Schools on a Crash Course with Failure

©Copyright 2016: Richard von Sternberg, All Rights Reserved

Making it in school

I have a daughter who has always had a way of finishing what she started, of digging in and aiming steadfastly toward completion.  She plowed through school like an icebreaker, scrutinizing and analyzing all along the way.  After high school she went to the local university, took many classes, did very well in them.  She married a fellow who joined the service, was “stationed” in Colorado where she enrolled in the university to find out credits from her hometown college were useless there, non-transferrable.  She had to roll back to square one.

She plugged away in that environment like she did when she was little, an unstoppable, indefatigable knowledge junkie.  On and on her education went as she aimed herself in the direction of becoming a public school teacher at the elementary level.  Her reward at the end of it all was to graduate summa cum laude and step right into a teaching position.

Or was it?  The memory of graduating at the top of her class will never fade, but, as of this writing, whether the teaching position is a reward for her remains to be seen, for she has stepped from the university world of what can be into the mundane world of what is.

No Child Left Behind

She entered the teaching field in the aftermath of the curricular and administrative atomic bomb blast caused by “No child left behind,” a federal-government-induced education program that launched an era in which “Teach to the test” has come to be the battle cry of classrooms everywhere. 

No Pollyanna, that daughter; she did not harbor unrealizable expectations of what she could accomplish in her first year of teaching after tracking through her student teacher program where “The rubber meets the road,” where you try out teaching and teaching initiates you.  Whatever illusions the general university experience may have left in her were steam-cleaned by her student teaching experiences leaving her with realistic expectations.

The teaching position she accepted was in a district where the test scores turned out to be toxic, a district like many from coast to coast that, as a result of their low scores, had moved into the crosshairs of No Child Left Behind and could plan on being watched and needled into prettier test scores.  To prefer higher test scores is universal, of course, but the methods invented and used to attempt to bring about those better test scores bring us to the heart of the difference between the two major philosophies behind the great differences in educational approaches: Behaviorism and Cognitivism.

Old Methods Used in Times that have Changed

Behaviorism works like factories work:  input on one end yields predictable output on the other, repeatable endlessly.  It treats people the way animal trainers condition subjects through rewards and punishment and holds all subjects to the same standards.  In behaviorist education, all students of the same age are expected to be on the same page at the same time learning the same thing.

Cognitivism does not hold that people are merely a sum total of their responses to stimuli as behaviorism does, but factors the individual into the behavior equation.  In other words, a human being does not just respond from trainable instinct to stimuli, but is in control of the response personally.  The individual child’s learning process depends on this control ability and interactivity with his or her environment.  In cognitivist education, a classroom of students grouped because they are the same age would be perceived to be on entirely different levels of proficiency, not on the same page at the same time due to how children learn.

In the behaviorist classroom the emphasis is on teaching while in the cognitive classroom the emphasis is on learning.  

Behaviorist education consists of knowledge and skill steps that build on a former step, and the former, and so on, to the building blocks of the beginning.  At an age arrived at by taking averages, it is believed that children are ready at age 5 to begin Kindergarten and progress chronologically through the grades.   

That belief exists because the public school system was originally modeled after the factories of the industrial revolution such as those of Carnegie and Ford.  Cars and widgets were assembled step-by-step, segmentally.  By segmentally I mean in segments and in a particular order.  The captains of industry wanted standards set in schools that made the diploma at the end proof that its bearer was ready to step into the factory.  The level of education determined at what level:

1. High school – assembly work  

2. Junior College – technical work

3. State College – middle management

4. University – upper management

My Years as an Educator

I came to know these things from the many years I spent as a teacher of university students, junior college, high school and junior high, as well as elementary level students, and the research I did for my master of arts thesis (linguistics).  I focused on child language acquisition and learned about what they call linguistic universals.  A process known as developmentalism accounts for the way all learners of a language progress through steps, segmentally, but they do so developmentally.

What this means is that language skills are learned by every learner in stages and in the same order (segmentally), but each learner can only progress through the steps when he or she is ready to do so (developmentally).  Hence, you can find two children born on the same day at two entirely different levels of language ability.  As those two grow and develop, individually, another look a few months later may find them in reverse order of ability because the one who lagged came to a stage of development that spurted, and surged forward, making him or her ready for the next level quicker.

Dr. Jean Piaget of Neuchatel, Switzerland

This applies to all learning, or so it was postulated by the most famous developer of the cognitivist theories, a Swiss psychologist named Jean Piaget who was born in 1896 and died in 1980.   Dr. Piaget has left behind an entire library of published works that speak to every level of the subject of learning.  His work inspired the field of psycholinguistics, the study of what psychological processes are utilized as  languages are acquired and used, which is why I became acquainted with his work.

At the end of my studies I realized I had been influenced by conventional wisdom and the norms of teaching to see children the way they had been stamped by the grading system:  A, B, C, D and F.  At whatever “next” level they were destined for, A, B and C were OK, the other grades spelled trouble.  Early in the grades, from the point of view of the cognitivist, some learners excelled in the environment because they were ready to understand what the schools presented and motivated to learn it.  Others were less ready, but perhaps motivated so much they excelled nevertheless.  Most of the OK ones were considered average, but showed enough promise to be included in the good set.  The D and F students were not ready and not motivated to achieve “grade level,” the teaching train moved forward but they did not.  These are the children left behind, as far as I am concerned.

Maria Montessori
"One test of the correctness of educational procedure
is the happiness of the child."

As a result of my new knowledge and about 150 visitations to classes of all kinds in two states – free schools, Montessori, Rudolf Steiner’s Waldorf type, traditional schools, military academies, religious schools, schools within schools, magnet schools, many alternative schools, I reinvented myself as a teacher and saw my role as a facilitator of learning instead of a teacher.  To stand and lecture, for example, came to seem a form of broadcasting to all the students, as if they were radios in the seats, when at any given time half of the radios were tuned to a different frequency. 

Motivated to Achieve Success

The only way I could expect learning to take place was when all materials could be used and learned individually and the environment I provided stimulated the motivation required to learn.  A most sage professor said one sentence that made it all so easy to understand: “You perform and feel better and live your life completely differently when you are motivated to achieve success rather than motivated to

Rudolf Steiner
founder of Waldorf education

avoid failure.”

In an attempt to enforce the notion of “No child left behind,” it is my belief that 70% of children are left behind because the learning machine moves forward at one speed only and keeps going in spite of the numbers of people who are not up to speed.  Teaching to the test, from my perspective, is becoming a way of life in public schools that is motivated to avoid failure.  Nearly all participants in the process are concerned about the consequences of failing, so concerned, that students end up being coached to pass a test that is laced with all the regalia and trappings of behaviorism, filled with assumptions about who will know what at what age, assumptions that no longer seem meaningful.

John Holt,
Advocate of humane classrooms

In short, learning takes place incrementally and developmentally, it is not about everybody being on the same page at the same time.  Learning takes places in the student, not in the teacher’s teaching, and learning can only occur when a human is ready and motivated to learn.  My kind daughter came to her post prepared to see each child as a person at his or her own place along the learning continuum and teach accordingly.  What she encountered instead, was a school filled with empty methodologies and an old fashioned administration determined to smack on square pegs so hard and so many times, that they will come to fit into round holes.  Her greatest strengths, recognized in her student teaching, were filtered out by the school administration as the wrong way to teach.

What they seem to want the most is that she conform to their overall motivation to avoid failure and give up the notion of success unless it is test score related.  It is no wonder that a huge percentage of students, as they progress through the grades, come to feel hopelessness, powerlessness and apathy.  They are alienated by the very methods invented by the system to try to make them progress, especially if the system punishes teachers for deviating from the path.  The mythological teachers from great movies like To Sir with Love and Stand and Deliver, as well as those teachers just sitting watching the clock until retirement and all those in between are all together in the crosshairs hoping no student will fail the terrifying test.

Richard von Sternberg, February 9, 2016