Telling Tales Out of School
We have always believed that our schools were failing.
I have an academic interest in early American schoolhouses—how they were built, what students and teachers did inside of them, and how they contribute to American culture today. These Americana, I am here to tell you, are a product of retroactive myth-making: the little red schoolhouse was not the result of pattern or design but a systemic accident of availability and, in many cases, impecunity. It was frequently too little for the number of students it housed, and, just as often, it was not only not red but completely unpainted. On average, a one-room schoolhouse meant to hold sixty children measured twenty-five by twenty feet; for reference, Henry David Thoreau's house at Walden was ten feet wide by fifteen feet long and considered an example of snug living for a single person. Schoolhouses were poorly ventilated and maintained, frequently compared unfavorably to prisons, and often placed on the least desirable plot of land in town.
Yet the icon of the little red schoolhouse embodies the ideals we cling to as the truth of American educational practice—community, individualism, diversity, public access, open dialogue. As Jonathan Zimmerman reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, when No Child Left Behind was signed into law in 2002, the U.S. Department of Education “unveiled eight new entrances to its headquarters in Washington, D.C. Each was shaped like a little red schoolhouse—with a slanted roof and a bell tower—and emblazoned with the name of the department’s signature education law: ‘No Child Left Behind.’” Seven years later, in June of 2009, “the Obama administration ripped down the schoolhouses and replaced them with photos of young people in a variety of settings: reading, attending class, playing sports.”
The Department of Education's architectural changes from Bush to Obama point to our profound ambivalence about the purpose of education in a democracy. Rhetorically, the little red schoolhouses of 2002 make the claim that American education requires a return to the good ol' three R's, basics taught using no-nonsense methods in community-minded institutions. The 2009 photos put in place by the Obama administration, on the other hand, emphasize the well-rounded child and the school experience that adapts to a spectrum of individual aptitudes. Seemingly polarized representations of the institution and the individual child, both symbolic gestures fail to represent the real idealism of American education: the enduring belief, in a nation that has always chafed against government imposition in private life, that school enables democracy by cultivating the individual through institutional practices.
The little red schoolhouse has never lived up to the lofty ideals that created an icon out of a one-room shack. We have always believed that our schools were failing, even as we continually place in them our entire hopes for a flourishing national culture. In the post-Revolutionary period, Noah Webster, calling for "a broad system of education" for the new nation, implored Americans to “unshackle your minds, and act like independent beings.” In the decades before the Civil War, American education re-oriented around compulsory school attendance and centralized school systems, instilling a belief akin to religious faith in the institution's potential to define individual lives. In 1900, John Dewey wrote in The School and Society, “individualism and socialism are at one. Only by being true to the full growth of all the individuals who make it up, can society by any chance be true to itself.”
In that book, a founding document of Progressive education, Dewey derides conventional teaching. “Its passivity” and “its mechanical massing of children, its uniformity of curriculum and method” offended him: “the centre of gravity is outside the child. It is in the teacher, the text-book, anywhere and everywhere you please except in the immediate instincts and activities of the child himself.” Dewey calls out for particular denigration the reliance on "certain ready-made materials which…have been prepared by the school superintendent, the board, the teacher, and of which the child is to take in as much as possible in the least possible time.” “It is all made ‘for listening,’” he exclaims. Sound familiar? Yet The School and Society describes, hopefully, an impending systemic shift:
Now the change which is coming into our education is the shifting of the centre of gravity. It is a change, a revolution, not unlike that introduced by Copernicus when the astronomical centre shifted from the earth to the sun. In this case the child becomes the sun about which the appliances of education revolve; he is the centre about which they are organized.
The child-centered classroom, a Copernican revolution in democratic educational practice, develops individual capacities through active participation. We now refer to this ideology as “learning by doing.” In privileging the “immediate instincts and activities of the child,” this method treats the teacher as facilitator and textbooks as invitations for active learning through talking rather than “listening.”
The student-centered approach described in The School and Society has become the default model that we use to think about learning environments. With Dewey, we castigate methods that privilege the teacher as the authoritative sun around which students passively orbit.
Despite our reflexive dedication to Dewey's Progressive principles, so intuitive now that they sound cliché, how thoroughly do we embody them in our classrooms? Legislation such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top has re-doubled our national focus on accountability through testing in primary and secondary education. The high-stakes tests in math and reading administered all over the country, to which funding and jobs are often attached, resemble too closely the examination days held in nineteenth-century schoolhouses. In these events, students gave orations, said lessons, recited poems, and otherwise displayed their attainments for members of the school board and community. The teacher’s appointment was often contingent on how well students performed displays of proficiency in basic language and math skills. We are, it seems, in danger of returning on a mass scale to the emphasis on fundamentals that characterized the one-room schoolhouse before critical thinking, writing, imaginative literature, and Progressive principles made their way into the curriculum.
Why tell tales out of school, then? Since 1852, when Boston established the first compulsory attendance law, school has become a nearly universal marker of childhood experience. Collectively, our individual classroom moments define American education, which in turn shapes our culture. At this moment, when the humanities and arts seem particularly vulnerable—how do we measure the value of thinking and writing critically with Scantron sheets?—it is worth reflecting upon school. It is worth asking how school cultivated us, or didn't. It is worth accounting for the debt our individualism owes, or doesn't, to institutional practices. Most of all, it is worth examining those practices critically before re-committing ourselves to the conventions of an accidental icon.
