A Parable for Today
Speedchange.at.medium
Let’s face it… nobody wants to read a dissertation. Nobody even wants to read a Medium Post this long. But OK, I’m going to share a tiny part of a 274 page document. Its from long ago — 2011 — so long ago in fact that the retelling takes on the nature of a parable. What I share here today isn’t the long-winded analysis of the writings that created the education system we know today — using French literary theories mind you — but simply the prologue and epilogue, the frame for the work.
I write this as Timeless Learning — even longer but far more readable — debuts. The work of three of us, Pam Moran, Chad Ratliff, and myself, who have tried to do the work…
That work is hard. It is never ending. Sadly, there are always people who will push back against child-centric education, there are always people who find reasons not to do the right thing. But we, I, believe in hope. To quote an important American president, in “the audacity of hope.” Please hope with us.
“Time tends to impose order on the past. We look back on the early days and think we discern the outline of what comes later…Knowing now how things happened, we assume this is the way it was bound to be…But the trajectory wasn’t pre-set. The chaos we felt around us was for real, and rich in possibilities other than those which came to pass.” — Eamon McCann in the introduction to No Go, A Photographic Record of Free Derry, by Barney McMonagle
Prologue
On the front wall of Trinity Elementary School on Pelham Road in the City of New Rochelle, New York there are ceramic plaques representing a history of transportation. What the architects of this 1955-era structure intended when these pieces were placed in the brickwork of the school is unknown, but for me, a small chunk of broken glaze on the image of the mid-century railroad locomotive whispers of my struggles with the education system of the United States.
The breaks are smaller than I remember, and blackened with age. There are two, one at the bottom of the headlight, another just to the right. In my memory they are much larger, and the exposed clay is a bright, attention attracting white. Today, it is muted, incomprehensible. But in memory, it is a loud, desperate, scream.
At the time the glaze of that tile was broken, some 46 years ago more or less, I was in the middle of the third year of a personal war with Ellwood Cubberley, a man I would not even hear of until almost four decades later. It was an intense struggle, fought in classrooms, corridors, offices. And it has gone on ever since. That broken tile might have been one of the few casualties I managed to inflict in those early days, though, like all who revolt against a system with the limited tools of those without power, I cannot be sure of who was hurt.
Education is the most intensely political thing a society does. It is the way in which a culture attempts to craft its future. It is fought over continually, and almost everyone feels that they have, by virtue of having experienced education themselves, a significant level of expertise on the subject.[1]
Yet education is also intensely personal. It is experienced by individuals who find differing meanings in every minute of every day of school. Neither the students, nor most of the teachers, nor even most administrators understand “the system” of education, how it came to be, why it came to be, or why “it” remains in place. Yet most who spend their days within the walls of schools struggle with this system, and far more than a few struggle against it. Others, especially many who populate colleges of education, political think tanks, and state legislatures, seem to work very hard, on the other hand, to preserve the essentials of the system.
What both groups have in common is a sense that “the school” is, if not a “natural” occurrence, at least inevitable. That what we live with day-by-day is what there is, the system as it exists is all we have to work with. On one side this leads to either apathy or rage. On the other side to complacency and certainty.
I have fought the system, fought with Ellwood Cubberley, since I sat in the corner of that second grade classroom between moments of being yelled at, hit, and locked in the closet by my teacher. My ‘crimes,’ in her vision of school, were a failure to conform. I could not read as a seven-year-old was expected to. I could not write as a seven-year-old was expected to. I could not even sit in a chair as a seven-year-old was expected to. So I was declared to be something less than fully human, and I was treated that way. And that, I understood.
This continued. In many ways in education it continues even as I struggle to write this. In elementary school, in junior high school, at universities, even in a PhD program. At every level I have not been good at following rules, jumping through hoops, ticking off checklists. It is who I am, though to many in education, whatever other skills I may bring, whatever else I might offer, my inability to conform — any students’ inability to conform — makes one “less than.” And, yes, that we understand.
So I have fought. I have fought with sullenness and rage, with refusal and disappearance. I have yelled and cried, begged and wished, argued and even, sometimes, listened. And at least once that rebellion against a system I neither knew nor understood took the form of a rock aimed at the building itself. I was ten. That was the tool I had.
I have different tools now. They may be only minimally more effective, but I have different tools now.
“He carried me toward the school’s front doors. As we moved under the concrete canopy I made my last gesture. I still had the rock in my hand. I threw it as hard as I could at the school. It smashed off the ceramic locomotive on the wall. The band teacher stopped for a moment but said nothing. Then he carried me to the Book Room.” (Socol, 2007, p. 57)
Epilogue
It is a late September afternoon in Charlottesville, Virginia and the sun has come out for the first time during the eight days of my visit there. The temperature leaps, as does the color spectrum, and charm of this ancient American valley where Jefferson lived, worked, and built schools, digs itself out from under the clouds.
Get Ira David Socol’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
I am heading toward the airport for my flight back to Michigan with Dr. Pamela Moran, the superintendent of the Albemarle County Public Schools, my focus during this time. I am driving, and she lifts a thick, black-covered binder with large white words on the front from her briefcase. I am assuming it is some form of frustrating policy manual, but instead, as she opens it and begins to read, I discover a 20-year-old manuscript by Dr. Daniel Walsh of the University of Illinois: a history of a battle a generation ago over the direction of these schools. It is the tale of a battle lost, and Dr. Moran — in 1991 a young elementary school principal working to transform a small rural southern school into something inclusive and child-centered — begins to cry as she reads a line about her former boss, the man who then held the job she holds now, vomiting blood before the acrimonious school board meetings which led to his resignation.
She pauses. “So many people were hurt so badly,” she says. “People now have followed me back out onto this limb, and I’m so afraid it will all happen again.”
Dr. Moran — Pam — recovers. But, as Walsh has noted about that past superintendent, I have glimpsed something we rarely see, the private pain, a bit of the private persona behind a public figure. “Researchers have examined ideas and values,” Walsh writes, “but too often in the process the people who have the ideas become trivialized, reduced to selected actions or answers. Ideas and values do not struggle. People do, in their day-to-day lives. Their struggles are seldom coldly intellectual, rather they are emotional and ideological and economic. Their struggles become personalized… Ideas do not develop ulcers, cry in frustration, find themselves unable to sleep at night. They do not experience pain and fear and anguish. These things only people do” (Walsh, 1991, pp. 8–9).
The Albemarle County Public Schools are a large organization with perhaps an outsized level of importance and scrutiny. The division covers 768 square miles of central Virginia, has over 13,000 students, over 2,400 employees, and 26 schools. It surrounds the University of Virginia, and many of the faculty at the Curry School of Education send their children to these schools. Because of the university, Charlottesville is filled with political and research organizations. Because of the proximity to Washington, D.C. what happens here is reported far beyond the mountains which rim the county.
Yet above all, the schools of Albemarle County, Virginia are people. They are people from many places and every social class. They are children and parents and grandparents. They did “well”/are doing “well” in school or they did/are not. They live on grand ante-bellum farms or in shacks or trailers, suburban houses and crowded apartments. They learn, in my experience and counter to the work of the University of Virginia’s Daniel Willingham, in a very wide range of ways.
They are people who believe, who strive, who try. And if they are working in these schools they are doing so, almost unanimously, because the lives of children are very important to them.
We stop for iced tea. I say to Pam, “Like any leader who brings people into a battle, you worry about them. If you didn’t, you’d be a lousy leader.” Then I tell her a couple of stories from the past week. I tell her that these principals, librarians, and teachers I have been working with are already on the front lines, as she was 20 years ago. They struggle daily with state and federal mandates, with other teachers and administrators who, “don’t get it,” with parents who want to reproduce themselves in their children, and who thus want school today to look exactly as school “did then,” with those in the community who want to reserve educational success and the opportunities which come with that for their own children.
“They are on this path with you,” I tell her, “because they want to be here.”
This is true of Michael, the young third grade teacher who hated school and now leads a classroom filled with academic choices, behavioral choices, and comfort choices. Where students draw their ideas on the floor and on tables, choose their technologies, and skype with people from around the world. It is true for Brian and Chad, two very different middle school teachers in two very different middle schools, whose classrooms filled with “Special Needs” students seem completely without limitations. It is true of Matt,[2] a former Teach for America teacher, now, years later, principal of an economically challenged elementary where every student, from pre-K to grade five, leads their parent-teacher conferences, discussing their own learning with both understanding and bravery. It is true of Joan who has created a high school library so inviting that it is not only filled with students long before and long after school, but often with students who cut class to go work there.
If I, and Pam, and the educators I am working with in Albemarle County, are in combat with Henry Barnard and Ellwood Cubberley, we will first see that historically, from the 1840s to today, we have lost the battles. American schools are not what William Alcott envisioned, nor John Dewey, nor Neil Postman or Alan Shapiro. But it cannot be seen as nothing but defeats. For the classrooms, school corridors, and school libraries I have been in this week are nothing like what Barnard or Cubberley envisioned either.
I say that 15 years after the destruction of this division’s first experiment with child-centered education, she became superintendent, the rebel taking power again. I say that what we are doing now is far more advanced than what they were doing then. I note that simply the fact that the two of us have significant influence on these schools is a sign that Cubberley doesn’t always win.
This transformation, in fact, is as transformative in style as in outcome. Learning from the redesign of the late 1980s Dr. Moran has rejected most top-down approaches, and together, the superintendent, her cabinet, principals, teachers, and I have expanded the “Toolbelt Theory” approach into a school-building centered series of ‘seed’ projects, building redesign around the mix of a school’s specific needs and its physical, faculty, and student attributes. Principals meet and dream. School librarians meet and dream. Teachers spend long nights on Twitter re-imagining lessons and spaces. Every part of this process, from the diverse backgrounds of the central office cabinet to the surprising number of principals who were trained in special needs education, is as ‘anti-Cubberley’ as the classrooms, libraries, and school corridors illustrated here.
His specter does always haunt, however, and just a few days before I have watched a small group of wealthy and politically-connected people from one corner of the county assault Dr. Moran and her “trendiness” at a board meeting. “When will they actually learn something?” one asks of students who seem to be happy. “Students will still need to look things up on microfiche when they get to college,” says another, critical of the interests in contemporary technologies. And for Dr. Moran and others who remember the history which Walsh has chronicled, there is great fear.
For me, however, there is something else. If my war with Cubberley began when I was in second grade — mocked and hit and locked in the closet because of my struggles with reading and classroom rules by a teacher trained in the Cubberley tradition — then I must look at a second grader I met in Albemarle County’s Greer Elementary School.
He sat at a round table near the center of a comfortable classroom, where children were working on many things in many ways. Sitting next to him was a girl who was just finishing reading the entire Harry Potter series. But this boy could neither read nor write the words of the lessons on Ancient Egypt which were the work of the class. If you looked very hard you could figure out that the symbols he created which might have been “ppr” meant “papyrus.”
Still, he was a full member of the class, fully honored by the teacher and the students, and he was learning along with everyone else, by whatever means worked for him. When I pulled out my phone, and using the browser, showed him papyrus growing in the pool by the Temple of Dendur at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, as he took the phone into his hands and zoomed into a living experience, he smiled with the thrill of understanding, of connection.
I have tried to tell these educators that this is a brutal and endless war. Few things arouse political passions as education does, for it is a struggle for the future. Those who, from Henry Barnard then to Bill Gates today stand for the economic and social status quo (softened by charity) will always have more resources at hand than Alcott or Dewey or Dr. Moran, but sometimes we do create change. And that change, the change in the lives of all of our children, is something we will keep fighting for.
Ira Socol — East Lansing, Michigan, 2011
