Making Schools Work/On Being a Teacher

...We only learn to think more clearly in an environment in which intelligence is offered space for practice...

...For him, the more highly programmed and inflexible the method, the better...

...uncertainty or diversity of judgment either...

...All the subjects of academic life are broken down into easily teachable and testable bits so that they can be covered in lock-step manner...

...For all of Kozol's apparent objections to the authoritarian classrooms that Benjamin is promoting, it's not evident that his preferred ones respect uncertainty or diversity of judgment either...

...Along with political rhetoric, Benjamin provides a superficial journalistic account of his seven good schools...

...He aims his remark at such teachers, particularly those who came out of the 1960's radical left...

...Is the fault in the nature of his politics or his grasp of school life and children's learning...

...As a result he has ended up producing just another teacher's handbook-with recipes for the already converted (but nervous) radical...

...Benjamin's search for a method which can be imposed by fiat and carried out by any well-trained-if not necessarily well-educated-adult make sense at best (or worst) if it's meant for "their" children, not "ours...

...Look a little into liberal behavior inside Germany during Hitler's rise to power...

...ON BEING A TEACHER Jonathan Kozol Continuum $12.95, 178 pp...

...The primary proof he offers is a U.S...

...He describes a model solution developed by one such radical teacher in the following manner: the teacher speaks to his class in terms somewhat like these: "Again and again, in history, whenever crisis comes, you'll find that liberals tend to turn against their former radical co-workers...

...Kozol does not address his advice to teachers in schools as authoritarian as Benjamin's favorite seven...

...There are ways, he argues, for you to be faithful to your beliefs and still be a competent and successful teacher...

...It's necessary, but hardly sufficient...

...Still, Kozol is right in assuming that in most schools teachers still can play adult roles and have some power to influence the life of the classroom...

...In order to both "desanctify" school and "build the groundwork for her own professsional protection" our heroine informs her new class of the ' 'risks and obstacles at stake'' for her and for them if they are to dare to catch up to their more advantaged peers...

...It takes a lot of careful observation, research, and years of good practice to find ways to assist children to use their intelligence more fully and productively...

...In a chapter entitled "Broadening Our Base-Building Loyalty Between the Teacher and the Class" he describes another real-life success story...

...Much as the late nineteenth-century fascination with scientific management largely influenced mass public education, not the elite schools, one suspects that even the Benjamins and Engelmanns count on the "gifted" children still receiving a real education, one that supports children's efforts to organize their ideas, to tolerate ambiguity, and to make fallible judgments...

...On Being a Teacher is at least partly aimed at getting teachers to assist in building just such a movement of parent power...

...I have no doubt," he tell us courageously, "but that my own ideas will ultimately win out within the minds of children...

...Her goal . . . is to be certain that the students will play ball...

...The book is singularly lacking in the sounds of real children or real teachers struggling along in a living and complex school culture...

...He assumes his readers work in more or less traditional classrooms in which the teachers are still somewhat free to make judgments about how to organize at least part of their students' classroom time...

...and flawed statistical analysis...

...To create such a setting it is necessary to treat children, parents, and our fellow teachers as something other than objects for our political battles...

...Deborah Meier ROBERT BENJAMIN, a veteran reporter and education writer for the Cincinnati Post, has journeyed to seven schools and found his Utopia: DISTAR...

...Its opponents...

...And whose work,, naturally, is never referred to by either Robert Benjamin or Kozol...

...He isn't afraid (as "some liberal-leftists" are...

...DISTAR, asserts Benjamin, guarantees that every child will learn equally well and every teacher will be equally successful...

...DISTAR is the embodiment of such a trend toward pseudo-scientific objectivity and neutrality...

...Benjamin's preferred style of teaching, however, is far more prevalent than Kozol or Benjamin (despite his bleak and victimized tone) acknowledge., Kozol is blissfully unaware of the attacks being waged on traditionally-recognized teacher autonomy by a whole spate of highly prescribed and authoritarian programs (similar to DISTAR...

...DISTAR is the best precisely because it literally "scripts" every word (and gesture) that the teacher and the child utter in unison...

...Do I have any better answers than Benjamin or Kozol...

...Office of Education-sponsored assessment of the Follow Through programs (called the Abt report...

...We have only begun to see the connection between genuine scientific knowledge about the human mind and learning theory...

...If the children remain skeptical after that, the teacher has further suggestions to help them learn how to think better...

...Having thus fooled the enemy, they will be free to engage in "some sort of pedagogic 'forced march' to master math, reading, writing, ethics and the power to transform...

...Unlike Benjamin, Kozol is primarily critical of the message of passivity and pseudo-objectivity contained within the traditional curriculum...

...Like most teacher recipe books, it is not useful even to its intended audience...

...In this morally obtuse fantasy, Kozol raises every issue that properly concerns socially-conscious teachers...

...We only learn individual responsibility and social reciprocity in a setting in which we can experience them...

...It works, it's cheap and it's simple to implement...

...The answer: no, I can't...

...This model teacher gets a class of tough, rowdy minority students who have not learned anything in school until she arrives...

...in ways that might be crucial for her own survival.'' After she clarifies for them who the enemy is, her students accept willingly the idea of play-acting the role of the "best behaved kids in the school . . . as evidence of a properly soul-broken class...

...It's a potentially moving message...

...Or are the two connected...

...If the students doubt this (as many do), he says, "Why don't you do some research and find out...

...If we want other people, including children, to have confidence in their capacity to make decisions, to engage in intellectual risks, and to invest themselves in issues and interests that they care about, then we have to listen to their agendas, not merely our own...

...Benjamin does not inform us that this report is highly controversial, nor that a team of critics, led by Engelmann's University of Illinois colleague Ernest House, concluded that the Abt report's findings in favor of DISTAR were "based on misclassification . . . inadequate measurement...

...Moreover, Abt did not claim that DISTAR had achieved unqualified success even in the limited skills the study purported to measure at the end of third grade...

...Like Benjamin and DISTAR, Kozol, too, has some suggested "scripts" for teachers...

...We have a great deal to learn from others who have gone before us-John Dewey and Jean Piaget to mention just two giants...

...But his neat set of recipes for our nervous radicals make me even more nervous...

...Does it sound like indoctrination...

...Can I whip out an alternate guarantee for teaching children either the three R's or how to become more effective critics of mainstream culture...

...Until parents take power back from the entrenched educational bureaucrats we will continue to face an "intolerably bleak" future, adds Benjamin in conclusion...

...Parents are getting raped by the schools," says DISTAR's developer Engelmann in an interview...

...Like Benjamin, Kozol sees most educators as roadblocks-although he views them as agents, with varying degrees of culpability, of an exploitative social system...

...Unfortunately Kozol is not a convincing proponent...

...Knaves and fools Who run the educational establishment in the interest of providing work for themselves...

...It's one of those power-made fantasies every left-wing teacher has surely occasionally indulged in-before she actually tried to see how plots like this one go over with real children in real schools...

...With this final point, Kozol agrees...

...Developed by a University of Illinois philosopher, Siegfried Engelmann, DISTAR is an all-encompassing educational method that has solved the age-old complexities of education...

...All students in an unjust social order are not equal victims," says Kozol, "but all are victims of a pedagogic structure built on lies...

...This is necessary not merely because we are sure our ideas will win out, but because it's the only way that what we represent could ever win out...

...Kozol assures us in a chapter devoted to attacking indoctrination and favoring "the free marketplace of ideas," that he welcomes teachers with political positions very different from his own-as long as they have beliefs that they are willing to express passionately...