O
The Raggedy Man! He works fer Pa
An' he's the goodest man ever you saw!
He comes to our house every day
An' waters the horses, an' feeds 'em hay.
An' he opens the shed - an' we all laugh
When he drives out our little old wobblely calf.
And if our hired girl says he can
He milks the cow for Elizabeth Ann.
Ain't he an awful good Raggedy Man?
Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man!
Why, the Raggedy Man, he is so good
He splits the kindlin' for us and chops the wood.
And then he spades in our garden too He does most things that boys can't do.
He climbed clean up in our big tree
And shook an apple down for me.
And and another too, for Elizabeth Ann .
And another too for The Raggedy Man.
Ain't he an awful kind Raggedy Man?
Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man!
And The Raggedy Man one time say he
Picks roast rambos from an orchard-tree.
And ate 'em - all while roastin hot!
Ain't he the beatin'est Raggedy Man?
Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man!
Rhymes of Childhood James Whitcomb Riley One day I found a group of fives singing, chair-dancing and reciting this wonderful, working man poem by James Whitcomb Riley. It was followed by "Old Dan Tucker was a Mountain Man. Washed his face in a frying pan. Combed his hair with a wagon wheel and died with a toothache in his heel. Now get out the way Old Dan Tucker. You're too late to stay for supper. Supper's over and breakfast is cooking but Old Dan Tucker just standing there looking." The words were carefully inscribed on big, hanging chunks of sturdy, chart paper. The children loved these words since the rhythms and narratives were helping them to read. They loved them for the pure joy each inspired. But the charts are gone now, stored and ignored, as are the opportunities they represent for literacy and community building. The adults who summoned the time and talent to author them, have also vanished into a rumored, lost tribe of educators now roaming the earth in search of a place called school. Big Books are no longer in use although there are literally hundreds of them piled bent and discarded on the floor of a chaotic closet so disorganized that it is incapable of functioning as the "Guided Reading Room". Children are not being guided through wise and wonderful experiences in language anymore so the messy mash is of no consequence. Close the door and subscribe to the absence of memory. It goes down much smoother.
The Eight Year Study came out of a democratic tradition of struggle for both change and the freedom to change. That struggle has a long history. If we stood on the steps of the original Jane Addams Hull House on Halsted Street in Chicago, we could see the outline of the Hart, Schaffner and Marx building. Knowing the history of labor activism in this country, we would be reminded of the battles that went on in the early years of the garment industry, in Chicago, New York and elsewhere. These were battles to achieve adequate wages and decent working conditions. If we didn't exactly welcome immigrant labor, we at least allowed them in and embraced their work ethic, knowing it made Team USA that much stronger economically.
As a pioneer in the American settlement house movement, Jane Addams found herself living and working in neighborhoods that were isolated, ethnic enclaves. Lithuanians claimed one section of Halsted, Greeks another, Italians yet another. These were people insisting upon remaining distinct and separate in terms of a positive cultural identity, yet needing at the same time to work together on the common problems of housing, work, health and education. Hull House provided that place for collaborating.
One testimony of Hull House's ability to value the differences while using them to build a common ground, are the maps drawn by community people that today are displayed in the front hallway of Hull House Museum. Immigrants went out and canvassed the neighborhoods to discover who lived there. Their findings were then translated into beautiful, color-coded maps. Go stand in front of these maps because they are absolutely riveting! Today we can only imagine how such a project was organized. From all the ethnic enclaves came people speaking no common language, yet finding the words, the time and the energy to compile a record of who they were and where they lived.
It was a collective effort issuing from a common place. There was desperate need in those turn-of-century times for such places and so, when Graham Taylor, his wife and children, and a cluster of graduate students from the University of Chicago decided to establish a settlement house, they called it Chicago Commons. What happened at Hull House and at the Chicago Commons was also what happened at settlement houses in Boston, Baltimore, Des Moines, Jersey City and Fort Worth. The conversation centered around human problems and the social value of a democracy that MUST shape solutions to those problems. A kaleidoscopic range of individuals came together to exchange ideas, voice needs and coordinate action. To make the exchange as extensive and inclusive as possible was a challenge. Hull House met that challenge by numbering among its friends such people as John Dewey, Florence Kelley, W.E. B. DuBois, as well as Russian tailors, Italian factory workers and Bohemian seamstresses. Wish we all could have been there!
If we stretch to identify a similar institution dedicated to many of the same ideals and values, only one comes to mind - Public Schools. It therefore comes as no surprise that during the last decades of the 19th Century and early decades of the 20th, as settlement houses cropped up in urban settings across the USA, we see as well the stirrings that were to lead to the formation of the Progressive Education Association and finally, to the Eight Year Study organized under its auspices.
As the settlement house workers had an expansive notion of what education could do and be, so did the pioneers of progressive education. Both were concerned with blunting the raw edges of industrial civilization and with reinvigorating human community. Both were discovering the forms of human association that could nurture individuality. They were concerned with demonstrating the necessity and efficacy of freedom as a wellspring of personal and social growth. Just as the settlement house workers had to deal with the destructive human consequences of harsh and mindless factory labor, so the progressive educators were moved to eliminate the factory as a model for organizing the work of classrooms.
The growth of the progressive education movement really began in the years following the end of WWI. In 1919 a group of educators founded the Progressive Education Association. In the same year, Carleton Washburne became superintendent of schools in Winnetka, Illinois. This was a post he held for 25 years. Under his leadership came The Winnetka Plan, which enabled children to learn at their own pace. It eliminated failure based on age-linked standards and placed strong emphasis on group activities that strengthened the school and its community.
In this same period, Harold Rugg, Director of Research at the Lincoln School in New York City and professor at Columbia University's Teachers College, developed his Social Science Course - six volumes complete with workbooks and teacher editions. The Winnetka schools were among the first to pilot the Rugg series. In his texts, Rugg asked students to think together about issues like the invasion of Native American lands by Europeans, the engineered dependence of Puerto Rico, and the contradiction of slavery as an institution in a "free" society. Not surprisingly, the series became notably controversial and was even burned in some American towns.
The explosion of experimental activities in American schools during these early years of the 20th Century is impossible to summarize in a few sentences. Perhaps the best way to capture some of the animating ideas of the progressive impulse is to cite the basic principles adopted by the Progressive Education Association at the moment of its birth in 1919.
1. Children should have the freedom to develop naturally.
2. A child's interests should be the basic motive for all her school work.
3. Teacher should function as guide and not a task master.
4. Record-keeping empowers sympathetic and scientific study of a child's development.
5. Schools pay equal & active attention to ALL facets of children's development.
6. The school and the home MUST be active partners in meeting children's needs.
The Eight Year Study began as a conversation at the 1930 P.E.A.Conference. Two years of further conversation followed. Initially there were no foundation dollars involved and people participated at their own expense. Beginning in 1932, support from Carnegie and the General Education Board helped underwrite the expenses of what was called the Commission on the Relation of School and College. It was this commission, created by the Progressive Education Association, that designed and directed the Eight Year Study. Its first action was to conduct an assessment of American secondary schools.
The Commission found that students were graduating with no sense of what it meant to be a citizen within a democracy. They found no connection between daily community life and the fundamental human values intended to guide that life. Student concerns and school curricula were miles apart. Where to begin? What to change? How best to change it?
As a starting point, the Commission focused on the freedom to change. That may have been one of the wisest decisions it ever made. It was clear to all members that high schools were most powerfully and extensively regulated by college admission criteria. So the Commission sought and won the agreement by some 300 colleges and universities to waive their existing criteria for graduates of the experimenting group.
It was also clear that experimentation could not and should not be the exclusive right of a few private and privileged schools. There had to be diversity of character, economic class and geography. And so the roster of participating schools included Altoona Senior High in Altoona, PA; Roosevelt High School in Des Moines, IA; Tulsa Senior and Junior High Schools in Tulsa, OK; Eagle Rock High School in Los Angeles, CA; and Shaker Heights High School located outside of Cleveland, Ohio. On the private side were such schools as Francis Parker in Chicago, North Shore Country Day in the northern Chicago suburbs; several Quaker schools; Lab Schools like those at the University of Chicago, Ohio State and Wisconsin; and other private institutions like Milton Academy, Baldwin School and the Winsor School.
In the fall of 1933, all schools began building new curricula. The process was intriguing and it varied dramatically from school to school. Institutions affiliated with the P.E.A. had been dealing explicitly with the following questions for years. What are democratic values? How do we recognize them in practice? How do we test such values publicly? How do we teach the ability to think deeply and critically about the social issues and problems of the day? How do we construct a descriptive yet dynamic portrait of a student's personality and character? How do we use that portrait to understand a student's needs, actions and feelings?
As bold and fascinating as it all was, it also was a very human venture just as it would be today. Complexity and the frustration of false starts were all part of what was to be explored. The English Department at Altoona High replaced required reading lists and book reports with literary parties, discussions, impersonations and book clubs. It also designated one day a week as a free reading day. No one ended up reading as few as the 14 books formerly required. Student were reading because they wanted to read. A junior high school math teacher in Altoona organized an insurance company run by students. It insured students against loss and damage to school books. The need to invest premiums led to a study of banking and investment because the students had money to invest, not because it was demanded by a grade level course of study.
Radnor High School in Pennsylvania addressed program needs for non-college bound students. They developed a senior curriculum known as the Cooperative Course. These were tryout training opportunities for students in one or more vocational fields. Each tryout lasted two weeks. Local business people agreed to provide some form of introductory experience or training in a given field. These field experiences amounted to something between a part-time job and an apprenticeship, where instruction, supervision, evaluation and reports to schools became routine practice.
In 1936 a group of nine men began working across the country as Eight Year Study consultants. They served only at the pleasure and invitation of individual schools. The consultant did not stick around for long and it was not her role to dictate or impose. Instead, she assisted by NOT having an ax to grind or a stake in the local broils. Like a Pony Express rider, each carried news of work in other schools. They visited classrooms, gave demonstration lessons, and served as a mobile clearinghouse for research, ideas and materials. Often they helped school people move their own mountains just by taking the time to leave a well-placed word of encouragement and understanding. In short, they were summoned to assist teachers in discovering their own ability to act and change.
There is renewal of interest in the Eight Year Study today because we still have educators who believe that American Schools must once again become innovative and lively places. The essential value was democracy. This feature, more than any other, sets the Study apart from contemporary school reform movements propelled largely by appeals for increased test scores, accountability and productivity.
We get our possibilities from one another - simple and inescapable. This means we must have well-funded, public and not privatized or stratified charter schools bent on separating us and making us strangers to one another.. Public schools nurture a democratic citizenry wherever kids from diverse backgrounds arrive to learn with and from each other.
Good teachers are once again stepping up and speaking out in protest over the dis-information, disorder and dis-ease now being inflicted on public schools 2013. It is guided from above, by a technocratic mindset adept at junk bond trading, corporate takeovers, bank bailouts and economic dominance. But for those of us committed to the democratic tradition, the Eight Year Study is both our ancestor and ally. It reminds us that the idea and broad practice of democracy comes with a price. If we want it to remain as the centerpiece for citizens, teachers and students, then we're going to have to fight for it. Eternal Vigilance is an action and not a slogan.
I'm not non-partisan. Instead, I'm here to convince you about a point of view. I have a point of view. I believe in it. These are the basic assumptions from which I start and I am making them public. That is what you do in a democracy. Hidden assumptions signals a hidden agenda. The first assumption is that education is an organized, directed, conscious process of preparing people to deal with their world, to deal with the world in which they live. I am therefore saying that any kind of learning which is not conscious and not directed toward the goal of preparing people to deal with their world is not education. If it hobbles, stratifies or diminishes people so that they can not deal effectively with their world then it is not education. There may be learning about a separate and unequal society going on but not education.
Curriculum is the organized way in which we try to achieve educational goals. Anything which is not intended to achieve those goals is not curriculum and should not be called curriculum. There are educators who speak of "hidden" curriculum. I say there isn't any such thing as "hidden" curriculum. There is only curriculum. EVERYTHING that happens in the school is part of curriculum. Everything that happens in a school is deliberate and intended, whether admitted or not. Everything that happens in a school is an outgrowth of the goals of education in that school, whether written down or not. Everything that happens in a school which affects children is part of that curriculum. So, emaciated curriculum or a testing tyranny that reduces all learning to boring bits and pieces that alienate and sublimate the development of creative human beings is deeply and fundamentally intentional.
My assumption about the learning process is that people learn what they experience, not what they hear. Children learn what they experience, not what is told to them or what they read. If they cannot experience it firsthand, or if nothing is related to their immediate experience of the world and how to shape and humanize it, then we can't call it learning. The learning process entails the interpenetration of learning and teaching. I believe in the process of learning where the student becomes a teacher and the teacher becomes a learner. The fundamental process in the school is the relationship between the teacher and the child. Child and teacher stimulate one another. Each recognizes and stimulates in the other the learning and the teaching. Remotely-authored and imposed, corporately-constructed "goals and objectives" for teachers and students who are routinized, objectified and thereby made strangers to one another, does not constitute learning.
Because people are social animals, the basic assumption is that the individual achieves her highest development in relationship to other people. We receive our possibilities from from others and not from our insides, nor from bureaucracies operating outside our circle of daily life and activity. Integration and education are inseparable because there can be no education in which people do not have their education in relation to one another and develop themselves and their understanding in relation to their total worlds. When we separate children and families into multi-tiered educational sectors of have's and have-nots, it is called an institutionalized caste system.
What would be the implications for policy in a school organized on the basis of my assumptions? There would have to be a policy of conscious consistency between verbally expressed beliefs and overt behavior. To put it in plain old language, put your money where your mouth is. A school which teaches one value system, and then behaves on the basis of another value system, teaches what the kids experience and not what the school says. A free public school system in support of nationwide democracy would look radically-to-the-root different from our current arrangement.
Another policy would be the rejection of perfection as a goal for both youth and adults. People are always in the process of becoming. No one is ever a finished product until you put that person in the box and throw dirt over the lid. Therefore, the emphasis is on struggle with people around the kind of a world we live in. The policy of such a school would be to develop a positive identity within the class, race and nationality groups among the students. There would have to be the recognition that minority and working class cultures have positive contributions to make to the development of all children. There would be an atmosphere where young people feel free to explore differences with the help of sympathetic adults, who though they may disagree, help young people to explore the realm of possibilities. Banished would be all directives which test, judge, label, segregate, humiliate and destroy the human potential that schools are pledged to protect and promote.
The classroom would be defined as the world we live in. This would give school what so many people love to call relevance, which is real and not contrived. Biology teachers in this community are only 15 minutes from one of the finest laboratories, right here on Sheepshead Bay. Yet students from Thomas Jefferson High School tell me that some of them have never been on a field trip to that Bay. There are a million and one new possibilities. It requires the desire, the commitment, the understanding to move out and deal with a concept of education which involves young people and teachers as partners in a process which is of the utmost importance to them and to their world.
Give me a group of kids, and the whole Bay, and I'll keep them there for a week. United Community Centers once ran an interim school and teachers from Thomas Jefferson H.S. who taught in our interim school said, "This is an ideal school you have created here." It was the first time those kids ever went down to the Bay. They spent hours there, exploring the life of the sea, the ocean, the intertidal zone. We have kids going there now, studying the ecology. There are a million things you can do if you want to study, are not afraid, have some imagination and are aware of what's under your nose."
Thomas Jefferson was one of 7 public high schools in New York to receive a M.P. Moller pipe organ for their auditorium back in the 1920's when beautiful music was just one of many investments that public budgets considered inspirational. Famous alumni included Howard Zinn, Shelley Winters, Danny Kaye, Steve Lawrence and Jimmy Smits.
In the fall of 2002, Thomas Jefferson High School was named one of 7 low-performing Brooklyn high schools scheduled for restructuring. In 2004 it was announced that Jefferson would no longer accept incoming 9th graders. Closed in 2007, Thomas Jefferson was broken into several different schools due to low graduation rates. Morris Eisenstein's vision of an ideal school was silenced and shuttered.
"Peanut Pirates" is just one episode from The Infinity Factory which premiered
January 31, 1976 on PBS.
Jerrold R. Zacharias, the creator, aimed to produce a television series for inner city children that showed them how mathematics worked practically in their everyday lives.
Zacharias was an American physicist and Institute Professor at MIT.
He worked on the Elementary Science Study with friends David Hawkins and Phillip Morrison.
Zacharias was founder of Education Development Center.
During the 1970's he took on standardized testing, criticizing it for stifling student independent thinking and curiosity in science.
Zacharias referred to the testing industry as:
"The Gestapo of Educational Systems....
Uniformity and rigidity require enforcement, so I have chosen a most denigrating title for the enforcement agency. Its hallmark is arbitrariness, secrecy, intolerance, and cruelty."
Come visit Leslie Stein's 1979 Second Grade Classroom at Central Park East Elementary Public School.
Nick Holmes is the Producer & Director who captures a wonderful adventure into King Tut's Kingdom.
Live snakes are involved and so is a funeral where the ritual snake burial begins with a child's pronouncement over the gravesite, "We all know why we're here."
One day I read about George Lucas’ Third Internet testimony before a House Subcommittee. It sounded like an exotic pipe dream whose realization was still light years away. I’d just returned from a tour of what passed for summer school where I’d seen hundreds of children crammed into classrooms, following rigidly-scripted lesson plans, with the single objective – a passing score on the NCLB test. What joyless containment tanks, where it was absolutely verboten to fire up computers for the frivolity of PBS Kids, Starfall or FunBrain. Nose to the grindstone little darlings, definitely grin and bear it time. I was seriously down in the dumps when my phone rang with an edgy Jack on the other end. “I thought you should know we aren’t going back to school in August.”
“Come again?” I replied. “Did you say YOU weren’t returning to school because you can’t do that, Jack. You’re our salary negotiator. You promised!”
“Forget all the union stuff,” he hurried on. “I mean that’s definitely and forever scraped since none of us are going back, at least not until later in the fall.”
“Have you spent the afternoon at El Imperial draining Margaritas with your flea market buddies? You certainly aren’t making much sense.”
“In my capacity as lead salary negotiator, I just received a courtesy call from the Superintendent’s office. There will be a press conference at the Admin building at 4PM Friday where the announcement will be made. The teacher reps will be given the opportunity to make a supportive statement.”
My face contorted in confusion and disbelief. “A supportive statement about what? Everyone knows how the state stiffed us to the tune of a $26 million-dollar shortfall. What’s to support?”
“That deficit, along with fuel and food prices, catastrophic flooding, $500+ million a day on war, and major bank collapses, have brought thousands of districts to a financial closure crisis that we are being asked to help out with,” Jack replied.
“And in my capacity as union president, I bet I get the thankless job of telling the rank and file that it is Love It or Leave It on a pro-rated contract. Suck up the pay cut and help out. How, pass the hat and run a Toys for Tots donation drive?” I was beyond disgusted.
“We’re being asked to create an electronic, community-based curriculum that will run in place of the first 30 days of the official school term and perhaps after that, to supplement a reduced week, now under consideration.”
“They have got to be kidding! You’re the math teacher, Jack. So what are we talking about here? This sounds like a chapter out of FDR’s New Deal. Subtract 30 days and then slim down to perhaps three days a week…what are we left with?”
“Affirmative on the 30 days but after that, we’d be paid for our time both onsite and virtual. A National Educational Emergency is being declared that will be governed by guidelines and funding mandates issued from Washington. We’re going to have to go along to get along. Ham has called a meeting in his office tomorrow morning at 9AM. You’re expected. All the tech support will be present, as will the curriculum heads. I’ll save you a seat so we can slide notes back and forth. Our two heads are always better together.”
Jack clicked off and I stood there with my mouth hanging open. We weren’t hammering out a salary agreement, we were making up education out of thin air.
Everyone in the meeting seemed up for the bump, pumped is more like it. I glanced around the room and saw talented educators who’d spent decades watching their bliss broken to bits by a procession of mindless, bureaucratic testing mandates. Now they looked alive, a little angry but animated for sure. Finally we would get to think outside of the restrictive, dumbed-down box public education had become. We might be headed to the poor house, queued up in soup lines and driving around on fuel ration coupons but at last we were free to do what we did best.
Horace Hamilton was a cut-to-the-chase kind of guy. He had a sly as a fox twinkle in his eye as he convened the gathering, hinting that this challenge might be exactly his cup of tea. A positive tone was established and his can-do attitude untangled my brain from most of the paralyzing anxiety I’d wrestled with the evening before. “Thanks for coming everybody. We don’t have time for the usual blah-blah-blah so tech team is up first.”
They’d been busy was my first reaction. I listened as a power point outlined first steps. The district server would be opened to all registered students using standard passwords. Software site licenses had been expanded to include as many remote hook-ups as necessary. Programs had been clustered into web pages according to grade levels but scholars were free to take on any level of complexity they could handle. Popular educational pages like BrainPop. Enchanted Learning, National Geographic, BBC Kids and many more had been added to the mix as had museums, libraries, government repositories and publicly funded literacy, history, math and science projects. Next came some wrangling about hardware. Should it be left locked up for the duration? Should it be distributed out to Wi-Fi neighborhood sites like supervised homes, church halls, libraries or community centers? Was there any point in calling the guy at MIT with the $100 laptops? Could we locate a stash of used/cheap but web-ready PDA’s, cellphones, iPods, iPads or comparable tablets? No one seemed to have an easy answer because the idea was to conserve gasoline, not squander it driving all over creation on techie, troubleshooting calls. Better to wait and resolve this once we knew how long it was going to drag on.
“Precedent for any of this?” Hamilton asked. “Have we done this before, people?” Silence sat on us for a few seconds and then I heard Jack clear his throat and begin hesitantly.
“Well there was the natural gas shortage. We closed school for the entire month of January, as I recall, and the world didn’t come to an end. We nearly froze to death but we made it through, teachers got paid and seniors graduated on time. The state even issued a waiver on number of days required.”
“Exactly, so we’re in somewhat familiar territory. Treat it like that and maybe everyone will relax and think deeply.” Then I saw Horace fix me with one of his meaningful stares. “Didn’t you gather up your crew and drive them around to cultural institutions during that closure? I distinctly remember that you talked some front office idiot into approving educational road trips for those baaad kids of yours.”
Groans and grins erupted. My students always look like a casting call for Blackboard Jungle and yes I had run them all over Kingdom Come during the month off. We had fun, bonded, learned a lot, and kept everyone engaged and out of juvenile detention lockup. From then on, I knew that extreme situations could offer up golden opportunities for intelligent innovation and experimentation. Why should this be any different?
“What’s going to happen when the thirty days are over, we’re not heroes anymore and everyone’s figured out that we’re hanging on by our fingernails?” Thus spoke Jakco the realist.
Ham nodded his head in agreement, “Peek around and you’ll see that hanging on by one’s fingernails is a fulltime occupation for much of the nation at present, but Jack’s right. We may look good in a clutch but if this moment doesn’t go away, then we’ll be held to a different standard. Our social institutions are facing major chiropractic adjustments and while changing horses in midstream may not be the safest, it is now officially the order of the day. How do we do a good job,remain accountable and keep our folks feeling comfortable and confident? Jack, what’re your major concerns?”
I’d watched him doodling on a legal pad and knew he had a punch list of problems at the ready. “ How about Kids of all ages out of school, unsupervised or inadequately supervised. Kids spending more time in already dysfunctional families where they don’t get enough to eat, physically and intellectually. Insufficient concentration of neighborhood programs to take up the slack. Complying with state-mandated curricula, advanced placement courses, graduation requirements and college matriculation. I can’t begin to imagine….” and his voice trailed off.
Others jumped in citing concerns about the retooling of teachers for a job description that was yet to be created, what to do with the textbooks, narrow test-derived lesson plans inappropriate for home schooling, special needs students, progress reports and report cards. Everywhere Smart Boards must be blooming with the roots and branches of mind maps and brainstorming sessions like ours. The swap meet was about to begin and what a trader’s village it would be. Emphasis on local solution-seeking was too good to be true but I was prepared to ride the wave for as long as it lasted. The best ideas usually came from those closest to the kids but most often these ended up suppressed or ignored. Desperate days had turned everything topsy-turvy, which suited me just fine.
I plugged a vintage, Targus keyboard into my beat-up Handspring and began ticking out a different kind of tune – past efforts that harmonized with our present plight. Jane Addams and the Hull House posse wedged themselves onto Halsted Street, folding in and out of the crowded tenements like an immigrant accordion – a call, a response, a need, an invention. 1889 or 2009, either way riding with predators, gougers, high-rollers, warlords, scaplers and fat cats always lands us in the same place – hunkered down together trying to triage the mess and jumpstart a recovery. Might the karmic reincarnation of the settlement movement return in the form of emptied out, sub-primed, tricked-out, traumatized condos, cottages, subdivisions and cul-de-sacs, offering up incommon thinking spaces for compassion, cultivation and civic transformation?
“School Is Not A Place But An Activity,” – a catchy but necessary rationalization for Philly’s 1968-1971 Parkway Program where highschoolers actually woke up one day and discovered that their district, burdened with debt and broken-down buildings, was sending them on a school without walls walkabout. In church nurseries, police stations, City Hall, and county court buildings, tutorials cranked out the 3 R’s as well as an ambitious assortment of student-supplied electives like Urban Economics, Multimedia Journalism, Market Research, Intro to Physical Chemistry and Business Skills for Beginning Jobs! They hooked up with the Franklin Institute, the Rodin Museum, the Academy of Natural Science, the Philly Zoo, Smith Kline and the Philadelphia Inquirer and all of this BEFORE the arrival of search engines, email, texting, podcasts, community video,YouTube, blogging, del.icio.us, My Space, or Facebook!
Edgar Dale used to toss around copies of the New Yorker magazine and playfully order an underlining of all ‘telling phrase’. Grad students sat and read an entry out of the World Book encyclopedia every time they visited his university office or routinely researched the etymology of several weird words of which he seemed to have an endless supply. He was the guru of planned but flexible, non-traditional, self-pacing, correspondence course, personalized, programmed, intensive, self-study and he meant it when he said it was the educator’s central mission to show people how to learn and think on their own and for themselves. Vocabulary development, readability and all manner of audio-visuals were his passion – instructional technique and technology a life fascination. His Cone of Experience paradigm was my Steady Eddie for figuring out how in balance or out of whack things were. Imagine an upside down ice cream cone with a base wide enough to support plenty of old fashioned, first hand, full-bodied, get your hands on it, sink your teeth into it experience. The re-experiencing continued up a spiral in the form of working models and mock-ups, dramatizations, demo’s, homemade or ready-made exhibits, dioramas, television/film, photographs/slideshow, filmstrips, radio and recordings, whiteboards, charts, diagrams, graphs or maps. And at the narrowest, most abstracted pinnacle of the cone was the place where teachers now seemed to hangout the most …letters, sounds, words, flashcards, paragraphs, concepts, definitions, formulae and aphorisms. We’d gotten it all wrong but maybe our upending would ultimately set us straight and launch us in the original direction we were headed forty years ago.
We could always pull a Civil Rights Era Esau Jenkins and fire up a fleet of alternately fueled school buses. If he could drive all over 1950’s Johns Island on dino-petro, teaching disenfranchised citizens how to read and answer questions on the unconstitutional, South Carolina Constitution Test for Black voters, I suspected we could manage to outfit a few mobile classrooms. A foundation in Fullerton, CA dreamed up a series of Arts Learning Activities Buses/Arts LABs ,featuring digital filmmaking, theatre production, music-making and dance, art studio & gallery and even an architecture office equipped with giant tinker toys, large Legos, Velcro building blocks and CAD software for kids. Or maybe we should ring Pearson Digital Learning headquarters and ask for the specs on their broadband, satellite-powered, internet accessed eBus4’s that roared into Bay St. Louis, Mississippi right after Hurricane Katrina, transforming the destroyed Second Street Elementary into a ‘TENT’ school worth crowing about. I was sure someone at our district’s transportation barn knew how to calculate how much fragrant french fry oil it would take to fill up a modified diesel tank on a 60-seater Blue Bird. They’d done it in NOLA and so could we!
I knew some 4th graders who loved to chant ‘How Low Can You Go?’ whenever the Chubby Checker Limbo Dance CD was played in gym class. Instant stardom was guaranteed to anyone who could lean back and take the crown of the head all the way to the floor. Did we grownups embody the same flexibility? Could we bend over and envision at our feet, a program of study in a muddle of clay, water, millet, sawdust and sisal?
The African Primary Science Series sure did. One 1966 creepy-crawly, unit entitled, Ask The Ant Lion, zeroed in on Myrmeleontidae – a hardy creature available throughout most of tropical Africa, non-biting/non-stinging, easy to observe, maintain, feed and replace. Everyone was plenty familiar with its existence but hadn’t a clue how to organize a scientific investigation into the everyday behavior of this crater building Insecta Anthropoda Animalia. Simple experiments flowed from children’s questions. How does it move? How does it catch its food? How does it make these little pits and can it do it in gravel, flour, bran, rice, cassava meal, sugar or ashes? How does it throw things out of the pit it digs and how big a thing can it throw? In one study an eyedropper was used to trail water along a crossroads drawn in tabletop sand to see if an ant lion would cross a simulated river.
Science of Sound contains beautiful photos of pupil-made East African instruments like the balophone, the kihembe ngoma drums, slit gongs, makaji and malume xylophones, thumb pianos, horns and flutes made from gourds or bamboo and mouth bows, zithers and tube fiddlers.
Common Substances Around The Home (Mixing Powders and Liquids) begins by amassing a huge supply of clear containers, bottle tops, hollow reeds, flat sticks, water, chalk dust, cassava starch, Andrew’s Liver Salts,vinegar, baking soda, white wood ash and limes or lemons. Rudimentary labs were assembled where powders got stirred, mixed, dissolved, diluted and bubbled. Very cool!
Now if you’ve ever had to count the number of hairs on your head, the number of eggs produced by a chicken flock in one month, or the number of fish that fit into a lorry, then Estimating Numbers is chock full of the practice that makes perfect. Good guessing about big quantities was done with items easily found in the immediate environment. Field studies included strategies for reckoning the number of leaves on a tree and the number of ridges in the corrugated iron roof of a school.
Arts and Crafts, Cooking, Dry Sand, The Moon Watchers and Making Paints are equally brilliant adventures including one of my all time favorites, common sticks changed into paint brushes by chewing down the fibers while walking to school.
Suddenly it struck me that it had only been five days ago when I’d spent a Saturday morning with high school teachers, previewing their labors of love, online Algebra II and Biology II courses. It surely was an African Primary Science moment when one of them handed me a big, fat, familiar red onion as the actual/non-virtual artifact used for studying mitosis in this newly minted e-Academy. What these young faculty-facilitators had taken three months to create, we might have to crank out in three weeks. I shrugged my shoulders at the absurdity of it all. If only we had started earlier – like three decades ago.
The Deluxe Show! August - September 1971 The Menil Foundation and Institute for the Arts at Rice University looked at poor neighborhoods in Houston, Texas and saw OPPORTUNITY.
Peter Bradley flew in from NYC and took to wearing cowboy hats as he curated a groundbreaking exhibition of Black Art in the Lyons Avenue DeLuxe Movie Theater.
No one complained that it couldn't be done!!!
Instead, Jones and Bynam Construction Company transformed the decaying, Jim Crow Era theater into an exhibition space in just THREE WEEKS! The old facade, balcony and lobby were left intact and everything else was gutted, sheetrocked and coated with two layers of white paint ready for art and covering a 50' x 80' space. Imagine!
Mickey Leland and Texas Southern University lent expertise.
The August 22nd Opening was attended by more than 1,000 people enjoying the work of artists Peter Bradley, Virginia Jaramillo, Ed Clark, Larry Poons, Jules Olitski, William T. Williams, Sam Gilliam, Alvin Loving, Richard Hunt, Michael Stiener and Anthony Caro.
Bradley thought the neighborhood children truly appreciated the opportunity to interact with paintings, sculpture and artists - unhampered by preconceived notions about what did or did not constitute art. They arrived daily by foot, on bikes, in cars or on city bus to hangout, comment, learn, laugh and love the organic process of creating and visioning.
What a wonderful, hot summer and by exhibition closing on 9/29, more than 4,000 visitors had attended the bold and brave De Luxe Show.
Let's do it again America!
Coming To a Theater Near You
I said unto myself,
If I were dead
What would befall these children?
What would be their fate,
Who now are looking up to me
For help and furtherance?
Their lives
I said,
Would be a volume
Wherein I have read
But the first chapters
And no longer see to read
The rest of their dear history
So full of beauty
And so full of dread.
Be comforted
The world is very old
And generations pass
As they have passed.
A troop of shadows
Moving with the sun
Thousands of times
Has the old tale been told;
The world belongs
To those who come the last
They will find hope and strength
As we have done.
