Community School Frances Pockman Hawkins At Work With Water

The Logic Of Action
Young Deaf Children At Work
Frances Pockman Hawkins


Everyone tried his hand at the water pool this morning.  Phillip, unaware of anyone's scrutiny, would fill his large plastic syringe with water by pulling out the plunger while the tip was submerged, and then shoot the water to the opposite side of the pool.  He was expert at controlling the force and speed on his plunger as he aimed the small stream.

Janie kept watching Phillip's actions.  Quite obviously she wanted to do the same thing with her syringe, but she was unable to fill it with water.  Finally, she turned again to watch and she thought about it.  This time, with syringe out of the pool she pushed down the plunger, then put the tip in the pool and slowly pulled up the water into the transparent syringe.  The final part of the sequence, shooting water across the pond, proceeded, but Janie's success in using eyes, hands, and mind to fill the syringe was for her, I submit, an achievement of equal merit.  To write about it is in some degree to share her pleasure.

Community School Water Table Watsu

Christopher is 4 years old and frequently grown-up angry.  One morning he stomped out of his classroom and into a restroom area down the hall.  Suddenly aware that I was nearby and watching, he turned to me with a jerk and shouted, “If I am mad at somebody, I just look at them and say, ‘Hey Bitch!’”

I clamped my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing and considered carefully before responding, the fewer words the better.  “Guess I just never say it.”

“What?” he replied in a rapid-sharp voice.  “What do you mean you don’t say it?”  Surprised I wasn't reprimanding him?  Wondering if I was telling the truth?  Curious if I had an alternative to his harsh way of talking?

“I simply don’t speak to people that way. It does not come out of my mouth.”  I delivered this with a silent, shoulder shrug and pretended to get interested in a developmentally inappropriate, preschool worksheet stapled to a bulletin board.

Since his outburst didn't provoke me, he immediately abandoned it and became absorbed in the water fountain, turning it on and off and diverting streams of water with his tongue and his fingers, in other words, exploring the properties of water.  It was a soothing diversion and ultimately calmed him enough that he could walk back with me to rejoin his friends.  Too bad there wasn't a water table set up as a workstation for this little man with the mouth.  But those also have gone by the Leave Every Child Behind wayside.

Alternately, Jorge healed himself at a water table.  He arrived for a visit, having lived in 10 different foster homes before his fourth birthday.  His hyperactivity and anxiety were so extreme that no family could soothe him or survive him, therefore he rotated from one placement to the next.  Prescribed a steady dose of Clonidine, you wouldn't have known it from the way he ran directly at a solid wall, smacking full force, face-on and then collapsing in fit of giggles.

It was the water table that drew his attention.  The girls usually commandeered it, washing baby dolls or dishes, transferring liquid back and forth from tea kettles to jam jars.  Most days, boys weren't allowed but somehow everyone knew Jorge was different and for him the rules did not apply.  He spent two weeks standing behind the crowd of girls listening in on their conversations.  He always wore a smile, sometimes nodded his head in agreement with an opinion expressed but never edged past the periphery of bodies to join in the fun.

Then the earth’s orbit shifted and his hands slipped into the delicious drench.  There was no moving him after that.  He was polite, always patient and ever alert for that perfect moment when it would be okay to slide into place.  He had figured out the human arrangement and was careful to comply in ways that guaranteed access to the dreamy drink.  There he would vibrate in endless delight, stuttering less and speaking more, solidifying an identity and a circle of friends who did not fail him.  In the water he learned how to become.

Community School Helen Keller Could Have Seen It Coming

I stumbled across Eva who could not read a lick.  I found her tucked up in an empty classroom, sound asleep.  She was snoring peacefully in second grade.  No one knew she was missing in action and no one cared that she was alone, separated from the herd and dozing on her lunch hour.  

Despite her illiteracy, there would not be any intervention for her, no tutoring, no read aloud, no big books or story dictation.  In fact, there would be no reading instruction for her of any description.  Second grade does not count on the accountability scoreboard and therefore, is not heavily proctored   

Thousands will be spent this year on a series of no-nothing, "school reform" consultants, who themselves know zippy-zero about reading as a process or a passion.  They will wander in and out like the contract zombies they are, drawing down dollars triggered by testing mandates for 3^rd grade and beyond.  

Helen Keller could have told them back in September who would be failing come January.  But everyone at this location turned blind, deaf and dumb when it came to the cause of Eva. Since Eva knew hopeless when she experienced it, she responded by curling up in The Back Of The Bus and surrendering to a dreamless sleep.  

Years of here, there and everywhere leave children like Eva undisturbed and unlettered.She has been allowed to float like a beautiful flower in a big pond, not a ripple approaching from any direction to dislodge her and prevent her from sinking into the treacherous waters of insensitivity and indifference.  Had she been growing up in the Sea Islands back in January of 1957, she might have been scooped up by Esau Jenkins, Bernice Johnson or Septima Clark and taught to read at the back of a beat-up school bus or in the midst of a busy, beauty parlor.  Their make-do movement imagined literacy and democracy walking hand-in-hand and ultimately exploded into a nationwide uprising against the entrenched, Jim Crow suppression of voting rights.  But Eva is enrolled in a data-deranged Public School, not a Citizenship School and she will never chase Esau across the sandy, marshy low country of Johns Island.

Community Schools & The Eight Year Study

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.

Community School Morris L. Eisenstein United Community Centers Brooklyn, NY

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.