination or individuality. They might have been turned out in a factory." I can remember that there were tears in her eyes.
Maybe because circumstances had made me a teacher, and maybe because I was a teacher before I learned the accepted ways to teach — whatever the reason, I was in my twenties when I began to look for the child's lost desire to learn. It seemed to me that if we could keep this desire alive through childhood and into adult life, we would release a force more precious and powerful for good than any physical force the scientists ever discovered for mankind's use.
At least, I reasoned, it would make the years of learning, the school years, meaningful. The child would learn in such a way that his knowledge would actually go with him from the schoolroom into the world; his knowledge would become part of him, as the knowledge the infant gains by his own trial and error method becomes part of him.
I had seen fifteen-year-old boys who had been faithfully taught their three Rs in the public school struck dumb and helpless when they needed to divide a fifteen-inch board into two halves in the shop. It was only one evidence — but how revealing — of what I had seen again and again, that our teaching had failed to teach, that it had only crammed knowledge like excelsior into unreceptive little heads, knowledge that was unused because it was unusable as we had given it, unrelated, undigested. Most dreadful of all, unwanted.
I once asked a cooking teacher why she did not let the children experiment with the flour and yeast, to see whether they could make bread. She said in a shocked voice, "But that would be so wasteful!" She was no more shocked by my question than I by her answer. That materials used in education should be considered wasted! Ours must be a strange educational system, I thought. And, of course, the more I studied it, the more convinced I became that it was very strange indeed. It was saving of materials, ah yes — but how wasteful of children!
Once in our school I watched a little girl take sheets of good drawing paper, one by one, from a pile — I counted up to fifty. She made a little mark on each one with a crayon, and threw it away. Fifty sheets of paper wasted, and nobody said, "Don't!" On the contrary, when she stopped and looked fearfully at the teacher, she got a smile and an encouraging, "Try another one." That little girl was in school for the first time, and terrified. She could not speak at all, could not look at the teacher without shriveling. Those fifty sheets of paper were a beginning for her; she drew, then played with blocks, then answered the child who played beside her on the floor, and in a few weeks she had begun to find her way through the jungle of her own terrors and was learning to be a happy, busy little schoolgirl.
Yes, no doubt we are wasteful of paper and paints and clay and wood and a few pounds of flour and a few cents' worth of yeast. But we try not to waste the child, or his energies, or his time. I have seen time wasted in the traditional classroom, where out of forty children one is reciting, while thirty-nine sit with empty hands, empty faces — and empty heads. I have seen a little boy with his chin in his hand and his eyes on the door, doing nothing, thinking nothing, only waiting with dreadful resignation for the moment when the bell would ring and the door would open, and he could get out of school.
But the child, unhampered, does not waste time. Not a minute of it. He is driven constantly by that little fire burning inside him, to do, to see, to learn. You will not find a child anywhere who will sit still and idle unless he is sick — or in a traditional classroom.
How this unnatural treatment of children came about was not my concern. I would not, even if I could, go into the history of education, a course in which I was an unhappy failure at Teachers College so many years ago. My own education was given me, not in teacher-training courses, not by professors of pedagogy, but by children themselves.
A child playing on his nursery floor, constructing an entire railroad system out of blocks and odd boxes he had salvaged from the wastepaper basket, taught me that the play impulse in children is really a work impulse. Childhood's work is learning, and it is in his play — before he ever gets into the hands of teachers in organized education — that the child works at his job. No child ever lavished on a history book the energy he poured into a game of cowboys and Indians. But cowboys and Indians are a part of the history of our country which he must learn. What is wrong with learning history by playing it?
Surely the school was at fault, not the child. Was it unreasonable to try to fit the school to the child, rather than — as we were doing with indifferent success — fitting the child to the school?
I sometimes thought, in my rebellious twenties, that the educators had never seen a child. It is one thing to have a child handed you, as the traditional teacher is handed her young charges, at the age of five or six — and then to proceed with him according to the curriculum. But that is not to see a child, any more than looking at a lion in a zoo is to see a lion.
To see a child means seeing him in terms of his own horizons, and almost from the day he is born. You see then how the circle of his interest widens outward, like the circles made by a stone thrown into a pond. First he is concerned with his own person — his hands and feet, the motion of his body. Then his mother's face, his crib, his nursery floor, the house in which he lives and the people in it, the milkman and the grocer's boy who deliver his food, the street and the park in which he plays.
Children "play house," and how ill we understand the word play. They are working in deadly earnest at the job of preparing to be adults, with the most serious of adult responsibilities, that of parenthood. A little girl pinned into a big apron stirs the batter for a cake — a favorite magazine advertisement in full color, favorite because it is quaint. Instead of cooing over her quaintness, we should treat her with respect. She is learning to be a mother in her own kitchen someday, learning to cook with loving care for the health and enjoyment of her own family.
Again and again in my life of learning from children I have remembered my own childhood, and that eager desire to help grown-ups in grown-up work — only to be given the lowliest and least interesting chores to do. How happily I would have washed the pots and pans, if I had had a hand in the cooking that was done in them! But that would have been wasteful; I might have spilled or spoiled good food. Perhaps it would be wasteful in the home when a limited budget must actually feed the family (although even of this I am not convinced). But a school is a place of learning; what economy have we served if we have wasted the urge to learn?
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "I Learn from Children"
by .
Copyright © 2014 City and Country School.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
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