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Find more Kappan articles in the Reforming American Education from the Top To the Bottom: Escaping Academic Captivity This special section is a "thought experiment," Mr. Clinchy says. It asks what might be the result if, instead of passing the reform and restructuring buck down to the lower schools, we reversed that process and tried passing the buck up. This Kappan special section was born when some of the most thoughtful and highly respected people working in this country's elementary and secondary schools began asking a series of questions for which none of us so-called experts had ready answers. The questioning runs along the following lines. We in the lower schools, say those who work in them, are being asked to "reform" and "restructure" our schools radically so that the students we educate are prepared to function successfully in the world of the 21st century and especially so that they can help maintain this country's leadership in the new, highly competitive global economy. We are also told that the 21st-century world and the global economy will require us to broaden and deepen the education we offer students so that they will not only improve their achievement levels in the standard curricular subjects but also develop their "higher-order thinking skills" and be able to think through and solve complex problems in the real world. If these demands are seriously made, these lower-school people ask, why is it that we are still being required to teach an outmoded, essentially 19th-century, almost entirely academic curriculum? Why are we also being required to prepare most of our students - and certainly our most gifted students - to meet a highly traditional, essentially 19th-century set of academic requirements for college admission? Those requirements (speaking now primarily of our "prestigious" four-year col- leges and research universities) are all too often still based on the purely mechanical, numerical scores our students must somehow be able to obtain on strictly academic, pencil-and-paper, often multiple-choice tests, such as the standardized achievement tests we are compelled to administer each year. Later, a goodly portion of the college admission decision is based on scores on the SAT I and the SAT II Subject Tests, and even on such numerical fabrications as high school grade-point average and rank in class. But these questions just lead to still more difficult queries. How, those who work in the schools ask, are we supposed to make the radical changes being demanded of us if we are held in what amounts to academic captivity not only to the outmoded 19th-century curriculum and its tests but also to a set of new, more stringent, and more demanding "world-class" academic standards and the tests based on them? Why are we being held hostage to a curriculum designed essentially by - and thus primarily to serve the interests of - the strictly disciplinary scholars in institutions of higher education and their discipline-based progeny in the lower schools? Why is it assumed, for instance, that students achieving academic success in that scholarly curriculum and meeting those new world-class academic standards will somehow be prepared for the uncertain world of the 21st century? Why do we assume that they will have experienced a broader and deeper education, that they will have developed their "higher-order thinking skills," that they will be able to think for themselves, be able to solve complex problems, and be successful in the real world? This chain of reasoning leads to the final question, the hardest one of all to answer: Why are we in the lower schools being asked to change - to "reform" and "restructure" ourselves and to prepare our students for life in the 21st century - when our institutions of higher education are not being required to "reform" and "restructure" themselves for the very same reasons? Changing the Direction of the Buck When critical questions of any kind are raised about public education in this country, the traditional practice has been to pass the buck down. People in the graduate schools claim that those in the undergraduate colleges send them students who are not by any stretch of the imagination adequately prepared to pursue study in their chosen professional fields. College and university people bemoan the poor preparation of students arriving in their cloistered halls from the country's high schools - those failing institutions that educate young people to be immature, juvenilized, irresponsible, eternal adolescents. High school people in their turn say that the fault lies with the middle and elementary schools, which are not inculcating in students the basic intellectual and behavioral requisites that lead to academic achievement and success. The middle school and elementary school people, in their turn, suggest that if only the kindergarten and preschool educators would get with it and start the children on their basal readers and workbooks long before they reached first grade, the students would do much better all the way up the line. Given the questions raised by the lower-school people and their analysis of the situation we all share, what we would like to do in this Kappan special section is to conduct what Albert Einstein called a "thought experiment." While Einstein used his thought experiments to explore and explain the concepts of special and general relativity, our thought experiment will serve a slightly more mundane purpose. It will ask what might be the result if, instead of passing the buck down, we reversed that process and tried passing the buck up. If, as Deborah Meier has stoutly maintained over the years, the American education system should be based on the principles of developmental education by which most early childhood programs and kindergartens have traditionally been conducted, then the thought experiment becomes more precisely a matter of asking ourselves, "What would happen if our elementary and secondary schools - and then our colleges, universities, and graduate schools - were all operated on the developmental principles by which our early childhood and kindergarten schooling is conducted?" To help answer this question, we have asked two lower-school people, Deborah Meier herself and Susan Ohanian, to spell out the kinds of elementary and secondary schools they would run if they were rescued from the academic captivity imposed by our colleges and universities - that is, if they did not have to worry about their students' being admitted to college. What would they do if every student certified as successful by a high school that had been reformed and restructured along kindergarten lines would automatically be admitted to whatever college he or she wished to attend? We have also asked them to spell out some of the changes those colleges and universities would have to make in their organization, in their curriculum, and in the way they teach and assess students, in order to meet these radically new and different and now truly "world-class" educational "standards" as a result of the changes in the truly "reformed" and "restructured" lower schools. We have also asked two people directly involved with higher education - Nel Noddings, Lee Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford University, and David Conley, director of the PASS Program at the University of Oregon (see page 309 this Kappan) - to spell out the changes they believe our colleges and universities (and perhaps especially our schools of education) would have to make in order to be responsive to the reforms of the lower schools and truly relevant to both the contemporary and future worlds that all our students will be living in. By working in this way, from the bottom to the top, we can perhaps get a clearer and more accurate vision of what the future shape of education in our elementary and secondary schools and in our institutions of higher education must be if that total system is to adequately serve the needs of 21st-century American society. EVANS CLINCHY is a senior consultant with the Institute for Responsive Education, Boston. |
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