Listerine Learning

"I am not saying, 'If it feels good, it’s good for you', but if we’re doing it right, it should feel good. If we’re doing literacy and language development right, teachers and students should be having a pretty good time. If there's pain, something's really wrong." 

-Stephen Krashen

The loss of joy and a cult of rigor has hijacked our education. What's scary is that the longer we immerse learners in a passive environment defined by worksheets and lectures, the more school becomes something not done by kids but something that is done to them. It's not long until we figure out that it's best to go along to get along.

In his book The Game of School, Robert Fried explains:

In schools and colleges across the nation and throughout the world, students and teachers continuously adopt roles and postures that remind us of uncomfortable visits to unpleasant relatives. We play out our roles as if we have lost the sense that learning is an intensely exciting and enjoyable activity, a necessary and joyful part of our humanity.

Fried says:

When we allow ourselves (or get convinced) to gear ourselves up so as to complete school tasks that have little meaning for us aside from the value of getting them done and over with, we lose touch with our own learning spirit. We become alienated from the natural learning desires and inquisitiveness within us. We tend to become compliant rather than creative, docile instead of courageous, inwardly passive instead of assertively engaged, cynical at a time in life when we should be idealistic. We become game players by reflex, and learners only on occasion.

For too many people, the game of school sounds all too familiar. It's like the learners and teachers exchange winks that say: you will pretend to teach and we will pretend to learn; it won't be all that enjoyable, but it will be easy.

Under these circumstances, is it any surprise that creativity is often seen as nothing more than a refusal to follow directions? Or that students grow up with an acute sense of apathy towards their own learning?

What's worse is that when kids have spent enough time playing the game of school - that is the teacher pretends to teach while the students pretend to learn - they come to think that what they are experiencing is normal; things are at their worse when students, teachers and parents come to see all this as an inevitable condition of learning. In his article on Progressive Education, Alfie Kohn explains:

And then there are parents who have never been invited to reconsider their assumptions about education. As a result, they may be impressed by the wrong things, reassured by signs of traditionalism — letter grades, spelling quizzes, heavy textbooks, a teacher in firm control of the classroom — and unnerved by their absence. Even if their children are obviously unhappy, parents may accept that as a fact of life. Instead of wanting the next generation to get better than we got, it’s as though their position was: “Listen, if it was bad enough for me, it’s bad enough for my kids.” Perhaps they subscribe to what might be called the Listerine theory of education, based on a famous ad campaign that sought to sell this particular brand of mouthwash on the theory that if it tasted vile, it obviously worked well. The converse proposition, of course, is that anything appealing is likely to be ineffective. If a child is lucky enough to be in a classroom featuring, say, student-designed project-based investigations, the parent may wonder, “But is she really learning anything? Where are the worksheets?” And so the teachers feel pressure to make the instruction worse.

Indifferent recall is the rule rather than the exception, and under such an oppressive bureaucracy of teaching and learning we live school believing nothing is wrong while everything is wrong.

Management expert Steve Denning chimed in on the K-12 reform debate with this interview. In a second part to the interview he said:

There is however a difference between hard work that is a grind and dispiriting and hard work that is exhilarating and uplifting. The current system specializes in the former. I believe that it will do better if it shifts to the latter.

Like Krashen and Kohn, I think Demming is suggesting that learning not only can be fun, but it should be fun, and if it's not, we are doing it wrong.

While it's true that Listerine learning passes the day, it would have passed anyway.

So how do we know if a school is engaged in pseudo learning and teaching?

If students, teachers and parents come to find their days occupied with something besides real learning, you can be assured that the Game of School and the Listerine theory of education are in full effect.

Not only is there no need for learning to be painful, but if we aren't careful, joy in learning will be regarded as nothing more than a bothersome distraction.

So where do we go from here?

Robert Fried explains part of the premise behind his book:

My hope is to bring this phenomenon to the attention of educators and learners at all levels; it is most destructive where least acknowledged. Those caught in the Game soon lose awareness of it; it begins to seem like the only way of doing business.

Thankfully school hasn't always been this way, so school doesn't have to be this way. But things won't change unless we are acutely aware of what we're losing when we normalize the Listerine theory of learning and the game of school.

My response to Ron Clark

I read a lot of articles on education. Some of them are insightful and some of them are not. Here's an article written by Ron Clark that I believe falls short of insightful. At best the messages delivered by Clark are unhelpful and at worst they may be harmful.

Early on the article points out a need for parents to trust teachers.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when I tell a mom something her son did and she turns, looks at him and asks, "Is that true?" Well, of course it's true. I just told you. And please don't ask whether a classmate can confirm what happened or whether another teacher might have been present. It only demeans teachers and weakens the partnership between teacher and parent.

But then at the end, Clark writes:

If your child said something happened in the classroom that concerns you, ask to meet with the teacher and approach the situation by saying, "I wanted to let you know something my child said took place in your class, because I know that children can exaggerate and that there are always two sides to every story. I was hoping you could shed some light for me."

Can you see how I might be unsettled?

When it's the teacher saying something, Clark doesn't see any need for further inquiry, and yet when the student says something, the parent needs to get "both sides to the story". The best teachers know that there are "two sides to every story" even the ones teachers tell. What Clark may be missing here is that the best teachers leave their omnipotence at home.

Some of the strongest school memories any of us hold well into our adult lives are the times we were wronged by a teacher. This isn't to suggest the best teachers never wrong children -- Because they are human, despite their best efforts, they inevitably will do wrong. The best and worst educators are prone to error but the difference is that the strongest educators understand this -- the weakest ones deny it.

Next, Clark tries to tug at the heart strings of teachers by indicting a child for neglecting their summer homework:

And if you really want to help your children be successful, stop making excuses for them. I was talking with a parent and her son about his summer reading assignments. He told me he hadn't started, and I let him know I was extremely disappointed because school starts in two weeks. 

His mother chimed in and told me that it had been a horrible summer for them because of family issues they'd been through in July. I said I was so sorry, but I couldn't help but point out that the assignments were given in May. She quickly added that she was allowing her child some "fun time" during the summer before getting back to work in July and that it wasn't his fault the work wasn't complete.

Can you feel my pain?

Some parents will make excuses regardless of the situation, and they are raising children who will grow into adults who turn toward excuses and do not create a strong work ethic. If you don't want your child to end up 25 and jobless, sitting on your couch eating potato chips, then stop making excuses for why they aren't succeeding. Instead, focus on finding solutions.

 Clark would like our first question to be: Why isn't the parent making sure this homework gets done?

But my first question is: Why is the teacher assigning homework over the summer?

Frankly, I'm skeptical of whether the teacher should have a say over what a child does during family time in the evening let alone whether the school should be allowed to dictate what a child does over the summer.

My second question is: Where's the research that shows if kids don't do their summer homework (or any homework at all) that they will end up 25, jobless, sitting on their parent's couch eating potato chips? The fact is there isn't a shred of evidence to support that there are any non-academic benefits to homework, and there isn't any evidence of to support academic benefits homework before high school.

These kinds of scare tactics do nothing but bully parents and children into doing things school forces families to do, like homework, that has no justification.

My objections to articles like this one can be summarized by Robert Fried:

Within the culture of failing schools one is likely to find that staff inertia and a penchant for victim-blaming prevail.

And by Pedro Noguera:

Many schools are plagued with a culture of failure where failure is normalized and predictable, and over time the adults come to blame the kids and their families. When this is the prevailing logic in a school that school will never improve.

When professionals like educators and nurses develop their beliefs based on blaming the very people they are to serve and work with, Robert Fried explains that "people stop thinking in new ways, they filter out evidence that might challenge old biases, and they stop reading in their field."

In other words, progress is plagued by a kind of professional paralysis.

The ultimate consequence of paralysis is that we spend less time focusing on meeting the needs of our students and more time complaining and feeling sorry for ourselves. Under these circumstances, the passionate educator that lies inside us all goes into hiding.

The funny thing about scapegoats is that they are always those with less power, and in education, those with the least power will always be the kids.

The special momentum of the status quo

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Michael

Have you ever noticed how little schooling has changed since your parents or even grandparents' classroom days?

I've often wondered how a classroom in 1985 Communist Russia would differ from one in 2011 Canada or America. Oh sure, there would be nuances with what kids were learning, but I fear how they were expected to do so would look freakishly similar. Regardless of time, place and political affiliation, behavioral conformity, worksheet completion and pre-test memorization would be the name of both games.

So why is school such a timeless institution where the more things change, the more things stay the same? Why does so much of school reform feel like the equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?

Why is this?

Joel Westheimer writes in his review of Ted Sizer's book Horace's Compromise:

One of the most stable structures in card house building, my nine year old cousin informs me, is the triangle. Three cards placed just so, leaning against each other in a three-way system of support, can be used as an "awesome foundation. On one architectural design occasion, as she happily laid cards for level four, I couldn't resist asking if her house could survive a slight change - adjusting one of the base triangles, for example. She tried, rotating one card gently counterclockwise. The house giggled for a moment and collapsed. It was a messy sight, a young architect's nightmare. "The foundation," she reported, "can't change without a whole lot of trouble!" 

"The status quo," writes Sizer in Horace's Compromise, "... has special momentum."

It's been said before that Old School is not a place - rather it is a state of mind that thinks very little of the mind - which is built on the premise that the teacher 'teaches' and the student 'learns' and never shall the two roles be confused. Paulo Freire aptly outlines this pseudo-learning environment well in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed while Robert Fried properly indicts the Game of School in his book:

I see no despicable plot, no conspiracy by educators to deny children their right to learn. The problem is not that those who work within schools and colleges regularly force us to abandon our own learning goals and submit to their indoctrination. It's just that too many of us - students and teachers alike - agree to substitute lesser, symbolic goals for greater and truer ones. When we allow ourselves (or get convinced) to gear ourselves up so as to complete school tasks that have little meaning for us aside from the value of getting them done and over with, we lose touch with our own learning spirit. We become alienated from the natural learning desires and inquisitiveness within us. We tend to become compliant rather than creative, docile instead of courageous, inwardly passive instead of assertively engaged, cynical at a time in life when we should be idealistic. We become game players by reflex, and learners only one occasion... 

My argument with the Game of School is not an argument against school, much less against the teaching profession. Teachers, schools, and school systems are themsleves often the victims of this self-same game, played out according to the rules set down by those who have power over us. My hope is to bring this phenomenon to the attention of educators and learners at all levels; it is most destructive where least acknowledged. Those caught in the Game soon lose awareness of it; it begins to seem like the only way of doing business.

Like Robert Fried, Ted Sizer and Paulo Friere critique Old School not as an argument against school (or teachers) anymore than Joel Westheimer's nine year old cousin would argue against triangles. Rather, the point to be taken from all of this is one of awareness.

Because one of the largest obstacles to improving school is our own memories, we need to be aware that until school ceases to be merely something done to kids, rather than by kids, reform will only ever improve school while changing nothing.

Until we stop selling 'more of the same' as a daring departure from what we've always done, the status quo will continue to gain more and more momentum. Real change will require school to look a lot less like school - and to do that would require a whole lot of trouble.