Two Steps to Education

BEING MAYOR of New York City is probably easier than learning to read there. Last week the city released the results of the annual Metropolitan Achievement Test, which purports to assess the reading proficiency of the city's public school students. For the seventh consecutive year the test showed a decline in relation to the national norm. The government outcry has been loud. The Board of Education promised to correct the decline, and the State Board of Regents formed a special task force to investigate it.

The continuing dependence on standardized tests to judge a child's progress shows how little has been accomplished by the bountiful writing on educational reform. We still expect our children to learn certain skills by certain ages. They still spend about six hours each day in a building called a school, sitting in classrooms arranged to facilitate order and discipline.

With extensive documentation Jonathon Kozol, Charles E. Silberman, John Holt, and Joseph Featherstone, to name only the most prominent, exposed the fundamental weakness of education in America. Starting either as despondent school teachers or irate spokesmen for minority groups, they arrived at the same dual conclusion: American schools are bad places for learning, and instruments for continuing oppression of large segments of the population.

To solve the first problem they proposed "open" classrooms where children would be allowed to experiment with their own ideas, and progress at their own speed. Teachers would offer guidance and encouragement instead of systematic directions. In response to the second they advocated local control of the schools. They said a child's education should reflect the concerns of his own community, not those of a centralized white-dominated bureaucracy. Efforts in both directions have met with little progress, encountering continual resistance from school boards and state government.

INf Places for Learning, Places for Joy, a loosely-organized series of speculations centering around one very good idea, Theodore R. Sizer, former dean of the Graduate School of Education, admonishes these writers for failing to advance potentially successful reform proposals. He considers their suggestions discordant with what most Americans want for their children, and consequently highly impractical.

Sizer proposes, instead, to create a system of dual-purposed schools which would separate the tasks of giving children good academic skills, and providing opportunities to develop self and purpose -- both popular, progressive goals. Children would spend half their time in "academies" where they would learn English, Mathematics, and Natural Sciences. In the other half they would participate in "collegia" where "through a series of experiences -- some vicarious, some simulated, some real -- a child can see at first hand how society works...and how he reacts to it." The collegia programs would range from working at day-care centers, to group camping trips in the country, to spending a few days with a policeman on his beat.

By dividing schooling into two separate programs, Sizer has cleared away much of the confusion that bedeviled educators interested in reform. They had difficulty resolving the conflict of how children could acquire fundamental skills and develop personally in the same institutions. Advocates of the open classroom gave priority to development of maturity and felt, or at least hoped that academic abilities would naturally follow. Teachers in standard public schools emphasize acquisition of skills at the expense of everything else. Sizer's division allows work to progress on both fronts without conflict, and probably with mutual reinforcement.

THOUGH SIZER brings to his work thorough knowledge of the political problems involved in educational reform, he ignores some of their consequences. He hopes that collegia will give students a true understanding of society. But he doesn't explain how he will get government funding for a kind of "social studies" that has never before been allowed in public schools.

He also points out that collegia must address...the conflicting claims of the individual and the state. The individual properly desires autonomy and personal freedom. The state properly wants a stable population, one disposed to advance corporate social and economic needs. It is unlikely that the ends of each can be fully met within a single institution. Both have to be taught ... but the resolution of conflicting claims must be left to the individual.

At best this is an oversimplified view of a very difficult problem. Schools do not exist in a political vacuum, and they cannot readily instill standards that oppose those of the society of which they are a major institution.

Sizer's traditional liberalism also informs his vast hopes for the power of education in the future. He believes the right kind of education can create a "real unity of mankind" in opposition to the simple homogeneity fostered by mass culture. But it is simple optimism to say that schools, alone, can bring about this kind of future. Other than the traditional aphorism -- that knowledge provides the ability to resist -- Sizer gives no evidence for this belief, and the conclusions he reaches are not obvious.

ALONG WITH his central proposal Sizer advances other interesting speculations about reform. Many are old hat, but in his program they achieve greater validity. In connection with the collegia, he thinks guidance counselling, traditionally reserved for telling students what colleges or jobs to apply for, should expand to service entire communities. They could offer advice and lay-therapy to both parents and children. He also broadly defines the functions of academies where basic skills are taught. They would concentrate on encouraging children to discriminate and reason logically, focusing on process rather than coverage of basic topics.

Sizer's appealing program for balancing life and work in school would work well at Phillips Academy, Andover where he is now headmaster. It is an ideal educational environment free from many social and political pressures. In most other American schools his program would be a welcome relief from current bad education. It would probably be very successful in teaching basic skills and self-awareness. But in the moral and political ends it sets for itself, it would fail.