In Schools We Trust: Creating Communities of Learning in an Era of Testing and Standardization - Hardcover

MacArthur Award-winning educator Deborah Meier is author of The Power of Their Ideas and Will Standards Save Public Education?. She lives in Hillsdale, New York, and Boston, Massachusetts.

chapter one

Learning in the Company of Adults

One afternoon I find myself approaching a group of young teenagers hanging
out in our hallways. They aren"t hanging out surreptitiously. They are not
always within earshot, but they frequently make it known that they are
nearby, where we adults are also hanging out—fixing our rooms, meeting
together informally, arguing about some important matter or other. They give
me the distinct impression that they want both to have their own world and to
be sure it is connected to ours.

Still I am obliged to remind them (and myself), "School was over an hour ago.
You can"t hang out in the school like this; it"s not safe." I mean safe for me,
of course. I am worried about liability issues. Some years earlier an amused
but genuinely curious adolescent boy had even put the irony into words for
me: "Do you mean it would be safer for us to be out on the street?" So as
usual I let it go with a warning that neither they nor I take seriously.

Two things move me about the memory of these events, and countless
others like them: the genuine, heartfelt desire of young people to be in the
company of adults who are doing adult work, and the way our institutions and
adult lives are structured more and more to keep us at a distance. As I think
back on more than thirty years in schools, I believe that the contradiction
between these two facts is the central educational dilemma of our times. In
those boys" desire to hang out with and around adults lies the secret, the key
to transforming our schools—and the key to the best avenues to learning.
A television interviewer talking to a group of high school dropouts some years
ago asked them whether they knew any grown-ups who were college
graduates. They all said no. Not true, I thought—since, after all, they had
known a dozen or more teachers over the years, all of whom had attended
college. But I was wrong. As I began to pay closer attention I realized that of
course they had not known any of their teachers. We adults were invisible to
them. In commenting to a friend about how disrespected I felt when some
teenagers poured in the subway car playing loud music, using what appeared
to me inappropriate public language, and dressed to shock, I was reminded
that, alas, my assumption that they were doing this "to annoy" might be
wishful thinking—maybe they didn"t really register our presence at all.

It"s a striking fact that kids don"t keep a lot of company these days with the
kind of adults—in or out of school—whom they might grow up to be (or whom
we might wish them to grow up to be); in fact, they don"t keep genuine
company with many adults at all beyond their immediate family. Our children
don"t work alongside adults in ways that, for good or bad, were once the
norm for most young people in training to become adults. Even when they
take jobs, it"s usually in the company of teenagers—at a Gap or McDonald"s.

Is this phenomenon truly new? Yes. And does it have an impact on the trust
necessary for good schooling? Yes again.

A century ago, even less, children made the transition to adulthood early,
steeped in the company of adults. Surely by fifteen or sixteen, when a
majority of youngsters today are still a half dozen years or more away from
entering the adult world, most were already in the thick of adult lives: having
children, earning a living. They spent their time in the midst of multiage
settings from birth on—small communities, farms, workplaces where they
knew grown-ups intimately and knew a lot about how they went about their
work, negotiating their way through life. Being young in the olden days wasn"t
idyllic, not by a long shot. It"s useful to say this to oneself over and over. The
early immersion in adulthood that characterized life a century ago was for
many a source of enormous pain and hardship. Good people worked hard to
help create a longer and more protected childhood. But for good or ill, until
quite recently, most of the learning of how to be an adult took place formally
or informally in the company of grown-ups—by working alongside them,
picking up the language and customs of grown-upness through both
instruction and immersion, much as they had learned to talk and walk.

Children once learned the arts and crafts of being a grown-up by belonging to
a community whose habits and rituals they naturally absorbed. When I was
born, the majority of young people even in the United States never attended
high school, and what they learned from formal schooling was a very small
part of what counted for getting on in the world. Usually the trades they went
into were ones they were very familiar with and had observed for many years,
and thus taking on adult burdens came about gradually, step by step. The
passage from being a novice to becoming an expert was often very gradual
and had little to do with formal schooling. Children gradually absorbed—
sometimes uncomfortably—the skills, aptitudes, and attitudes that went
along with membership in the "club" of adulthood, in psycholinguist Frank
Smith"s apt metaphor. They found the present and future predictable and, at
least in that sense, trustworthy. However conservative a vision such a style of
learning suggested—generation following generation in orderly progression—
it was the way most humans learned for centuries.

In seeking a substitute for the natural learning communities of yesterday, we
invented schools and then systematically began to downgrade anything
learned in nonschool ways. Schools bore the burden of replacing many if not
most of the functions of those former multiage communities—and at
increasingly earlier ages. In a daunting but perhaps not surprising twist of
fate, the schools that replaced those natural learning communities
simultaneously underwent a transformation too—toward greater
depersonalization.

Formal learning in particular deliberately ignored what might have been the
strengths of the traditional routes from childhood to adulthood. Most children
today are disconnected from any community of adults—including, absurdly,
the adults they encounter in schools. Many young people literally finish four
years of high school without knowing or being known by a single adult in the
school building. Dry textbooks and standardized curricula unconnected with
any passions or interests of children, delivered by adults in seven, eight, or
sometimes nine 45-minute time slots, dominate schooling.

We"ve invented schools that present at best a caricature of what the kids
need in order to grow up to be effective citizens, skillful team members,
tenacious and ingenious thinkers, or truth seekers. They sit, largely
passively, through one after another different subject matter in no special
order of relevance, directed by people they can"t imagine becoming, much
less would like to become. The older they get, the less like "real life" their
schooling experience is—and the more disconnected and fractionated. As
my granddaughter Sarah tells me with delight at her new eight-period
schedule (which she knows I disapprove of): "But Grandma, it"s more fun;
there"s no time to get bored—you"re in and out so fast, and you get a chance
to chat with friends between classes." Children are expected to learn to do
hard things in the absence of ever seeing experts at work doing such things—
to become shoemakers when they"ve never seen shoes or a shoemaker
making them.

We"ve cut kids adrift, without the support or nurturance of grown-ups, without
the surrounding of a community in which they might feel it safe to try out
various roles, listen into the world of adults whom they might someday want
to join as full members. At earlier and earlier ages they must negotiate with a
variety of barely familiar adults, increasingly barren classrooms, and
increasingly complex institutional settings; for many it starts as early as
three or four years of age. My grandson, in a big New York City elementary
school, spent his seven-year-old energies finding ways to avoid the halls,
bathrooms, lunchroom, and recess, where everyone he encountered was
likely to be a stranger—and a risk to his sense of safety. In some
communities kids go from one huge school to another every three years—by
design. Large schools designed exclusively for kindergarten through second
grade, grades three through five, grades six through eight, and grades ten
through twelve are not weird aberrations but are increasingly common. There
are nowadays fewer children in schools where there are likely to be teachers
they or their families have known over the years. We are—in short—perhaps
the only civilization in history that organizes its youth so that the nearer they
get to being adults the less and less likely they are to know any adults.

I believe this needn"t be; schools can turn around the distrustful distance that
the young experience toward the adult world. They can return children to the
company of adults in ways that meet the needs of a rapidly changing and
more globalized world. It"s not true that the best way to learn to deal with
adult change and trauma is to know nothing but change and trauma. In fact,
quite the opposite. Greater, not less, intimacy between generations is at the
heart of all the best school reform efforts around today and is the surest path
to restoring public trust in public education—while also enhancing the
capacity for creativity and novelty, which earlier forms of apprenticeship
learning often downgraded.
The kind of company I want children to keep with adults is essential to
learning. And the key building block of this relationship between student and
teacher is trust. The more complex the learning, the more children need
genuine adult company, and the more trusted the adults must be.

Polly Wagner, our school"s math consultant, noted that seventh grader Jerry
was busily doing his geometry assignment but seemed to have no idea what
an angle was. But what"s so puzzling about an angle? So we explored it with
Jerry. For one thing, it"s the first time he"s ever run into a measurement that
stays the same even when what"s being measured appears to get bigger. It
took a while for his teacher, Emily Chang, to figure out how to explain this to
herself, then to us, and along the way to a puzzled Jerry. As Emily pointed
out, in some self-astonishment, it isn"t a measurement "in that sense." Aha, I
said. We tried to define different meanings of "measurement." There we were,
three adults and one kid, puzzling over and complicating what had seemed to
us so obvious until we looked at it through Jerry"s eyes.

What is the setting that allowed Jerry to explore the obvious more fully with
us, and to have his confusion taken so seriously? Furthermore, what was
required for the adults as well to find each other"s company so trustworthy
that we stopped for a moment to consider our own confusion? What allowed
us to reconnect to the sense of surprise and wonder that is at the heart of
human learning?

The key was that we risked showing ourselves to be learners alongside the
student. We teachers made it acceptable for Jerry to ask questions, because
we so clearly were asking questions we didn"t already know the answers to
ourselves. There is no way to get around it: the willingness to take risks, ask
questions, and make mistakes is a requirement for the development of
expertise. We can learn secretly, but at a price. If we act as if we take it for
granted that there"s never (well rarely) a "dumb" question, just occasions
when it is hard for us to understand where we"re each coming from, then we
can more readily go public with our confusions. And confusion is essential—if
uncomfortable. It"s the frequent outcome of allowing ourselves to pursue our
curiosity more deeply, to pay attention to the unexpected. Whatever do I
mean by "up" and "down"? Why is it that I can forever go east but not forever
north? Am I wrong that the sun used to rise over that building and now it
doesn"t? However can it be that a big heavy metal boat doesn"t sink?

Living without answers is unsettling, of course, but when we"re not required to
immediately pretend to master uncertainty, and probably only then, we can
make the slow intellectual leaps required of all children today. It"s not a
luxury that only a favored few need, as it may once have been. The trustful
relationship with the world that this acceptance of uncertainty allows—with
respect to people, ideas, and things—is at the heart of learning.

Lots of successful students probably never really trusted teachers or school
systems when they were kids; still they got by and even did well. How
come? In part because kids were once school successes even if they never
took more than a year or so of math beyond arithmetic, at most a year of
science, and one or two courses in history. Most of what life required us to
learn happened over time in authentic, natural settings. Furthermore, what
the most successful students had going for them was that even in
kindergarten, with their hands eagerly raised, they were ready to show off
their school smarts. Starting on day one, certain forms of knowledge and
skill—the stuff they"ve eagerly brought with them from home—was confirmed
and honored, thus increasing their self-confidence to take still more risks.
What they were good at grew out of trust—it"s just that the trust came from
something or someone outside of the schoolhouse.

But many other students never found a replacement for a school and teacher
who didn"t recognize their genius, who responded with a shrug or a look of
incomprehension as they offered their equally eager home truths. They too
soon learned that in school all they could show off was their ignorance.
Better to be bad, or uninterested, or to just silently withdraw.

Today schools are expected to impart, even to five-year-olds, more complex,
bookish, abstract knowledge than ever before, including much that is
counterintuitive. Children in today"s science-rich world even need literally to
unlearn what some learning theorists call "cognitive illusions" common to
our "native" minds—prescientific assumptions about how the universe works
that are at odds with the realities of probability theory, modern physics, and
biology, and a good deal more. As these demands on content increase, the
gap between the well educated and the pseudoeducated threatens to widen
even earlier. I want us to imagine what it would be like if we were to create
environments that fostered learning because of—not in spite of—school, that
took advantage of what we know about how all children best learn and what
all children can contribute from day one, so that all children will maintain their
trust in their own learning abilities and in the families who are their first
teachers.
I enjoy telling all who will listen the startling fact that kids, rich and poor,
learn new words at the amazing rate of about ten per day from the time they
first start understanding speech until their early adolescence, when the pace
slows down. It"s so counterintuitive that it takes repeating often for the
importance of this fact to sink in....