WHY TEACHERS FAIL

...It describes the school as a mental hospital, a treatment institution...

...When we try to increase them, a cry goes up about "grade inflation" and "lowering standards...

...Often these images are more real to us than reality itself...

...With more shocks and more stick...

...In most schools and for most children, there is far more stick than carrot, far more shock than morsel...

...The assumption is that whatever is squirted at the container will go into the container, and once in, will stay in...

...The experts told them, "You didn't do anything wrong...

...The blame used to be parceled out in plain English...

...It was too risky, politically, to blame these failures on the parents, so educators soon came up with the perfect alibi—"learning disabilities...

...One man told me then, the other told me later, about research which showed that when students with supposedly severe learning disabilities were put in a relatively stress-free situation, their disabilities soon vanished...

...It is hard to say...

...But we need only read the latest rash of school improvement proposals to see how dominant this metaphor is...

...Some educators are more or less aware that their work is guided by these metaphors, others are not aware at all, and still others might vigorously deny their influence...

...All these assumptions are wrong...

...The schools assume that children are not interested in learning and are not much good at it, that they will not learn unless made to, that they cannot learn unless shown how, and that the way to make them learn is to divide up the prescribed material into a sequence of tiny tasks to be mastered one at a time, each with its appropriate morsel and shock...

...The positive reinforcements in schools are teachers' smiles, gold stars, As on report cards, dean's lists, and at the end, entrance into prestigious colleges, good jobs, interesting work, money, and success...

...In an audience of about 1,100, two hands were raised...

...The negative reinforcements are angry scoldings, sarcasm, contempt, humiliation, shame, the derisive laughter of other children, the threat of failure, of being held back, of flunking out of school...

...When they are compelled, instead, to act like laboratory rats learning tricks, a few of them, clever answer-repeaters, teacher-readers, and test-guessers, produce a feeble but plausible imitation of learning...

...he's just got some wires crossed in his head...

...In other words, we must squirt English into these containers for four years, math for two or three, and so on...

...In effect, those official reports all say, we must have so many years of English, so many years of math, so many years of foreign language, so many years of science...

...Beside the belts is an array of pouring and squirting devices, controlled by employees of the factory...

...Angry people demanding that the schools "get busy and teach my kid something" could be told, "I'm sorry, there's nothing we can do, he's learning disabled...

...For morsel and shock, read carrot and stick, or "positive reinforcement" and "negative reinforcement...

...Is there any chance that schools, educators, teachers, will renounce their false and misleading metaphors...

...We are urged to impose higher standards: "If they don't learn the stuff, flunk them...

...Raising standards...

...But right now, I can only report that of any such change I do not see the faintest shadow of a sign...

...Some children are even told by their teachers that this is what the tests are for...

...A substantial part of the pseudoscience of pedagogy is now made up of listing and describing these imaginary diseases, the tests that are supposed to diagnose them, and the activities designed to treat but hardly ever to cure...

...If students don't know enough, we insist, it is because we didn't start squirting soon enough (start them at four), or didn't squirt the right stuff, or enough of it (toughen up the curriculum...

...No one seems to ask the obvious question: How come so many of the containers, having had these substances squirted at them for so many years, are still going out of the factory empty...

...At a highly rated private elementary school, a veteran teacher put it this way: "If the children don't learn what we teach, it's because they're lazy, disorganized, or mentally disturbed," and all but a few of his colleagues agreed...

...The results are familiar to all of us...

...Since then, many parents have informed me that their children—often able to read and write far beyond their age level before going to school—had developed serious learning disabilities in school but had quickly recovered when the parents began teaching them at home...

...After World War II, however, more and more poor and minority parents began to reject such rationalizations and demand results...

...The schools needed an excuse that sounded scientific and absolved them of responsibility for causing or correcting their many failures...

...pop bottles) seem to be smaller than the others, or that seem to have no openings at all...

...The carrots that schools can offer are necessarily few and are deliberately rationed...

...Children as young as five or six, often in their first days at school, are now routinely given batteries of tests "to find out what is wrong with them...

...Why Teachers Fail BY JOHN HOLT More than we may realize, what we do in our lives and our work is greatly influenced by metaphors—the pictures we have in our minds about how the world works or ought to work...

...Guilt-ridden middle-class parents of failing students could stop asking, "What did we do wrong...

...If whatever we did last year did not cause a pupil to learn, why will doing the same thing again this year do better, particularly when he or she will have the added shame of failing before kids who are younger...

...Make them repeat the grade...

...For many poor children, the negative reinforcements include physical beatings...

...If the rat presses the "wrong" shape, the unwanted one, he gets an electric shock...

...The first of these metaphors presents education as an assembly line in a bottling plant or canning factory...

...Upstairs, management decides when the containers should be put on the belt, how long they should be left on, what kinds of materials should be poured or squirted into them at what times, and what should be done about containers whose openings (like John Holt is the author of "Teach Your Own " and the founder of Growing Without Schooling, 729Boylston Street, Boston, MA 02116...

...Down the conveyor belts come rows of empty containers of sundry shapes and sizes...

...The third metaphor is, perhaps, the most destructive and dangerous of all...

...And when this method doesn't work, the schools assume there is something wrong with the children—something they must try to diagnose and treat...

...and when it doesn't, the students get the blame...

...How would current proposals for school improvement address this state of affairs...

...More than 25 per cent of the students who enter high school do not graduate...

...This was an explanation that had something for almost everyone...

...Asecond metaphor depicts students in a school as laboratory rats in a cage, being trained to do some kind of trick—most often a trick that no rat in real life would ever have any reason to perform...

...Life is full of surprises, the past does not necessarily determine the future, one can always hope for change...

...All studies on making kids repeat grades show that few do better the second time around and most do worse—and why should it be otherwise...

...At the end of this line are entrance into low-rank colleges or none at all, bad jobs or none at all, dull work if any, not much money or outright poverty...

...But conscious or not, acknowledged or not, these metaphors have largely determined and still determine what most teachers do in school...

...Some years ago, at a large conference of specialists in learning disability, I asked whether anyone had ever heard of—not done, but merely heard of—any research linking so-called perceptual handicaps with stress...

...Schools, top-rank or low-rank, have always operated under the wonderfully convenient rule that when learning takes place, the school deserves the credit ("If You Can Read, Thank a Teacher...

...In the face of a century of contrary experience, educators cling to the notion that teaching produces learning, and therefore, the more taught, the more learned...

...in cities, the percentage is much higher...

...The easily observable fact is that children are passionately eager to make as much sense as they can of the world around them, are extremely good at it, and do it as scientists do, by creating knowledge out of experience...

...Organized education, in the United States and all of the fifteen or so countries about whose educational systems I know anything, is governed and dominated by metaphors—three in particular...

...Cutting out the courses which poor kids might find interesting and giving tougher grades will simply cause many more to leave...

...Children observe, wonder, find, or make and then test the answers to the questions they ask themselves...

...Most do even that badly and many, including some very bright kids, simply refuse to try...

...Such talk bears no relation to reality...

...Our third education metaphor, like the first two, presents a false picture of reality...

...When they are not actually prevented from doing these things, they continue to do them and to get better and better at it...

...When I discuss this metaphor with teachers, many laugh and seem to find it absurd...

...According to John Goodlad of the school of education at the University of California in Los Angeles, author of the most extensive of the recent reports on the schools, this is what almost all teaching in schools was at the turn of the century, and it is still what teaching is today—task, morsel, shock...

...If the rat presses the "right" shape—the one the experimenter wants him to press—out comes a tasty morsel...

...When they experience repeated shocks, children, like sensible rats, give up on the pointless tasks assigned to them and begin to think about the really interesting problem of how to demolish the cage...

...Not one of the reports I have read has raised serious questions about this assumption...

...As the containers go by, these workers squirt various amounts of different substances—reading, spelling, math, history, science—into the containers...

...Here sits the rat and at the other end of the cage is a circular shape and a triangular shape...