The 2012 NAIS visiting accreditation team last year charged my school with defining what we mean by “progressive” so that we might become a more progressive school. To this end, the Chair of our math department assembled a Progressive Education group that began meeting to discuss these issues. The group read several writers, including pieces by Will Richardson (2012) and Alfie Kohn (2008), who both embrace progressive ideas such as the following:
- project-based learning (rather than textbook learning)
- answering questions and solving problems (rather than only covering skills)
- decision-making involves students at every level (rather than only adults deciding)
- in-depth study of a topic (rather than breezing through items on scope & sequence)
- student interest helps determine topics to study (rather than material preselected by the teacher)
- emphasis on inquiry (rather than rote learning of facts)
- interdisciplinary, theme-based curriculum design and instruction (rather than isolated subject instruction)
- students acts as teachers and learners (rather than assuming one passive stance)
- researching to publish or post results online (rather than writing on paper for the teacher)
- students engaged in the democratic process through collaborating, negotiating, contributing, and responding to the ideas of others (rather than teacher “covering the curriculum” to get students “prepared for the standardized test”)
- emphasis on the process students go through to answer their own questions (rather than every student aiming to produce the same assigned product for the teacher)
- emphasis is on hands-on learning-by-doing (rather than simply listening or reading)
- student online collaboration (rather than insulated, on-campus book talk)
- teacher-as-facilitator (rather than omniscient dispenser of knowledge)
- performance-based and portfolio assessment (rather than assessment by textbook tests for letter grades or standardized tests for another number)
- heterogeneous groupings (rather than tracked classes)
Certainly Kohn (2008) and legions of other educators who call themselves “progressive” agree on these characteristics. Kohn himself goes further than Richardson and encourages renewed vigilance by culturally and politically progressive schools, such as our own, that have grown pedagogically lethargic, allowing the creep of tracking, standardized testing, and letter grades over the years (p. 6). I would argue, though, that neither Richardson nor Kohn go far enough in their ideas in order to articulate what should be three essential, overlapping curricular goals for our contemporary progressive school: one, solving the interconnected ecological emergencies currently buffeting our world; two, making unequal economic societies more equal; and three, creating a empathic global civilization before it’s too late. Richardson and Kohn may not oppose these three progressive education goals, but by focusing on technological fixes to join the currently imbalanced workforce (Richardson) or vague, seemingly rudderless, student-generated curriculum based upon what interests them at the moment (Kohn) these two writers fall into abstract, disembodied theorizing about pedagogy that ignores a major obstruction to our school developing into a healthy progressive institution: the fact that our young, privileged student population cannot be expected to sustain a complex exploration of either privilege or environmental collapse without heavy teacher guidance. Richardson and Kohn not only ignore how bad the physical world and billions of physical lives are right now (and the inverse: the privilege of our small minority set of NAIS students and teachers), but they don’t imagine how we can, and should, improve the planet and our embodied lives today. By missing both the lived, embodied, material problems and solutions, they not only underestimate the institutional lethargy that progressive schools can fall prey to, they underestimate how progressive schools can be vital centers of participatory, Earth democracy within communities.
Three Overarching Curricular Goals of Progressive Education: Solving Ecological Emergencies; Making Unequal Economic Societies More Equal; and Creating a Global Empathic Civilization
Solving Ecological Emergencies
Richardson and Kohn largely ignore nature and the environment in their discussions of progressive school education. Dewey, Parker, and thousands of other progressive educators, however, start from the natural, concrete, and particular—the fir grove, the apple orchard, the pumpkin patch, Corkran Pond—outside our windows and move to the more abstract, rather than the other way around. The global environmental threats are so pervasive and interwoven that we need new 21st century progressive outdoor experiential education pedagogy to address those threats. Take, for instance, the fact that “two-thirds of all people are expected to face water shortage in less than a generation” (Lappé & Lappé, 2002, p. 15). Or that “today more than six billion people rely on food grown on just 11 percent of the global land surface,” while just “a scant 3 percent of the Earth’s surface [is] inherently fertile soil” (2008, p. 92). That soil is being wasted and ruined by factory farm monocropping, chemical fertilizers, GMOs, and chemical pesticides. Or that each year for the last twenty breaks the previous year’s global temperature record, or that more and more billion dollar extreme weather disasters happen each year.
Joel Bourne, Jr. (2009) notes that global population is booming, but so is global warming and deforestation of land for more production zones. We know how this pattern goes, if we follow Diamond (2005) and Ponting (1991). Acting as mitigates on grain production across the globe, are three other factors: one, global warming is sharply curbing harvests of rice, corn, wheat, sorghum, cassava, and sugar cane across the world; two, staple crops such as corn and soybeans are being fed to livestock as the desire for meat and milk products skyrockets among the millions of new middle class citizens; and three, more and more trees are being cleared to make way for fields that are being converted to biofuels in a well-intentioned response to global warming, which is, in a grimly ironic catch-22, causing erosion, topsoil loss, and desertification, thereby creating more hunger (Bourne, 2009). This is exemplar of the vicious circle involving the triad of hunger-overpopulation-global warming, and it will be the greatest challenge of our students’ lives when they get older.
These environmental issues are therefore not just academic concerns that can be studied in our fir groves, apple orchards, and ponds; they are urgent survival concerns for the entire planet, and progressive schools—powered by problem-solving, thematic, and interdisciplinary units—can be at the forefront of public education and participatory democracy in solving these problems.
A problematic anti-environmental aspect of Richardson’s thesis is his assumption that internet connectivity increases the chance at global collaboration and global justice. When I think global justice, I think about environmental justice, people living in working in local economies, employing what Vandana Shiva (2005) calls “earth democracy,” where people work in egalitarian and sustainable groups in environmentally sustainable ways. Richardson, though, ignores the environmental impact of increased internet usage. "The cloud" requires massive data servers, which in turn require massive energy. America's adoption of networked broadband digital media and "cloud-based" alternatives to print are driving record levels of energy consumption. Digital media increase, of the kind Richardson proposes in schools, will double coal burning: "There is growing recognition that digital media technology uses significant amounts of energy from coal fired power plants which are making a significant contribution to global warming. Greenpeace estimates that by 2020 data centers will demand more electricity than is currently demanded by France, Brazil, Canada, and Germany combined" (Carli).
While it’s true, as Richardson states, that we live in an age of abundant electronic information, we are also living in an age of ecological catastrophe and mounting social and economic injustice. Children in my grade, sixth grade, need direct guidance, for example, about the empathy erosion that led to the Newtown murders. They need plenty of highly choreographed interdisciplinary instruction to tease out the various interconnected threads in the global warming-water shortage-hunger shroud thrown over most of the southern hemisphere. Our students need direct instruction by knowledgeable teachers today to solve these problems. Of course, students should also be involved in project-based interdisciplinary work that seeks to solve these problems, but—given the complexity of the overlap and the emotional density of the subject matter—they need their teachers to deliver and mediate—providing backstory, connections, and possible solutions—information throughout the units.
Richardson’s bogeymen seems to be the unholy trinity of poor teaching that teaches to standardized tests, student boredom, and unprepared public high school graduates to get jobs in an exploitative global marketplace that he accepts as a foregone conclusion. By contrast, I would submit that the chances of school and societal revitalization are greater than he imagines and the current global dangers are more pressing that he lets on.
While it’s true that we need his six prescriptions, we also need to step away from the electrical devices, head outside, and build social, economic, and environmental justice by getting our hands in the dirt with our students. Computers, smart phones, and IPads are important, but the progressive education of the kind seen at Putney School and Catlin Gabel School, where the students work with animals and in the organic gardens to grow food for the cafeterias are just as essential. We need a postmodern amalgamation of the electronic empathic civilization that Jeremy Rifkin proposes in The Empathic Civilization (2009) and the sustainable, biodynamic ethos that Vandana Shiva lays out in Earth Democracy (2005).
While I agree with most of Richardson’s version of electronic school progressivism, I would also return to the essential goals of social, economic, and environmental justice, along with empathy. Even though Richardson hints that his ideas “transforms our ability to work together to change the world for the better,” I am unconvinced, as internet posting, while inherently possessing the ability to raise empathy for other involved in the struggles for justice, are I assume, of the same kind that are carried out daily by social justice sites such as MoveOn.Org. It’s true that MoveOn.org is successful as a consciousness-raising venue that shares questionnaires, videos, and direct letter writing campaigns. However, Richardson, unlike MoveOn.org and other social justice sites, seems resigned to the fact that his students will be computer aficionados hired as non-union temp workers by giant global multinational corporations without retirement plans, health benefits, the right to collectively bargain, or vacation times. If we adhere to Richardson’s dystopian prediction, in seven years, in 2020, with 65-70% of our students will be working as freelancers, there will be no more unions, no collective bargaining, no health coverage, no environmental laws governing CO2 emissions, and our students will be competing for part time help desk jobs that have been shipped to Bangalore and the Philippines. This vision seems decidedly shortsighted for a man who espouses that we should all work together to create the kind of world we wish to see.
We need to challenge climate change now, and this depends on global cooperation using the technology that Richardson espouses. Ignoring the problem, as schools have largely done till now in the US, is anti-humanity and anti-future.
Making Unequal Economic Societies More Equal
In their book The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (2009) show that the United States, along with Singapore, Portugal, and the United Kingdom have the highest rates of economic inequality in the world among modern industrialized countries. The runaway wealth of the richest 1% in the US has been widely chronicled in such books as Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality (2012) and Winner-Take-All Politics by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson (2010). Wilkinson and Pickett also reveal that the more economically unequal a country is the higher the rates of anxiety, depression, and other health and social problems such as violence, mental illness, obesity, school dropout rates, and incarceration. Our country has the ignoble distinction of leading the world in many of these unhappiness index points. The inverse is also true: that “ill-health and social problems . . . occur less frequently in more equal countries” (20). The authors argue that “reducing inequality is the best way of improving the quality of the social environment” (29). How is this relevant to our discussion of progressive education here at Catlin Gabel?
The authors also discovered that reducing economic inequality in societies not only increases the well being and quality of life for the poor—as could be expected—but that the affluent and middle classes also find a corresponding increase in their qualities of life, marked by a decrease of anxiety and depression and an increase in empathy for one’s fellow citizens. Community life improves while class and ethnic prejudices decrease with a reduction of economic inequality. Our students, the affluent in our society, in other words, would also benefit from our society becoming more economically equal.
The hidden price tag of private school education and working hard to maintain one’s affluence in the world’s most economically unequal society—decreased happiness, decreased trust in one’s neighbors, increased health problems, increased hostility to broad swathes of humanity—is exposed.
I would argue that the social ills that beset this nation could be approached head-on by having our students do cross-cultural studies that look at happiness and community health relative to economic equality. If we want a more economically and socially just world, we can teach our students the steps toward creating that world. They need to understand that this is not an argument for socialism, but that even the richest groups benefit from increased equality (180-181). As the authors point out, “greater equality can be gained by using taxes and benefits to redistribute very unequal incomes or by greater equality in gross incomes before taxes and benefits, which leaves less need for redistribution” (184).
Equality is made possible by empathy and cooperation and community building; these are among the most progressive lessons that we could teach. Wilkinson and Pickett agree with Jeremy Rifkin (2009) and Martin Nowak (2012) that our current highly unequal societies are historical anomalies, that our ancestors existed largely without warfare in highly egalitarian hunter-gather groups for the vast majority of human history (Wilkinson and Pickett, 207-208). The false social Darwinist notion that humans are hardwired for brutal competition that would lead to unequal societies simply isn’t true; in fact, each of these writers show that groups use counter-dominance strategies such as ridicule to ostracism and violence against people who try to dominate others. Our mirror neurons and instinct to empathize with others drives humans to value fairness and reciprocity and cooperation. It’s these human traits that instinctually seek community—and not brawn used in service of survival of the fittest individualism—that most characterize humans as a species. Therefore, when we set up societies characterized by inequality, we are creating inhumane institutions.
I bring all this up in order to point out that the exclusivity that our affluent, privileged school community, situated in the world’s most unequal nation, is bound to make us sick over time. We have arrived at a state of affairs where families need 25 thousands dollars to send one child through my grade, sixth grade, for one year. Only a very small fraction of humans can afford this type of education—some call them the 1%—and this fact looms over this campus as a specter that must be named.
Madeline Levine, in her book The Price of Privilege (2006), details that “affluent communities excessively emphasize individualism, perfection, accomplishment, competition, and materialism, while giving short shrift to more prosocial values such as cooperation, altruism, and philanthropy” (p. 178). If we tilt this analysis on its side, we can see that affluent private school education inherently tends toward the un-progressive: education characterized by individualism, perfection, accomplishment, competition, and materialism. Compare these characteristics to those that open this piece of writing, where Kohn and Richardson argue that progressive education is characterized by collaboration, inquiry, creation, research, and process, not an unattainable “perfection.” What’s more, Levine points out that the pressure to succeed and achieve this illusory “perfection” sets up the affluent, talented, and hard working for a lonely, cold-hearted life of measuring oneself according to unreachable standards.
Clearly, in order to address progressivism in our NAIS schools we also have to address the exclusive financial nature of our schools; and, I would argue, we—the teachers, the administration, the parents, the Admissions department, the board of trustees—have to seek alternatives to this exclusivity with our students so that they get reconnected to what is healthy and innate.
Richardson, on the other hand, accepts the unequal economic system and its attendant sickness as a foregone conclusion. “As globalization and connectedness ramp up, traditional definitions of employment are being rewritten. . . . Based on existing trends, some now predict that year 2020 will see 65 to 70 million freelancers, consultants, and independent workers representing more than half of all U.S. employees. That’s four times the number today.” Richardson accepts that by 2020 “fewer companies will be willing to offer full-time jobs with health benefits or retirement plans when they can hire short-term contractors from anywhere in the world.”
Obviously, this Walmartization of the global workplace is problematic, but rather than offer an alternate path, Richardson suggests we “connect and learn from and with authors, scientists, journalists, explorers, artists, athletes and many others. We have immense storehouses of primary-source information that we can literally carry in our pockets. This new landscape transforms our ability to work together to change the world for the better.”
How does he suggest that we work together? By getting connected via the internet on social media sites.
How does he suggest we teach our kids? By modeling our curriculum after Khan Academy, Knewton, and High Tech High in San Diego where, he says, students are engaged in “real-life, inquiry-based learning. . . [the] kind of schooling that prepares students for the world they will live in.” Richardson suggests that the internet is the tool for students to “find the answers, [and do] real work for real audiences . . . [because] students are encouraged to connect with others, and to collaborate and create with them on a global scale.”
What would this collaboration look like? It would look like High Tech High in San Diego, where “students prepare personal digital portfolios that document their achievements. They solve real-world problems and present their work to both students and adults, in addition to earning traditional letter grades and taking standardized tests.” Students at this school interview veterans, and collect the stories into podcasts, which they post on the internet. Or they post scientific data on the internet. Or they film a live stream class on YouTube.
I went online to view some of the science projects that Richardson mentions, and I was unclear how real-world problems were being solved. Described and chronicled--yes; solved? No. It was clear that students were learning how to use the web based software on how to create a online report of what they learned. There were videos, hashtags, and pie graphs, but I did not see the necessary positing of solutions to the catastrophic loss of topsoil on Earth (Daniels). Nor does Richardson offer any clues as to how schools might prepare students to create a more environmentally sustainable or equal economic, and therefore healthier, society.
Accepting the current environmental emergencies and economic and social inequalities as inevitable is simply not acceptable in a progressive school. What about one of the many models of self-employment and cooperative work of the kind Gar Alperovitz (2011) envisions in America Beyond Capitalism or that Marjorie Kelly (2012) explores in Owning Our Future? Student should explore these worker-owned ventures as viable future socio-economic community models, as they most closely align with the characteristics of progressive education: collaboration, participatory democracy, inherent worth of all group members, involvement and appreciation of a variety of skills, worth being measured by growth indicators.
The internet will not save us by itself. We need a progressive education plan.
Creating a Global Empathic Civilization
Because nature has programmed us so that our species might survive communally, we are able to see ourselves in others and reach out to help them. This empathetic act is not only vital to the survival of individual cultures, civilizations, and empires, it is also “central to our adaptability as a species. As the human population and the climate changes, we will need to harness that adaptability and figure out ways to work together to save the planet and its inhabitants” (Nowak, 38-39). Teaching empathy and its relation to science, economics, history, and the material living conditions of humans is progressive.
Perhaps we might speculate with our students that in order to survive both the devolution into obscenely unequal economic power and the interwoven ecological challenges of this century, human beings may have to create a matrix of semi-autonomous nearly self-sufficient communities of around 500 people each that are socially, economically, and environmentally just—that, indeed, as Paul Hawken reminds us in Blessed Unrest (2007), these three nodes of justice all fail if one fails. What might these communities look like? Perhaps our schools themselves could become the beating hearts of a matrix of ecologically and economically minded communities spread out over this land.
Morris Berman, in The Reenchantment of the World (1984), outlines such a future “planetary culture,” which would have extended family living together, the young, middle aged, and elderly in the same houses, on the same land, emphasizing community rather than individuality and competition (p. 277). Shannon Hayes (2013) writes of the inherent sustainability of multigenerational family farms, highlighting how healthy one such arrangement is for the children being raised there. An irony here, of course, is that, recognizing the empty promises of globalization to achieve global justice, Berman and others advocate the local and autonomous as a global solution, echoing the bumper sticker Think Globally Act Locally. Jan Martin Bang (2005) has written and taken photographs of twenty such “ecovillages” in his book by the same title. Such deliberately small-scale living arrangements, Bang reveals, have always existed, since Mesopotamia, and they are making a comeback, given how fossil fuel dependent globalization has imperiled life on Earth. A growing number of people are hungry to live self-sufficient lives in groups on organically farmed land, where the community shares education, chores, property, birth, death, childcare, birthdays, and bounty. Rob Hopkins (2008) has chronicled the transformation that whole "Transition Towns" across the UK are making to live in more sustainable, more resilient ways.
On a smaller, more local level, Thom Hartmann (2004) calls similar communities “intentional communities,” and he argues that the most successful communities are the ones “with a shared vision that is put into action” (p. 316). He is not talking about the failed religious experiments of millennialism, the back-to-the-land communes of most people in the 1960s, or the armed, politically extreme militias movements. Hartmann clarifies that the “primary key to successful, long-term community is that the group of people are interdependent for their survival or livelihood” (319). The communities are the ones that meet “vital social and spiritual needs as well as providing for the life-support needs (food, shelter, and sometimes employment) of their members” (320). If the schools were at the center of such communities, our children—and therefore our hopes—would be there too.
On a larger, societal level, Berman would have an embrace of diversity, whether this applies to biodiversity and protection of endangered species, or to marginalized cultures and dying human languages. The larger societal cosmology would “be preoccupied with fitting into nature rather than attempting to master it” (p. 278). The goals would include clean air, water, and soil. Politically, we would decentralize and move to smaller institutions of regional, autonomous, and local control. Community hospitals, food cooperatives, neighborhood associations, community centers, strong neighborhood schools, and community gardens and farms would proliferate. The paradigm shift in cosmology would be marked by intense study of and adherence to the manifold principles advocated by feminism, ecology, cultural diversity, and spiritual renewal.
Rifkin’s model for a future global civilization starts somewhere in Berman’s neighborhood, then quickly expands to promote the adoption of what he calls “biosphere consciousness” (p. 475) via Internet connections. In the idea that the internet offers us unprecedented connection to others, Rifkin agrees with Richardson; that said, Rifkin is interested in enlarging empathy in order to live a life in community and justice, whereas Richardson seems more interested in getting students jobs one day within an unhealthy economic system. People used to empathize, Rifkin points out, with their family members and nomadic tribes before the founding of Mesopotamia. With the founding of cities, however, in Sumeria, and the specialization of labor, followed by the influx of new ideas brought in by trade, people’s empathy expanded to include others in their own cities, as they began to think of themselves of citizens of Uruk, for example. The pains and pleasures of their fellow citizens became the province of each individual in the first cities, as she could easily imagine herself in the place of another in like social caste. Later, after the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press in 1440, which catapulted European literacy and allowed people to take in the news from other worlds that started being spread by the great seafaring colonizing countries of Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and England, people’s empathy were enlarged once again to include the stories of peoples in foreign lands. Later, during the Industrial Revolution and the advent of nation-states following the convulsions of revolutions against monarchies, Europeans began thinking of themselves as Spaniards, Poles, and the like.
Today, Rifkin says, we stand at the gate of global consciousness, made possible by social networking technologies such as Twitter, You Tube, Facebook, and Wikipedia. This is also Richardson’s vision as well, although Rifkin argues for the creation of an empathic global civilization, starting in school, which Richardson does not mention. Instead, Richardson seems content with merely connecting socially on line and posting one’s research in order prepare for employment in unequal economic societies. Rifkin embraces the promise of these electronic technologies as a means to help us learn about our fellow humans on earth and thereby deepen our empathy and connection to people whom at first glance might appear unlike ourselves. Nowak’s research supports Rifkin’s contentions, as human communities evolve biologically most successfully when they have information about other communities, their group’s reputation is shared in a social network, and they are able to assist other communities in need in a public, open forum with other communities observing (Nowak, 38-39).
People at bottom have always had, in all times and places, similar desires: the desire for food, water, reciprocity, community, safe lodging, and hopeful futures for their children. Rifkin adds to this the fact that our technological connectivity today enables a new, global ecological conviction, biosphere consciousness. This new cosmological paradigm, which is “the only context encompassing enough to unite the human race” (p. 593) gathers together people of all nations, ironically, under the banner of fighting for survival due to the complex threats posed by global warming, hunger, water scarcity, and the other predicaments detailed earlier in this writing.
Rifkin wonders, though, along with perhaps this Progressive Education Committee at my school, Catlin Gabel—given the fact that climate change seems to be progressing just as quickly as technological innovations that allow the worldwide spread of this biosphere consciousness—if the technology will raise consciousness quickly enough to avoid the most heinous of global warming’s possible impacts.
History will decide, but we should start educating ourselves today at school.
An Obstruction to Progressive Education: Unfairly Expecting Our Students to Grapple Alone Successfully with Their Privilege and with Environmental Catastrophe without Some Teaching as Transmission, Transaction, and Transformation
Teachers, through interdisciplinary, project-based, inquiry-based learning—where we learn and explore side-by-side with our students—must map out a way to salvage not only economic, environmental, and social justice, but a sustainable, empathetic way for humans to be in the world before it’s too late. Our NAIS students, a privileged 1% of American students, are not capable of facing these calamities alone—as they will get paralyzed by confusion, fear, guilt, shame, despair, and anger.
Stiglitz (2012) shows that the top 1% of our societies use NAIS schools as a means to retain their wealth and pass it along to their children. Private preparatory school graduates go to university, graduate, get well paying jobs, and have children, which they then send back to the private preparatory school system. The prestigious and exclusive education that we offer in NAIS schools, while being largely progressive, anti-racist, pro-feminist, and environmentally-minded, also nonetheless—by virtue of it huge price tag—preserves class inequalities, as poor and working class families, in numbers proportionate to the demographics of U.S. population, cannot send their children to school here. Lacking access to private college preparatory schools like ours, the majority of the poor and working classes are locked out of college before their children become of college age. Stiglitz notes the inequality of educational opportunity in the US by looking at “the composition of students in America’s highly selective colleges. Only around 9 percent come from the bottom half [of economic income] of the population, while 74 percent come from the top quarter” (p. 19). Despite the fact that statistics clearly show that the rising tuitions costs of private K-12 and college educations are pushing these opportunities out of the reach of three-quarters of US population, Stiglitz says, “Americans still believe in the myth of opportunity” (20). The truth, however, is that “the radical, growing inequalities of power and wealth in U.S. society are harshly reflected in current [public vs. private] school inequalities” (Featherstone, 45). Wilkinson and Levine, we have seen, show that this unacknowledged divide is making our society sick, lacking in empathy, rife with anxiety, depression, substance abuse, violence, and a bevy of other social ills.
Still, progressive educators in progressive schools like ours recognize that “democracy has to mean not only the participation of all children intellectually and socially in school subjects, but also a renewed fight for equal access and racial justice” (Featherstone, 45). We know that increasing our socio-economic and ethnic diversity on our campus—in the staff, administration, teacher, and student populations—can only begin to heal the country torn by economic and racial injustice.
So what does this have to do with how our schools define “progressive”? The economic inequalities that high tuition costs of our schools and colleges are of immediate importance to our curriculum because it is unfair of us, as teachers at NAIS schools, to expect our students to grapple with the privilege or environmental catastrophes that they were born into without scaffolding that grappling. Neither Kohn nor Richardson mention this dynamic, however, as their notions of progressive education seem to be disembodied and happening on a planet much like earth but more environmentally healthy, socially just, and with unlimited capacity for economic growth.
Two other educational theorists, though, may provide our Progressive Education Committees with valuable insight. Jerry Aldridge and Renitta Goldman (2007), in Current Issues and Trends in Education, compare and contrast four different teaching styles: teaching as transmission, teaching as transaction, teaching as inquiry, and teaching as transformation (pgs. 107-111).
Aldride and Goldman define teaching as transmission as the type preferred by our federal government, an antiquated caricature of teaching in which outside “experts” create curriculum for teachers to administer to students in their classrooms. The teachers have the answers, and they fill up the empty heads of their students. The curriculum is collected in textbooks and other educational company products such as websites, workbooks, worksheets, and DVDs. Facts are more important in this model than meaning or understanding. Students work as individuals to complete the tasks set forth by the curriculum guide. The teacher’s role in this model is to deliver the prescribed curriculum on the prescribed day in the chronological order dictated by the curriculum guide.
Aldride and Goldman define teaching as transaction as the type in which teachers still use curriculum guides, but they don’t follow them lockstep, and they augment the guides with lessons of their own creation. Teachers, in any case, create the curriculum ahead of time, and they arrive in the classroom with the target objectives, skills, and concepts pre-decided. Activities are more open-ended than in transmission teaching, and students have choice about how they will display their understandings of the concepts preselected by the teacher. Students work in groups to display what they have learned. The teacher’s role in this model is to “[guide] students’ interpretation of the material and [express] what is most important” (109).
Aldride and Goldman define teaching as inquiry as the type in which the teacher “encourages children to explore and learn more about topics of their own interest” (109). This is the type of education favored by Kohn and Richardson. “Students play an active role in determining what the class, general, and what they, in particular, will study” (109). As with transactional teaching, the emphasis in on project-based group work, but unlike transactional teaching, where teachers create the curriculum, by in large, ahead of time, teachers in inquiry classrooms act more as a resource guide and classroom manager while the students, in essence, create the curriculum during their research. In any case, the curriculum is more about the process of inquiry in this classroom than it is about content. The teacher’s role in this model is to “teach students how to investigate and how and where to find information” (110).
Aldride and Goldman define teaching as transformation as the type that seems at first glance to be identical to inquiry teaching, but there is an important, political and culturally progressive difference: in transformation teaching, “we study things so that we can make a difference on the planet” (111). The curriculum is still about the process of inquiry, but the end objective is to make a better world with more empathy and with environmental, social, and economic justice. The teacher’s role in this model is to help organize the classroom energy and commitment around an issue of injustice and to then mobilize the group to correct the wrong.
I detail all this before returning to Kohn’s article “Progressive Education: Why It’s Hard to Beat, But Also Hard to Find” (2008), which could be an important touchstone to help NAIS schools focus on becoming the progressive schools that PNAIS recommended last year that my school become.
Kohn’s eight characteristics of progressive school are thought provoking, and we should realize that our NAIS schools already typically embody several of these characteristics. Still, we should also have the honesty to admit that we fall short of several others—if, in fact, we are willing to embraces Kohn’s prescriptions—and we might still strive to realign ourselves to or adopt the remaining characteristics.
One of Kohn’s assertions concerns me, though—his teaching as inquiry notion that our curriculum should be based upon our students’ interests. I agree with this assertion in principle and in part, but I’d like to provide what I consider to be some important counterpoints—not to invalidate Kohn’s concept, but to help flesh it out more fully so that his point might be more useful to us.
First, only 1% of U.S. high school students attend NAIS schools like ours (Bruce Hammond pointed this out during his lecture at a 10/3/12 faculty meeting at my school), and most of them are therefore the children of privilege, which means that they are unconsciously, at least, out of love and loyalty to their families and home communities, interested in maintaining that privilege. Like most of their parents and teachers, probably, these students will want to ignore that privilege or to limit the confrontation with that privilege to Service Days off campus or Diversity conferences on campus, as it would be a source of embarrassment and discomfort for them to confront daily while at school. Knowing that we teach a 1% that has systemic connections to the 1% identified by the Occupy Movement might have far-reaching negative emotional consequences, and conversations with our students to unpack those connections and differences would take many moons, as we would like to avoid the self-blame and shame that might ensue inside of our student community with a cursory treatment. The teachers sense this dynamic intuitively, I think, and we avoid a brief confrontation out of concern for our students’ emotional well being, knowing all the while that a longer, more nuanced analysis of access to college and economic equality must be undertaken soon, as we watch college getting more and more out of reach financially for all but the very wealthy. Regarding Kohn’s idea about student interest, I doubt very much that our student body would gravitate to the confrontation with privilege naturally.
Because our students are unconsciously and emotionally invested in ignoring the interlocking privileges of wealth and attending this school, many of our students might be more interested in fitting in, meeting their own pleasures, as preteens and teens do, and in preparing themselves for the next stages of academic rigor. I note these facts about privilege and ignoring privilege without derision or condemnation, as I believe that birth status is accidental and that kids are born empathetic, but that living in a country that has an alarming degree of income inequality harms the empathy of the privileged class of children in a very specific way. From a very early age, all children in the U.S. who have access to TV and the internet are targeted by commercial corporations to become the next generation of consumers. Ironically, it might just be harder for student of financial means who have always attended a school of financial means to reclaim from corporate consumer culture the empathy than has been seized from them and replaced by less noble instincts such as addictive acquisitiveness, vapid materialism, a desire for fame and wealth, and blaming the poor for their poverty. Wilkinson and Pickett’s book and Levine’s book both make this claim, and they also show that the resulting callousness and fear of our neighbors make us sick, personally and culturally. Our students need us, their teachers, to manage their realignment with what is good and native in them. I find myself sadly acknowledging that our students’ secondary, selfish desires have been carefully nurtured and groomed by the consumer/media culture in which we live, and that this culture operates by creating and then meeting those desires for luxury, pleasure, and comfort through overseas imperialism, exploitative economic globalization, ubiquitous consumerist marketing, and plutocratic government masquerading as democracy. When and if our students begin connecting these dots, the process will be fraught with feelings of denial, anger, regret, anxiety, urgency, radicalism or its flipside reactionaryism—and they will need their teachers to facilitate, in a way involving possibly heavy teaching as transaction that Kohn decries, the reclamation of solidarity with humanity that has been taken from them by the media, corporations, and the (bad) luck of being born into a family of privilege in a country of privilege.
Our white students of privilege (the majority of our NAIS students)—as we perhaps learn at our diversity day conferences focusing on white teachers addressing their own privilege—will not be mature enough to address their own privileges afforded by their whiteness, upper socioeconomic classes, and heterosexuality. They are just kids, after all, and I wonder about a curriculum that would politicize the skin and families they were born into, since children and young adults are not mature enough to rise above the guilt or denial that ensues when one first learns of one’s privilege. Because we know and care about these kids, and because they are part of our NAIS communities, teachers might feel it would be unfair to politicize the students’ skins and families, as that politicization would cause fractures on our campuses. That type of fracturing might be better left to colleges, some teachers might argue. Still, left to their own interests in the purely inquiry based classrooms advocated by Kohn and Richardson, many of our students would probably want to ignore the privileges that their ethnic backgrounds, socio-economic status, and sexual orientation afford them. We know as teachers, though, that to continue to ignore these privileges is morally indefensible. So what should we do? Not leave these issues to the kids, surely, as the complexity would overwhelm them.
Second, our world is being threatened today by global warming (and its attendant crises of extreme weather disasters, water shortage, topsoil loss, biodiversity loss, species extinction, poverty [highest among women and children], and hunger), which will be the most important web of threats to our students this century. Kohn’s analysis of progressive education should not simply focus on student life on campus in the disembodied abstract, but it should also mention the world—nature, the environment—in which our schools exist and operate. School electricity is drawn in part from some nonrenewable resources, for example, such as the burning of gas and coal, which in turn contribute to carbon dioxide emissions and global warming. While it’s true that students should be involved in the formulation of curriculum, they also don’t have requisite personal experiences, wide enough lenses, or brave enough constitutions (as they are children and young adults) to address these frightening interlocking ecological emergencies. Powerful moneyed interests, it must also be noted, conceal these environmental emergencies, from us in the same way and for some of the same reasons as the racism, sexism, poverty, and homophobia visited upon the victims of nondominant culture is concealed. It’s the teachers’ job to make these issues visible and to present this curriculum in a sequential, interdisciplinary fashion, using a combination of teaching of transaction, teaching as inquiry, and teaching as transformation. We might perhaps focus first on gardening, for example, then food, then water, then globalization, then economic justice, then global warming, then solutions. Because the issues involved are multivalent, inflammatory, and fearsome, teachers are the ones to make the curriculum palatable, approachable, and less frightening. Most importantly, given the systemic, interwoven nature of these advanced emergencies, which makes the web feel overwhelming, our students deserve their teachers to work together on a kind of interdisciplinary, environmental scope and sequence that cultivates hope and allows them to come up with answers in a supportive educational environment—rather than simply broadsiding them into hopelessness with a dump truck of ecological and economic bad news. In light of these concerns, leaving the investigation to student interest feels negligent to me.
Kohn and Richardson might not disagree with any of this, but I think they might still argue for inquiry teaching and therefore might want to leave it to students to a greater degree than I would be comfortable with. To my thinking, I assume that our global ecological and economic emergences simply demand that teachers, utilizing vertical and horizontal curricular integration, guide students in a fairly preplanned way to restore a sacred view of Earth, good science, and decent democratic principles, that undergird social, environmental, and economic justice. Once we set the essential questions and interdisciplinary curricular objectives of a given unit, of course we should empower students to bring their interests and move within the unit to discover, learn, and teach. Leaving the essential questions and objectives to the students, though, given our advanced problems to solve, is not the right course of action for NAIS schools.
I would advocate to the Progressive Education Committees of our collective NAIS schools, therefore, that any notion of “progressive education” that we define across this country should also foreground empathy as well as political, social, and environmental justice, since these issues focus on not only Kohn’s principles of progressive education, but also on the principles that McTighe and Wiggins’ Understanding by Design (2005) identify as central to progressive pedagogy while employing backward design: real-world relevance, students making meaning, a recognition of material living conditions, collaboration, justice, and problem-solving. I am not suggesting that we politicize our curriculum; however, it is politicized whether we acknowledge this fact or not. What we choose to teach, whom we choose to admit to this school as students, teachers, administration, and staff, and the way we treat our campus and community citizens are all acts that can be situated moment to moment along a continuum ranging from just to unjust, empathetic to callous, Earth wise to unsustainable. Lessons on political, social, and environmental justice are implicit in all that we do; they are the subtext and overarching themes of our days at school, even if left unspoken. This said, themes of political, social, and environmental justice should be planned out in a project-based, interdisciplinary way, and grade level to grade level. Leaving the education to the kids’ interests, whatever they may happen to be each year, feels like we are not preparing kids to live in this world beset by inequalities and global warming, but are simply preparing them in a progressive way to join an unprogressive, imbalanced system and perpetuate that system by simply make a living.
Kohn and Richardson come down in the teaching as inquiry camp, whereas I think, given the aforementioned, NAIS schools should present a progressive mixture of three different teaching styles—transaction, inquiry, and transformation—so that we can lead our students to discover the means by which we can study the past and analyze the present in order to create more empathetic and environmentally, socially, and economically just societies in the future.
Stepping Toward the Progressive School that Catlin Gabel Will Be
Our job as the Progressive Education Committee at my school is to envision and define what makes our school progressive, and then try to implement that vision. Ultimately, being progressive at school is not, at bottom, about machines or curriculum, but rather about relationships between people and their planet rooted in love, empathy, and justice. We forget the most obvious sometimes when we talk about curriculum design and school culture and other “adult, professional” teacher concerns: that we are fortunate to spend our days with other creative, curious, enthusiastic, passionate people, most of whom are children and young adults. Being in this vibrant community, with intellectual hunger, laughter, friendship, experimentation, risk-taking, and growth so much a part of our day, it is important to note that teachers and students are most progressive when they are actively engaged in the process of becoming more empathetic, just, aware, and knowledgeable. As bell hooks (2003) points out, love is the precondition that fosters growth in empathy, justice, awareness, and knowledge. She defines “love as the combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust. All these factors work interdependently” (131).
It may sound strange to a Progressive Education Committee or to a Curriculum Committee at a NAIS school to talk about love as a starting point for sound, robust progressive education, but I agree with hooks that it is absolutely where we should begin.
Traditional teaching as transmission started with the notion that students were empty vessels that the teachers had to fill up with fact, truth, and the “correct” way to view the world. It was assumed in this old way of teaching that “the truth” was out there, that the teacher had discovered it in graduate school or some other time and now knew it, and that he would deliver that truth to the student. The teacher would then test the student to evaluate whether or not that student had memorized (in some cases, the teacher’s version of) the truth. Sometimes even today, it must be admitted, the facts of history, math, science, music, art, and other subjects are just that—facts—and we have to ask that our students learn these facts and commit them to memory. Without concrete foundational knowledge, of course, students cannot move to the deeper levels of application, experimentation, creation, collaboration, and analysis of abstract concepts.
Still, in the overvaluation of objectivity, students are still continually asked to stand at a critical distance from the world in order to evaluate it and see it clearly for what it supposedly is. While it is true, even on our campus today, that critical distance is importance to memorize concrete bedrock facts, to admit mistakes, and to note, in an unbiased way, the results of a science experiment, it is also true that too often these traditional classrooms create a climate of fear and competition that deny “the emotional presence and wholeness of students” (hooks 129).
When grades, tracking, contests, or testing foster competition in the classroom, the message to students is that they stand “in an adversarial relationship to themselves and to their teachers” (hooks 130). When this climate of fear and competition is the norm, students resist learning and simply want to know what they have to do to get the best grade.
The teaching as transmission educational climate is unprogressive, obviously, but it also creates an unhealthy hierarchy and power relations in the classroom that privileges the students who most quickly come into alignment with a pre-decided curriculum and the teacher’s own bias. Students are encouraged to fear the classroom and to doubt themselves in this model of education, and they seek to please teachers and parents by earning high marks, winning awards, and getting into the “good colleges.”
All along, the dominant culture of hierarchical relationships with teacher on top and students below is sustained; all along the dominant culture of unjust hierarchical relationships out there in the world is sustained because unexamined; all along the fear and competitiveness grow in the hearts of the students. The students “succeed” with learned helplessness, figuring out the facts and figures that are important to the ones in control, and then showing that they understand those facts and figures. Students become disinterested in why and what if, even as the dominant, unequal, unsustainable culture of the outside world is perpetuated by remaining unexamined.
Strict adhesion to “the facts” seen through the veneer of objectivity does not yield justice or empathy, as we are asked to memorize the presidents rather than to analyze why there has never been an openly gay president, why there has never been a woman president, why there has only been one president who was a person of color, and why one president after another is unable to adequately confront our global environmental degradation. If we love this planet and the people of it, progressive educators have long known that the curriculum must enlarge and become more student-centered.
The more competition is stressed in classrooms, the more tenuous and less authentic the relationships between students become, as they begin to see each other as fellow competitors to defeat. Likewise, teachers are seen as adults to please rather than as fellow learners. The relationships between students and teachers in this paradigm are also false and ingratiating, as students see teachers as gatekeepers to their futures.
If, however, as in our classrooms, we stress education as transaction, inquiry, and transformation, then students see schooling as “a mutual partnership model [that] invites an engagement of the self that humanizes, that makes love possible” (131). Students feel valued, seen, and loved when there is space for their diverse interests and talents. “When these basic principles of love [care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust] form the basis of teacher-pupil interaction the mutual pursuit of knowledge creates the conditions for optimal learning” (131). When teachers are actively involved in learning alongside students rather than pretending that all of the books have been written and all of the knowledge in the world has already been discovered and catalogued, the space for students to collaborate, experiment, question, and take chances enlarges. We know our students, then, as we see them spread out, and we can be flexible enough to rearrange and adapt lessons in order to allow students to ask more tough questions, challenge accepted norms, and stand up against unequal power relations and injustice not only in the classroom, but in the world. When students branch out in this way, teachers at schools like ours show them we see them, value them, and love them. We create a space for mutual exploration and for the recreation of empathy and justice that every new generation needs to enact. Perhaps most importantly, when the students in our NAIS schools know that we are standing with them in love rather than condemnation to confront all of our group privileges in order to reach out in empathy, they jump at the chance to bravely begin creating the socially, economically, and environmentally just societies that they know we all long for, deep down.
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