What real learning is all about

NEA Today, Nov 1999 by Fischer, Bill

Instead of going back to basics, this author argues for an educational experience where students enjoy learning.

THE SCHOOLS OUR CHILDREN DESERVE

Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and "Tougher Standards"

By Alfie Kohn.

Houghton Mifflin, $24.

As a parent of two public school students. I was heartened to read a boo; that dares to confront the conventional wisdom-for children's sake.

This is really three books in one. In the first seven chapters, Kohn. who grabbed headlines with an earlier book on student rewards, presents his case against "tougher standards." back to basics, core knowledge, highstakes tests, and all the other popular "fixes" that now dominate the school reform debate.

Kohn takes on, with some special relish, the back-to-basics movement. This campaign, he argues. emphasizes achievement at the expense of leaming, encouraging a focus on the rote memorization of facts, without an understanding of how these facts relate.

Kohn also takes off on the people who see standardized tests as the be-all and end-all of measuring achievement. These tests. to Kohn, are "contrived little exercises that tell us very little about the intellectual capabilities that matter most."

Kohn says that what standardized tests primarily seem to measure is how much a student has crammed into "short-term memory."

And Kohn, a former teacher, also minces no words when it comes to talking about traditional grades, which he sees as not only unhelpful, but destructive. He quotes approvingly from an educator who wrote over a half-century ago:

"If I were asked to enumerate 10 educational stupidities, the giving of grades would head the list. If I can't give a child a better reason for studying than a grade on a report card, I ought to lock my desk and go home and stay there."

Kohn's alternative? In the book's second section, he challenges readers to do exactly the opposite of what many reformers want schools to do.

Instead of superficial facts, Kohn wants deep understanding. In place of fragmentation he asks for the integration of skills, topics. and disciplines in a meaningful context.

Most of all. what Kohn wants to see in America's public schools is active and interactive learning taking the place of student passivity and isolation.

Near the end of his new work, Kohn offers readers several questions to ask as they evaluate their own public schools:

To what extent does a given school meet the basic psychological needs shared by all students? Some examples: the need to have some say about what you are doing, the need to feel connected to other poeple. the need to feel competent at doing things that are seen as meaningful?

To what extent does a school meet my child's unique needs?

To what extent is a school likely to promote the long-term goals I have for my child? Will the school help him or her to grow into a caring and responsible person, an independent lifelong learner?

Finally, is this school more concerned with promoting democratic skills or with preparing students to take their place as workers, more interested in teaching everyone or in deciding who's better than whom?

These are important questions. They may not necessarily reflect every parent's top concerns. But these are questions that need to be asked, if we are to move on down the road to the schools our children deserve.

-Bill Fischer

If there is a unifying theme in all these prescriptions and a common characteristic of the very best classrooms, it is that kids are taken seriously. The educators (and parents) who do the most for children are those who honor, and work hard to find out, what children already know. They start where the student is and work from there. They try to figure out what students need and where their interests lie. Superb teachers strive constantly to imagine how things looked from the child's point of view, what lies behind his questions and mistakes. All of this represents a decisive repudiation of the Old School, where, as Dewey observed, "the center of gravity is outside the child. It is in the teacher, the textbook, anywhere and everywhere you please except in the immediate instincts and activities of the child himself."