Critics of the public schools do not understand the original nature of public school education, that which was at its beginnings a compromise between the ideals of democracy and the ideals of education. And that this compromise was always heavily weighted in favor of democracy, that which is evidenced by the large place in our public schools given to “democratic” activities, such as sports, band, the lunch room and locker corridor, the student assemblies.

Classrooms, the places of education, were clearly elitest. The best roles here were always given to the best and the brightest. Student majorities in the subject matter classrooms were always left out, always took second place to the work or a small and talented few. The so-called failure of the schools is just that, the failure of learning to ever be democratic. It couln’t be otherwise. Activities such as problem solving, essay writing, reading history and science, and foreign language learning had to be for a few.

The critics of the schools don’t seem to recognize that public education was necessarily flawed by the fact that it was meant to be for literally everyone. That of course couldn’t be.

Probably the original limitations of a truly democratic school were never properly spelled out. Probably because of the enthusiasm of the originators, those who would create, for the very first time, free public education for all. Indeed, why would those innovators want to accompany the magnificent thing they were doing with a serious question as to its actual possibilities? No more than the freeing of the slaves or the serfs needed to be accompanied by a statement that in fact their new freedom was not without serious flaws.

The result is that the schools were and are still not seen as what they always were, an attempt to educate all the citizens of the commonweath with the inevitable watering down of the quality of education that resulted.  Perhaps if the limitations of our public schools were fully understood we would then be closer than ever before to realizing the real possiblities that do remain in the original compromise.

My brother visited last week with Joe Carroll, the superintendent of the Masconomet Public Schools. This year under Joe’s leadership Masconomet High School has adopted modular scheduling for one half the freshman class, about 90 students.
This means that instead of taking 5 courses 5 days a week, ninth graders take only two courses, but for long double periods each day, for twelve weeks. For example, a student might, during the first twelve weeks, take math and science, then in the winter a foreign language and English, and finally in the spring, social studies and an elective. There are several other pieces to the program including something called seminar, that which Joe Carroll came to talk about. Their seminar is a discussion class that meets in the afternoon. In the first meeting the teacher will introduce an issue such as abortion or gun control, and, then, during subsequent meetings (perhaps 5 or 6 on a given topic) the students and teacher are supposed to carry on a discussion on the subject. The seminar was meant to provide for and promote a learning style that was pretty much absent from the morning teacher-directed subject matter classes. During the seminar students are expected to speak up themselves and share their ideas with others, listen to and respect what others have to say, and by means of this process, grow in their own understanding of an important issue. They are expected to learn that discussion, if entered into candidly and honestly, will not only be enjoyable in itself, but also considerably strengthen and clarify their own thinking upon any given subject. The seminar was different from the morning classes in other respects, also: No homework was required, and no grades were given. Joe said that whereas the new modular schedule seemed to be working just fine, the seminar was not. The students were not taking it seriously, making little effort to come to grips with whatever issue had been introduced, perhaps because there were no grades. He didn’t know why it wasn’t working. He had come to ask our advice. My brother had told him that Waring knew all about the seminar. (Actually the “seminar” at Waring was a Great Books seminar, not the issues “seminar” introduced at Masconomet, but many of our humanities classes and tutorials, not to mention the all-school meeting, would qualify as “seminar” like classes of the sort that interested Joe.) My brother had told him that we were the experts, and that he ought to come and pick our brains and find out all he could from our experience. Following a tour of the school buildings we returned to my office and talked for an hour or more, about Waring and about the new program at Masconomet. Joe described the frustration among the Masconomet teachers whose seminar students didn’t talk. The much desired discussions were just not taking place. If there was a discussion it was over in a few minutes, and then the teacher would do all the talking. Joe asked if some of his teachers might come and visit Waring and learn from us. I told him, of course, and we arranged that they would come on Friday.
Three of them, David Donavel, an English teacher. Jack Paarlberg, a math teacher, and Vija Skudra, a German and French teacher, arrived about 10:30 on Friday morning. It was raining and there were big puddles everywhere, so I didn’t give them the usual tour of the buildings and grounds. Instead, they met first with Peter Smick who was an old friend and Peter told them about Waring. (Peter’s wife, Allegra, is also a teacher at Masconomet.) Then they had lunch with Josée and myself in the French library. I suggested that they “take” the all-school meeting coming up right after lunch and go directly before our students and teachers assembled in la grande salle, 100 strong, with their “problem.” From experience I thought that our students would like nothing better than to talk about those factors which had motivated them to talk. Dave and Vija and Jack looked at one another for only a moment and then agreed that this might be a good way to begin.
By 12:25 we were all assembled in the Grande Salle. Josée and myself, and our three guests at one end of the room on the long, wooden bench behind one of the folding tables, and everyone else facing us, on chairs, benches and on the floor. There was a little room at the end of the bench and Claire Sullivan came up and sat down next to Josee. This was a good sign—a year ago Claire would have been off in a corner, well out of sight I felt that Claire, and all of our students, more and more want to take an active role in these meetings. “Are there any announcements?” I asked. Little by little people began to stop talking among themselves and quiet down and listen. Someone said it was Lisa Glossman’s birthday and we sang her a very loud Happy Birthday. I could feel an unusual amount of excitement and electricity in the air. The kids were really up for this meeting, in part because it was Friday, but in part also because we had guests. I know our students love to show off in front of strangers. Other announcements followed. Angela Jernigan got up from her seat on the floor and asked the students why they hadn’t turned in their donations for the French Trip Auction. She sharply admonished them and gave them until Monday to do so. Emily O’Brien, seated to one side of the room, right next to a list of overdue library books tacked to the wall, stood up, pointed to the list, and made some remarks like, “if you don’t return these books…” We all love Emily, but we don’t take what she says about the overdue books very seriously. If we owe the library a book we want to confess to Emily and leave it at that. By returning the book we might break a tie between Emily and ourselves, a tie that we enjoy and don’t want to give up. Then Jon Bannon stood up, not an easy thing to do with crutches and an ankle in a plaster cast, and asked, “Who here has ever stolen a lunch, or anything else?” I thought to myself, this was the right way to ask the question, not “Who stole my lunch?” that to which no one has ever in my experience confessed. Jon had the right question, for at least 20 kids raised their hands, saying yes they had stolen someone’s lunch at one time or the other. In this case it wasn’t Jon’s lunch, but his orange that had been taken. He wanted it back. There followed other announcements, including Ben Richardson who proudly related that this time the J.V. basketball team had beaten Landmark by two points—(they had lost their first game by 14). We also heard that the Girls’ varsity had beaten Brimmer and May, for the second time.
I looked at our guests. They were taking everything in with obvious enjoyment and great interest. They were clearly impressed by the ease with which our students would stand up and speak in front of 100 people. I said to myself that it was time to cut off the announcements. I got everyone’s attention, turned to our guests and introduced them. Immediately Dave Donavel spoke up. He told everybody what he had already told me—he described the new modular schedule, and, in more detail, the seminar and how it didn’t seem to be working. He said it was now evident why they had come to Waring. “You,” and he addressed our students, “obviously know how to speak up in a group. We want to know how you learned to do this. When we conduct a seminar, it doesn’t go anywhere; we’re frustrated because our students seem to have so little to say about the subject, no matter what it is. How do we get our students to talk? How did you learn to do it? You have that reputation. Your reputation is certainly confirmed by what I’ve seen just now. Where did you get all that self-assurance? Why even your announcements make our discussions pale in comparison.”
I don’t remember who was the first one to answer. I don’t think it was Ben Dahl. But well-considered responses from all parts of the room came on fast and furious. It was almost as if our kids had been waiting for this moment. The actual question was probably not even that important. They were ready. They wanted to talk, probably, in part, they wanted to show off. I’11 try to put down the things they said, helter skelter, and without attributing particular words to individual speakers. There are many details of phraseology I can’t recall. It’s the ideas that I remember most. The quotes that follow are meant to represent the substance, usually not the actual words, of what was said. The order and particular choice of words is, in most instances, my own.
“Why speaking-up is easy here. At Waring we’re free, free to say what we want to say.” • “We don’t have to raise our hands. If we’ve got something to say we just open our mouths and say it” • “I began my talking in the Seminar two years ago. There were small groups of us, we were asked a question about the story. We could talk, say anything at all, and we’d know we’d be listened to, not put down by the other students.” • “Here you don’t have to worry about being wrong. There are no right and wrong answers.” • “The teachers at Waring care about what you say. They encourage you to speak. You know they are always listening.” • “In order to talk you’ve got.to know something about the subject. You can’t and won’t talk if you don’t.” • “The seminar shouldn’t be for just one period during the day. The kind of speaking up and taking part that you envision has to be reinforced all day long, in many other classes besides. That’s what happens here.” • “You first have to learn to listen. Talking is easy if you first listen to what the others are saying. It took me a long time to learn this.” • “Here we call each other by the first name, students and teachers. That may not be important in itself, but it does create a certain informality that helps one to relax, to loosen-up, and open one’s mouth and start talking.” • “Ask the kids in your classes what they want to talk about, don’t give them your subjects. They’re probably not interested in such things as gun control and abortion. Have you asked them to talk about the seminar itself?” • “Maybe you shouldn’t have any teachers. We don’t. Here there are only students.”
• “Look, you’ve got to start with something that they know something about” • “We learned in Seminar that there are three kinds of questions, those of fact those of opinion, and those of interpretation. You can’t discuss factual questions. You shouldn’t discuss opinions. Good discussions result when there are different interpretations possible.” • “I know how I learned to talk. For three years I just watched others who would open their mouths and do it. Then, not too long ago, I started to do it myself.” • “First you have to talk about things that are not close to you. That’s right, things that don’t touch you personally. Here we talk about books and stories, about the characters and plots. We can talk about them and remain pretty much hidden ourselves. In this way we learn to talk without risk to ourselves, without exposing things we don’t want to expose. Then, much later, we can talk about something that is important to us, something we really care about. But you can’t begin that way.” • “Take Philip and Josée back to Masconomet with you, that will do it” • “In public school there were long corridors. I had to walk down them everyday. I felt as though they had me on a leash. If I talked at all, it was to perform, to do and say what they wanted. At Waring there are no long corridors, there are no seats in rows, there is no leash. I can say what’s on my mind. And if I don’t want to perform I don’t have to.” • “I didn’t say any thing for a very long time. It’s really a question of having enough confidence in oneself. What are you doing to build up their self-confidence? You’ve got to. When you do that they’ll talk, and talk a lot. You’ll not be able to keep them quiet Look at us.” • “I learned first from my friends, friends I’ve made since coming here to school. They were here last year, and they told me what to do. Already I’m starting to do it myself.” • “Maybe a group of us could go to Masconomet, Talk with the kids, do a seminar. We’d like that.” •”By being with the older kids in classes and in meetings, I learned from their example. They encouraged me, made me think that what I had to say was important.” • “Don’t think that you can do it in 60 days. It takes a long time to learn to speak up, to take part in discussions. Change your thinking in respect to the time table. Look for results over the long term. Don’t expect to see results from one day to the next, especially if there is only one period given to this sort of thing.”
These are just some of the responses. Perhaps you can remember more. Perhaps you’ve thought of others since Friday’s meeting. Put them in a letter to the Editor. Needless to say, we who watched this mini-event were overwhelmed by the students’ responses, and by the number of them who talked—later, with the roster before me, I made a quick count of who and how many had spoken up. There were 38 altogether, 15 of the 19 juniors and seniors, 6 from the seventh and eighth grades!
Finally, how would I answer the question, “How does one get kids to talk in seminar?” Actually, the problem does exist at Waring. We haven’t by any means won the war. On Friday we only stormed the fort and captured it. How to help our own kids speak up in class and in meeting is still very much on our minds. After all, during Friday’s meeting there were 47 students who didn’t say a word (I hope they were listening!). Three years ago when I was directing a great books seminar I remember feeling some of the frustration that Dave Donavel describes. I know from long experience that there’s no guarantee that this or that series of steps will lead to the desired result of kids participating in a class discussion. The students’ wonderful suggestions related above are necessary, but probably not sufficient conditions, for creating good class discussions. What for me is, perhaps, the most important element in bringing such about was not even mentioned on Friday—although on Friday this element was present and contributed substantially to the success of the meeting. This element is a condition, and the condition is that, for at least one person in the room or about the table, the subject of the discussion must be real, as real as a hand or an eye. This person provides the link between the words and the thing, between what is said and, to begin with, at least a particular person’s real world. This is the rope that holds the discussion balloon, always in danger of bursting and becoming only warm air, firmly in shape and tied to the ground underneath. On Friday the teachers came with their problem, with their frustration, with their link to the ground, to something real. We responded well because we knew we were talking about something important, that our words could have an effect The discussion topic must allow one to feel that one’s words do relate to possible future actions, to actual results. It is for this reason that the best discussions seem to arise when there is a real problem, such as how to recycle the school trash, how to help the homeless, how to care for the school in the absence of Diane and Pavel. Good discussions may also occur about something less real, about an abstraction, about a book or an idea, but the result in this case, real as it may be—a growth in one’s understanding, a change in one’s values—is not as readily perceived as being real, and hence the difficulty in getting this kind of a discussion off the ground. For a discussion to be successful there must be at least the perception that the issues are real and that real outcomes are possible. This was clearly the case on Friday afternoon.
Philip B. Waring

Myth Number One

Education is books and programs and schools and teachers. Or, in other words, education is money, for all these things cost money. Of the three myths this one is probably the most widely held. This is the  “thinking” behind the belief that yet another increase in this country’s educational budget (now in the hundreds of billions of dollars) will improve the quality of this country’s education. It follows that, where there is little or no money, as in poor, inner city neighborhoods, in entire third world countries, little or no education takes place, and illiteracy reigns. For those who hold to this myth, probably many teachers and parents, and most school administrators, the effectiveness of the schools varies directly with the amount of money spent on the schools. More education, they say, will come with more money spent for books, programs, schools and teachers.

Here, as in all myths as widely held as this one, there is an element of truth. Books and programs and schools and teachers are certainly part of education, although as we shall see, not the most important part, and do cost money.  If they have a place out of proportion to their real importance it is because these are the elements of education that are most easily quantifiable—they, and the money spent on them, are easily counted.

Just the other night on the news I encountered an instance of how widely spread is the belief that education is books. A Charleston high-school student, returning to school after a three week absence caused by the ravages of hurricane Hugo, was interviewed by a correspondent from NBC news. He was asked what had happened to his education while the schools were closed. “Why,” he said, “I lost my book the first day of the storm and I haven’t been able to do anything for three weeks.” (Josée and I looked at one another and smiled, thinking of the Charleston high school teacher who must have heard that one upon returning to his classroom after the storm break—we thought we had heard them all, but here was a new one.) If the young man had come from a real learning environment (not the institution in which he was enrolled), if he had learned something about what learning was really about, the storm and its aftermath would have been in his eyes a much more important learning experience than the book he had lost, let alone the school that was closed. He would have answered the correspondent that these three weeks in his life had been a terrific “school,” and that he hoped upon returning to “school” that the learning awakened by the storm would not come to a halt. In any case he wouldn’t have mentioned the lost book. Now in fact we know that he must have learned more during those three weeks than he would have if he had remained in school, but he didn’t know it. Life and real life experiences were in his mind separate from school and books. He believed in Myth Number One, and he gave what he thought was the correct answer to the correspondent, who, a believer himself, was sympathetic to the young man’s plight, that without a book, in this case a classroom text, one couldn’t learn.

The much more important parts of education— the students’ motivation, the teachers’ interest in their students and their own desire to go on learning themselves, the parents’ attitude toward their children’s education (do they really want their children to learn to think, to play the violin, to speak French—are they ready to make the  necessary effort to help this to happen, do they value these things themselves), the relevance of the learning experience  itself, its impact on the lives of the learners (Hugo vs., the lost book—these are the parts of education not easily  measured, and therefore not easily translated into dollars, and therefore taken for granted or neglected and put aside by  those who create and fashion this country’s learning environments. When the country was young, and when schooling was not yet for everyone, those who were in the schools were apparently richly furnished in interest and motivation; students, teachers and parents held beliefs and values in common, their attitudes, their desire to learn, not the allocation of public funds, were the real ground on which they built their educational structures. The first schools themselves were much less richly furnished in things. Supplies and equipment, classrooms and buildings were not so much neglected as relatively unimportant. But then, within a relatively short period of time, perhaps in the passage of just two generations, one at the end of the last and one at the beginning of this century, schools became compulsory for everyone; by 1940 there was no life outside of school for children aged 16 years and younger.

The impulse behind compulsory school for everyone was a good one. Thomas Jefferson had made it clear one hundred years earlier, that schooling was necessary in a democracy—an uneducated public could not wisely and properly exercise its right to choose its leaders. Consequently, it was with good will and great energy that local school districts (the seats of power in education in this country) set about to build schools for everyone. For the richest country on the earth this job was relatively straightforward, a question of money—the physical structures, programs, numbers of teachers and supplies had only to be multiplied by a factor representing the new school population. A piece of cake for the country of J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller et al. The other, much more important ingredients of an educational system, the intangibles, the shared values and attitudes, the interest and motivation of the participants, would have to be increased also, but since there were no wealthy individuals or a government that could bring this about, no money that could be spent that would effect this end, these ingredients were overlooked. Instead, the educators did what they could, they spent money for spanking new classrooms in massive red brick buildings, believing, or wanting to believe, that the rich learning atmosphere of the old one room school house would somehow  come along of itself. Of course it didn’t. The schools eventually became a blown-up shell of their former selves, and the debacle that is now our system of public education, most apparent in our largest cities, is the direct result of a whole, country holding to Myth Number One.

Myth Number Two

Education is the acquisition of skills and knowledge. Probably many of you still believe in this. ‘Teach my kid how to read and write,” you say, “see that his math skills are up to par, make sure he knows something about the history of his own country, about world geography and the natural sciences, have him read the great works of literature.” This is what you want for your children, and probably what, in your eyes, school should be all about. For who could be against the acquisition of skills and knowledge as being the principal business of at the schools—indeed, this is how I spend most of my own time. But the knowledge that I as acquire is the result of my learning, not the reason for my learning. For as I learn I am following up an interest, often a desire, sometimes, even, a passion to know. What I know, as soon as I know it, is put aside as being as unimportant; when I’ve learned something I immediately go on to something else. The usually friendly arguments, between myself and individual parents, especially those who are engineers and whose profession is, par excellence, knowledge based, stem from their believing Myth Number Two, and myself holding an entirely different new of education. (MythNumber 4  See below)

This myth, the confusion between education and the acquisition of knowledge, stems from the fact that, whereas good education will always result in the acquisition of knowledge, the converse is not true—being knowledgeable, doesn’t mean that one is well-educated. (If this were so computers would be the best educated individuals in our society, and robots would gradually replace all of us in all of our tasks—perhaps some of you believe this will happen.) The Japanese public school system is based on the converse, believing that if kids know a lot of information they are well-educated. Therefore, in Japan the principal business of the schools is to see to it that the students know a lot. Not a bad end at first glance. Things go wrong because one can obviously learn a lot more in a given amount of time if one uses the faculty of memory exclusively. As a result in Japan and in other similar school systems memorization takes up most of the students’ time both in and out of school.

Not only in Japan but to a large extent in the elite independent schools and in the top, academic tracks of the best public schools in this country the college preparatory programs including Advanced Placement are by and large based on the student’s memorizing large amounts of material. Since the other mental faculties do not lead as directly to the end of greater knowledge acquisition, these school systems are subliminally encouraging their students not to question, not to interpret, not to evaluate, in short, not to think. Indeed, in a highly competitive social structure such as Japan, or in the elite college preparatory programs in this country, where kids compete with other kids for the same few positions, first in school for places in the prestigious colleges, and then in society for jobs, positions are awarded based on grades, which are based on test scores, which in turn are based far too often on how much material one has memorized.

Learning to think may, for a time anyway, slow down one’s acquisition of knowledge, diminish one’s performance on examinations and thereby interfere with one’s success in the competition for places and jobs. In Japan there are now critics of the system, people who are beginning to point out that the exclusive use of knowledge based examinations is not the best way to arouse the creative faculties in their young men and women, and that, in the long run, it is the latter faculties that will insure their country’s continued prosperity. In this country there have always been critics of the dominance of the faculty of memory in the schooling of the young, but, so far at least, the little respect that the public accords the schools, the little the public expects from the education of its children, the little impetus for change there is among the leaders of the schools, all these factors have not allowed any significant reforms to come about.

Americans, who continually compare their students’ scores with those, say, of the Japanese and Korean students (on the same examination) are showing their adherence to Myth Number Two. When the scores show, as they invariably do, that the Americans know less than students, not only from Japan and Korea, but from most other developed countries as well, the test-watchers conclude that our students are less well-educated than those of these other countries. These comparisons will set off another heavy session of self-criticism. Americans will cry out that we are a nation at risk, that we ought immediately to make the education of our young our top priority, and, if we have not just recently done so, that we ought to thoroughly revise our curriculum and increase our expenditures on education. All to no avail, however, and we continue to slip when measured against the achievement of students from other countries. (At the same time almost no one points out that when American high school students compete in a non-knowledge or non-information based area, such as during the International Mathematics Olympiad, they do extremely well, usually coming out among the top two or three teams. This suggests that there are other, more important ingredients to a good education than the acquisition of knowledge and skills.)

I believe that knowledge is incidental to real education. Let me say again, if one is learning one is becoming more knowledgeable, but one can become more knowledgeable without learning anything at all. Wise men never talk about what they have learned—if that’s what you want to talk to them about they’ll refer you to what they have written, or to a library. They want to talk about what they don’t yet know, what they still have to learn, for the learned man in them is over and done with, history, whereas a man learning, that which they still want to be, is the present moment, alive and exciting.

The lesson for the schools, and for Waring, is the following: The school should concern itself most of all with arousing the student’s desire to learn, then with strengthening that desire, and seeing to it that the student’s desire to learn has a life of its own, away from the teacher and away from the class-room. For if the student’s desire to learn is only in response to the teacher, no important learning will ever take place. Can one seriously doubt that what one learns in a lifetime follows directly from any thing other than the strength of one’s desire to learn? It certainly doesn’t follow from one’s success or lack of success on knowledge based examinations in school. Witness the number of students with top grades in a given subject who just a year out of school “know” little or nothing about that subject.

The real learning, which goes on throughout one’s lifetime, and for which school is only a preparation, must come from within, from the learner’s internal motivation. Other than the learning by rote, that which has a very short lifetime, in some instances only the time it takes to complete the examination, learning cannot be imposed from without. The lesson for the schools is to create an atmosphere in which children will want to learn, for then the children themselves will acquire naturally (incidentally) all the skills and knowledge they need in order to lead successful and happy lives.

Myth Number Three

Education is self- expression, or the freeing of the individual from the inevitable inhibitions and restrictions of family, school and society. A slightly different version of this same myth says that the role of education is to enable each child to realize his or her own uniqueness. This myth is probably less widely held than the other two. Most adults probably do not believe it—they’ve lived too long, (that is, while they believe in the uniqueness of the child, they do not believe that catering to this uniqueness should be the principal business of education and of the schools) but many children and teachers, and too many parents, probably still do. This myth, unlike Myths One and Two, has some basis in biological science, in the theory of organic or natural growth. Unique genetic codes in the cell nuclei (except in the case of identical twins) do “contain” all that an individual is meant to be in his or her lifetime. The process of education may be seen as enabling the unique set of instructions in the nuclei to be realized first in the life of the child, then in the student, and finally in the man or woman. In its extreme form this myth says that each child is a unique individual and must be allowed, during its growth stages, more or less complete freedom in order to realize its uniqueness. Furthermore, since that which each child is meant to be comes from within the child, it obviously cannot be fashioned from without. Each child’s freedom to grow in his or her own, unique way must remain untrammeled by the environment, must take precedence over the inevitable restrictions of the surrounding traditional structures. In other words, don’t put an oak sapling with its own set of instructions in a flower pot and then expect it to thrive and respond favorably to its environment. It won’t, nor, says this theory, will the child flourish whose education is expected to come about within externally imposed structures—the flower pots of family, school and society.

What we are describing is often called the negative theory of education, negative in the sense that all those things that might cramp the child’s growth are to be subtracted from the child’s environment. Whereas not many of us will admit believing in this myth most of us act as if we did. This may be seen in respect to how we monitor our children’s homework assignments, in respect to how much pressure we put on them to do their work. How many of us even know what the teachers expect of our children, let alone see to it that our children live up to those expectations?  How many of us insist that our children keep a sketch book and journal in the way that the art and writing teachers recommend? How many of us insist that our kids practice their instruments daily, that on which the success of the Waring music program most depends? How many of us ask to see our child’s natural science journal, supposedly containing his or her observations of the natural world? How many of us seriously restrict or limit what our children may see at the movies or on the television, may listen to on the radio? How many of us place any severe behavioral restrictions on our children at all? From our answers to these questions it is probably true that most of us do subscribe to some extent to the negative theory of education. Aren’t we obviously afraid of placing restrictions on our children, thinking, perhaps, that such will boomerang—for example, by limiting our child’s music listening at home to the Bach and Mozart they are listening to at school won’t they be apt to become secret, but avid devotees of hard rock? Aren’t we a bit afraid of our children, of what’s in them, of what we may unknowingly be bottling up? In short aren’t we afraid of our child’s very uniqueness? We don’t know how best our child’s uniqueness might be realized, but we do know that we don’t want to get in the way.

I would suggest that a child’s uniqueness, just like the acquisition of skills and knowledge, is incidental to learning and school. Just as knowledge will follow from learning, from the child’s active pursuit of those skills and knowledge important to him, so will a child’s uniqueness be best realized if the child studies the liberal arts along with everyone else, thereby acquiring not those things that are unique to him or her, but those very things that he or she has  in common with everyone else. A school has no business tending primarily to that which is unique in a student. In any case, because it is unique, the school would probably not even recognize it when it did appear. But what about the bottling up of the child’s uniqueness? Inhibiting or overly restricting the child’s freedom to be himself? Need we be afraid of that? No, not if what we are teaching are the liberal arts. For by definition, these arts—literature and history, music, foreign language, mathematics, science and art—are ultimately the dress, the clothes that will enable the child’s uniqueness to appear at all, not necessarily in a school context, but certainly later in the grown child’s, and in the man’s  or woman’s lifetime. By definition these arts are the freedom-giving arts. We need not be afraid of any apparent restrictions that they may be placing on the child, at home or in school.

What, then, is the real business of education, if it’s not the acquisition of skills and knowledge, if it’s not programs and teachers and books and classrooms, if it’s not the uniqueness, the specialness of each child?

Here’s Myth Number 4, the one in which I believe:

Education is the uncovering, the developing, me strengthening within the child of that which he or she shares with everyone else. The goal of education in this sense is the realization, not of the student’s unique nature, but of his or her common humanity. All children and all people have the same nature; they reason, they laugh, they feel joy and sorrow, they communicate with words and other symbols, they have bodies and minds, they have some knowledge, some direct experience of good and evil, they have religious experiences, they sense the reality of truth and beauty. Education should concern itself with developing and communicating and understanding these kinds of awarenesses in children. In other words the schools ought to be helping children to understand their own human nature, to recognize that most of what they are they share with other men and women, and thereby to become more comfortable with themselves and their own experiences. For ultimately the learner’s skills and knowledge, ultimately his very uniqueness, will be less important than his closeness to his fellows. Ultimately one might even say that learning to work together, not just for the individual, but for the common good, is what education is most about.

—Philip B. Waring (Headmaster, Waring School)

Kids seem to understand from a very early age that they can ‘make’ music; usually, however, they have not understood, even by the time they get to the Waring School, that they can just as easily “do” science.

Perhaps this is because young rock musicians are everywhere, on the tube and on the pages of the newspapers and magazines they read, whereas successful young scientists, such as the recent group of Westinghouse Science Prize winners, pass by pretty much unnoticed by the kids, as by the general public.

It’s probably a fact, that, of all the subject matters and activities that we would have students become familiar with while in school, music and science are the two most readily accessible to them at their age.

For one cannot be an historian, nor can one have much to say about literature, without having read an awful lot of books (thus limiting these activities by and large to graduate school and beyond).

Then, to write and to draw well take years of practice; at Waring only those students who keep sketch books and journals (those who practice) achieve anything significant in one or both areas.

Finally, both mathematics and French require years of study before one is able to think in either language.

If then science, like music, is indeed accessible to kids at an early age why is it that so few of them seem to be doing it? (Whereas so many of them, if not making, are certainly listening to music.)

In part the fault lies with the media as I mention above, and the attention given the one activity and the neglect of the other. But also to blame is the fact that teachers, students and parents are probably not of one mind as to what it should mean to “do” science in the schools.

There is no reason why the Waring School’s science program could not be just as strong as the programs in math, music and French, but teachers, parents and students would have to reach agreement among themselves as to what it is they (we) would achieve in this area of the school program.

Probably science for most Waring parents means lerning (memorizing) the elementary content of one or more subject areas such as biology, physics and chemistry, the content being presented both through chapters in a textbook and exercises in a laboratory manual. In other words, for many of you, having a science program means having the students both reading science texts and spending some time in the science laboratory.

Doing science in this way generally means memorizing information and learning laboratory techniques, that which obedient kids, especially those with good memories, do well, whether or not there is anything of the scientist within them.

But this is only one kind of science, probably the kind that turns so many kids off to doing any science at all while in school — it’s a fact that fewer than 10% of American high school students choose to take courses in physics or chemistry.

But doing science need not be primarily reading textbooks. In this science differs from history and literature. Doing science may include reading some books, but the books need not and should not come first (as they do now in most science programs in most schools).

Science should be first and foremost a unique way of looking at the world (different, say, from that of the poet, or the business man), and in so doing the looker acquiring a certain kind of (scientific) knowledge of that world. Indeed, to confine the activity of science to the acquisition of information from textbooks is bad science for a number of reasons.

First, one doesn’t learn to took for oneself, one accepts usually uncritically what others have said and discovered; second, there is just too much available information and no school science program can cover more than a small portion of this tremendous body of knowledge; and third, the state of our knowledge of the world is never at rest, and any given textbook description will, almost immediately following publication, be out-of-date.

Perhaps in its most fundamental form doing science means being curious about something, something you have noticed and which has struck your imagination. Richard Feynman’s life (as depicted in Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman) is an endless succession of instances of his following up his own curiosity. I don’t think he would even bother to distinguish in kind between those instances which led to his Nobel Prize in Physics, and those which enabled him to pick the lock of one of the filing cabinets in a Los Alamos office.

Mr. Feynman’s curiosity leads him to such things as investigating a house painter’s claim that by mixing red and white paint he will get yellow, finding out just how much of the bloodhound’s gift he has within his own nose, discovering how the mindreader reads minds, how the ant returns to the hill, and comparing “human” cyclotrons at Princeton with “inhuman” ones at MIT.

Feynman shows us that absolutely everything and anything may become the object of scientific inquiry, that everything can be looked at scientifically. On the other hand this is why, perhaps, for many people, science is so frightening, — for it’s probably true that everything may be made subject to observations and experiments in order to discover patterns, trends, theories and laws.

To do science in this way, investigating methodically the object of one’s interest, was the intent behind our 7th. and 8th. grade science program this current school year. Each student was asked to choose a subject of interest to him or her and then follow up that interest in every possible way in order to gain thereby and then communicate to the rest of the class a greater understanding of the subject.

Some students have enjoyed this approach, choosing subjects such as pregnancy and birth (to which the student in question happened to be a recent witness), sketching ducks and observing their social behavior in a backyard pond, the workings of logic gates and gasoline engines. These students have kept science journals, the principal focus of their work, recording therein their observations, measurements, notes, questions, ideas, and sketches.

Other students who seemed uncomfortable with this approach would, at best, go to encyclopedias and texts and take information and the transfer that information to their science journals. And in fact it has been these latter students have since opted to study basic science in the more traditional manner.

Finally, here are my own ideas on what might be (ought to be) the six elements of science education at Waring. Do they meet with your agreement? We want to know.

1) First of all I would place mathematics within the science program because, besides being a science in its own right, it is, after all, the language of physics, of much of chemistry, and much of molecular biology.  Calculus (taught at Waring in AP form) did grow out of physics. It was invented, by Newton and Leibnitz, in order to better describe motion, being therefore in important respects the language of physics as much as a discipline in its own right.

2) Second, there are the familiar basic science courses in biology, chemistry, and physics, the kind of thing I describe above. But it is not often acknowledged that these, in spite of parents’ wishes, just like Harvard and Yale, are not for everyone.

Indeed, it is the experience of the Waring School that only a few students in any one of these classes are interested in and/or prepared or ready to begin their serious study. Those who are ready may do so at Waring, in addition, we make it possible for them to enroll as juniors or seniors (prior to that time they won’t have had enough mathematics) in one of the basic science courses offered to highschool students through the Extension School at Harvard.

The Harvard classes open to our students are the very same ones given to Harvard undergraduates and they therefore represent a tremendous opportunity to find out, while still in highschool, what a college course is like, as well as to receive a course credit that can be used later on in college.

3) There are the independent science projects, the kind of things that go on at science fairs and that may be presented in competition for Westinghouse Science awards. This is the sort of thing that comes closest, in my view, to “doing science” while in school.

The independent projects represent on the part of the student scientist an investigation into something for which there are not yet clear and thorough answers in the books. And while doing the investigation the student will inevitably learn a lot of traditional science, in addition to illuminating and acquiring an improved understanding of the particular problem that he or she has chosen to address.

The beauty of this approach to science is that the student may very well discover something new, see something for the first time, make clear a relationship that no one else had noticed, and therefore experience a bit of what it’s like to be a scientist. There are no prerequisites for doing science in this way, except the ability to clearly state what it is you’re doing, then to carefully observe, measure and record, and finally to correctly interpret.

Most of all the student must be able to think clearly about whatever it is he or she is investigating. And this ability is, I would like to believe, more or less within the capacities of all of all of our students, accessible to all of them.

4) Work in the laboratory is the fourth element in the Waring science program. Accompanying the basic science courses described above are any number of laboratory techniques and experiments with which the student must become familiar. But it is not expected that every Waring student do laboratory science. the time commitment is considerable and the student must be ready and willing to make it. Not all are.

For those who are it will be their responsibility to come to the laboratory with a particular goal in mind, such as learning a basic lab procedure, carrying out an experiment that illustrates this or that physical or chemical law, or one in support of his or her independent science project.

Laboratory science is a costly and often tedious activity and only makes sense if there is considerable interest on the part of the student to thoroughly prepare and meticulously carry out the proposed experiment.

5) The fifth element in the Waring science program is the history of science. (This also happens to be where my own greatest interest lies.) Also, and in important respects this is the school’s interest, because science considered in this way fits right in with the Humanities (history and literature), the discussions of the Great Books, the history of Art and Music.

Those high school students who have little interest, or who are without the necessary math skills, to study the basic sciences in the traditional manner described above might with considerable satisfaction and profit study science in this way. In any case, the great scientists, and the ideas and laws with which they are associated should, no less than Beethoven’s music or Monet’s art, become the possession of all of us.

6) Finally, there is science literacy. This comes about, just like literacy in any other area, through reading not only science texts, but also science newsletters, newspapers, and magazines. Waring offers no course in this area, but encourages students to be curious about what is going on right now on the frontiers of each one of the sciences.

In this regard the daily all school meetings will take up such subjects as mapping the human genome, theories of the K-T extinction, particle accelerators, and super conductors, all these and other exciting ideas and happenings that are currently taking place among scientists throughout the entire world.

The Waring School brochure contains no listing of course offerings. This is purposeful on our part. Lists of course offerings, course catalogues as they are commonly called, are primarily lists of subject matters. Perhaps such are appropriate for colleges where one elects ones course of study, where one decides to become familiar with certain subject matters, such as computer programming and art history. We believe strongly that the business of schools, all educational institutions prior to college, is something quite different.

We feel that we are not primarily in the business of teaching subject matters, and therefore the course catalogue is of decidedly secondary importance. Indeed, to be primarily concerned with teaching subject matter, with continually augmenting one’s lists of course offerings, is to put aside the real business of all elementary and secondary education which is on the one hand to awaken children to their own limitless possibilities as human beings on this earth, and on the other, to awaken them to their own primary responsibility for their education.

First on our list of “course offerings” are values. By this we do not mean courses in ethics, or moral philosophy, or how to make the difficult choices, resist peer pressures etc. Rather we mean those beliefs and ideals that we would live by, and rather than teach them in a course, we would structure our learning environment and our activities in order that they incorporate these values with the result that the environment itself becomes the teacher.

For example, one value we would have our students acquire is that of good citizenship, that they become public spirited. To this end we have frequent all school meetings at which students and teachers are encouraged to go “public,” to speak their minds before the community; only in this sense are we “teaching” this value.

Secondly, there is “cultural literacy,” not the same thing as values. We certainly intend that our students become familiar with the great achievements of science, with the great periods of history, with the great men and women of the past, with the geography of countries and peoples, with the history of art and music. However, we would not have them memorize, and then forget, dates, names and places.

Nor can course offerings bring this about the desired cultural literacy. Witness the endless papers that prove our high school graduates, and even the freshmen at our most prestigious colleges, to be culturally illiterate. There is simply too much to learn and retain in the traditional manner, and traditional high school courses in history and science are woefully inadequate to the task. Indeed, the proliferation of such courses implies that the ground can never be covered in this way. Cultural literacy, just as the acquisition of shared values, can only come about by the entire environment becoming the teacher.

Learning in this way is analogous to properly learning a foreign language by immersion. Language learning rarely happens in the classroom, but it happens every time that the student is immersed in the country, or other environment where the language is spoken. Thus we try to create a “culturally literate” environment, and immerse our students therein. For example, the entire student body has just recently immersed itself, participated in a simulation of the constitutional convention.

Then earlier this year we devoted an all school meeting to the pros and cons of the Bork nomination. And on a regular basis such things as the history of life on earth, the geography of the middle east how we know about the life and death of stars, become the focus of attention of all of us. Also, to the end of arousing our students’ interest in the world in which they live, we support a very successful college bowl team.

Ultimately cultural literacy will only come about from the students’ own efforts to acquire the same. Therefore, our job is not to have the student memorize facts, but to arouse his interest in acquiring such knowledge for himself.

Third, in addition to values and cultural literacy, we teach language skills. English to begin with. Reading, writing and speaking. These, also, should not be thought of as course offerings. Rather they are activities that go on constantly throughout the six years that a student may spend at the Waring School. In this context subject matters, such as history and literature, become means to the ends of reading and writing and speaking more effectively.

In particular, at this school, because one of the school founders was French, we teach the French language, using as much as possible while not being in a French language country an immersion method. In any case nearly all of our students become fluent in this usually second language, and often will spend some time, perhaps as long as one semester, in France while a student at Waring.

Fourth we teach a number of other “languages.”

There is Mathematics, or the language of science. Like reading and writing English, learning mathematics goes on year after year. Our mathematics “course,” the School Mathematics Project, is a spiraling sequence of essential ideas from traditional courses in algebra, geometry, and the calculus, combined with a range of “new math” topics including transformational geometry, vectors and networks, matrices, probablility, and statistics.

There is Music. Every student at Waring studies a musical instrument, plays in jazz, string, or wind ensembles, sings in a chorus, listens to great works from the classical repertoire, and may or may not study music theory and composition. Once again music is an activity in which we would immerse our students, not a series of unrelated course offerings.

And there is Art. All students learn to draw. All students are asked to keep a sketch book. Drawing, like mathematics and music, is an international language. Learning to draw is learning to see, and like all real educative processes there is no end to this activity. Once again, we have only succeeded, when, after we stop, the students continue on their own.

Finally there are the all important intellectual skills. We would help the student to think clearly and to understand more. To do this we draw on all the traditional subject matters, but perhaps most of all on the great works of literature, art, and music. Such works become through our efforts the common experiences of us all.

We attend closely to these works, study them, listen to them, and, in weekly Great Books seminars and frequent Humanities classes, we discuss them among ourselves. The goal of such activities is that we learn to think more clearly, that through their help we grow in our understanding of ideas and values.