An interview with William Glasser

Teacher Education Quarterly, Summer 2002 by Nelson, Thomas G

William Glasser, M.D. served as the keynote speaker at the recent California Council on Teacher Education Spring Conference in San Jose on April 11, 2002. Prior to that event, I had had the pleasure of meeting with him on several occasions over the past year and a half with the intent of completing an interview for publication in Teacher Education Quarterly. The following is the result ofmany hours spent in conversation about schooling, education, and specifically the role of teacher educators in preparing teachers to work in contemporary schools.

Tom Nelson: In your recent book, Every Student Can Succeed, and I believe throughout much of your work, you use the term "schooling" in a very specific way. Would you please explain what you mean by the term schooling and its relationship with the concept of education. In other words, how would you characterize the difference between schooling and education?

William Glasser: I have to go back and explain what I think is a big deficiency in the schools. If we had in this room a hundred teachers, good teachers from good schools, and asked them to define the word education, there would be very little general agreement. I think it is totally wrong and terribly harmful if education is defined as acquiring knowledge. You can acquire a lot of knowledge without ever going to school. I think education is both using and improving knowledge and that changes the whole picture. If we look at all the tests given in high school at any week during the course of the year, we will find that 90 to 95 percent of the test questions are questions where students have memorized something prior to the test and showed that they have acquired the knowledge at least for the duration of the test.

Charles Schultz, who was a great friend of mine, said, "the difference between an A student and an F student, is that the A student remembers until five minutes after the test, the F student until five minutes before the test." So, we need to start understanding the difference between what I call factual knowledge and educational knowledge, and we don't focus much on educational knowledge. We don't focus as much in schools on educational knowledge which requires thinking and application, as we do on acquiring facts. This is important because the system now that we have is terribly discriminatory against students who don't come from families where they are wealthy or their education is valued at home. Kids from poor families or poor backgrounds like A's as much as anybody else, but early in their career, by second or third grade, they give up on the idea that they'll ever get them and therefore we are killing them off on something that isn't even important, memorizing facts. In a Glasser Quality School there is no such thing as a closed book test. Students are told to get out their notes and open their books. There is no such thing as being forbidden to ask the teacher or another student for help. Now schooling, to get back to your question, schooling is basically 98 percent factual knowledge and so schooling is that what you're asked to learn in school and punished for not learning, that no one in the real world would ever ask you to know. There is no job any place you can go where they are going to ask you something you can't find out and say, "oh, you don't know four questions, sorry you are going to get an F." I'm saying that school is flawed because in the real world there is really much more education going on than in school. Workers are told, "please don't memorize facts, look them up, use a calculator, or ask someone." For example, the secret of surgery is not knowing it's a heart, it's in knowing what to do to fix the heart's malfunction, and schools miss that totally when they ask students to memorize facts without using them. Schooling doesn't promote critical thinking, it only requires students to parrot back what teachers tell them.

TN: In your book, Every Student Can Succeed, on page 131, you make the statement that "Emphasis on using what has been learned is not a common school experience, even though it's been the core of learning since the beginning of time." What is it that you believe ought to be at the heart of a common school experience?

WG: I think that there is such a thing as competence. As long as acquiring knowledge is the educational goal of schools, educational opportunities will be limited, as they are now, to affluent families. Poor students don't memorize or do homework. Changing that definition to education is using knowledge and backing that up with all classroom work and tests focused on doing this is the way to upgrade the low grade system we have now. What we are doing is a vivid example of why the extracurricular activities are so successful and our classes so unsuccessful. All extracurricular activities reflect the use of knowledge, never just the acquiring and regurgitating that now extend into many of the classes that prepare teachers to teach: a tragic example of the blind leading the blind. What students lack in school is an intellectual relationship or conversation with the teacher. We can spend billions of dollars. We can train our teachers a thousand times better than how we're training them now. We can pay teachers a hundred thousand dollars a year, and we'll do nothing to improve our schools as long as we keep the A, B, C, D, F grading system. Now we're getting down to the heart of education, which our schools don't even touch right now. Every single major push in education has made it worse and right now it's really bad because everything we've done is de-humanizing education. It's destroying the possibility of the teacher and the student having a warm, friendly, intellectual relationship. This is at the heart of all good education, where the teacher asks students to think and engages them in encouraging dialogues, constantly checking for understanding and growth.