Schoolmastery: Notes on Teaching and Learning

Significant change usually comes about not by introduction of something new but by reinterpretation of something old. Among the more interesting illustrations of this premise is that of Arthur C. Clarke, who in 2001: A Space Odyssey uses it to account for no less than the evolution of mankind. Back eons of time, so the story goes, herbivorous man-apes roamed the parched savannas of Africa in search of food, a search that had brought them to the brink of extinction. Their miraculous transformation from man-apes to ape-men did not come about until they realized that they were slowly starving to death in the midst of plenty, that the grassy plain on which they search in vain for berries and fruit was overrun with succulent meat. Such meat was not so much beyond mankind's reach as it was beyond his imagination. To negotiate the necessary transition, the man-apes had to reinterpret their environment.

The history of education can also be viewed as a sustained series of reinterpretations, which, because they remain human, retain remnants of the man-apes primeval flaw - a certain primordial rigidity of the imagination that renders us unable to grasp what lies immediately at hand because it fails to correspond with what comes habitually to mind.

When it comes time to characterize the educational environment of the past few decades, it will undoubtedly be remembered as an era of reform. Cries for reform in education are by no means new to schools, of course, but seldom are they the focus of such prolonged and concerted attention as they have lately received. Not since the days of Sputnik have we witnessed such massive concern about what was happening or not happening in the nation's classrooms. In the sixties the thrust of reform focussed on the teaching of science and mathematics and spawned a period of curricular innovation that carried us well through the seventies. It was an exciting time to teach, a time filled with openness and optimism and plentiful support.

But with the publication of "A Nation at Risk" in 1983 by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, a new interpretation struck. Suddenly, it seemed, everything had gone awry: the schools had somehow fallen derelict in their duty to prepare the nation's youth to meet the manifold challenges that awaited them. Schools had degenerated into "Shopping Malls," SAT scores had plummeted to new lows, teachers had descended to shocking levels of incompetence, and content had turned to jelly.

Subsequent reports by other foundations, commissions, and "blue ribbon" panels confirmed the assessment. "American schools are in trouble," said John Goodlad. "After years of shameful neglect," according to Ernest Boyer, "educators and politicians have taken the pulse of the public school and found it faint." Horace Smith - Ted Sizer's mythical English teacher - was forced to compromise, but "dares not express his bitterness to the visitor conducting a study of high schools, because he fears he will be portrayed as a whining hypocrite."

Today, with the No Child Left Behind act, schools are embroiled in the tribulations of "accountability," with high stakes testing roiling instruction that must teach to the test and urban communities that must struggle just to keep their schools open. Meanwhile, as vouchers swell enrollments in private schools, charter schools have begun to siphon off students and teachers from the public schools.

Donald Thomas began his teaching career in 1961 as an intern at Emerson Junior High School in Concord, Massachusetts where some of his students used to ride horses to school and where he taught five sections of seventh-grade English. He landed his first full time teaching job at the Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter New Hampshire, a venerable institution enrolling some eight hundred boys and an English department of twenty male teachers, many with Ph.D's and most having taught for thirty years. In the early 1930's Edward Harkness had donated a few million dollars to Exeter under agreement that the school would develop an innovative teaching method designed by the faculty. The result became the so-called "Harkness Plan" that built several new buildings, doubled the faculty, and furnished each classroom with an oval table around which sat a dozen students and their teacher. The core of the plan was to have students interact with each other as well as with the teacher who would act as a facilitator. The plan is still in effect.

As the youngest member of this venerable English department under the tutelage of George Bennett, the department chair, Mr Thomas taught for two years at Exeter, at the end of which time he was offered a "permanent appointment." One evening late in the year, however, Mr. Bennett showed up at the Thomases' front door, indicating that it was time for them "to make their plans." When he was a young teacher at Exeter, he said, all the old men got the plums, and he swore that if he were ever in a position to award a plum, as he now was, he would give it to a young man. And this is what he had come to do: Mr. Thomas was to be given a full year off to "go read somewhere" at full salary. Incredulous at this sudden windfall, having feared that the plans he was asked to make were not destined to include Exeter, he decided the "somewhere" would be King's College, Cambridge, where through special arrangement he had been granted "luncheon privileges." In the process of deciding this, however, he discovered that the Harvard Graduate School of Education had been contracted to staff a brand new comprehensive high school in the Nigerian bush, enrolling a thousand students with dormitories housing five hundred. It would be a transplant of the American comprehensive high school set up in the African bush.