Chapter 8B

Pewter Bowls

“So? What do people think? After what you’ve seen today, can we make this work at Central or not?”
Jack, my principal, tapped his pen expectantly against his open portfolio case and looked around the room at the rest of us for confirmation.
“Personally, I can’t wait to use the Socratic seminar approach in my English classes,” responded Brenda. “This whole idea of focusing intensely on a smaller body of material more rigorously is exactly what our students need.”
There was some general murmur of agreement, and a few heads nodded. However, they came from people like Brenda who were already among the Coalition “faithful;” so Jack merely gave her a quick flickering smile of approval before focusing his attention on those of us at the table who hadn’t replied with immediate assent.
“David?” He demanded. “What do you think?”
“Well, Jack, you already know I support the basic principles of an Essential School; I already use them in my classes anyway. I’m just worried that we’re trying to fix major problems simply by talking about them with a different vocabulary. I mean what I saw today made me wonder a few things.”
I paused and glanced worriedly at our host. She smiled understandingly and nodded in encouragement.
“Please, David. Go on. I specifically asked to sit in on this meeting because one of the important ways we can grow as an existing Essential School is by seeing ourselves through the eyes of others.”
I hesitated, searching for words, and then noticed the expression on my principal’s face. Not going to win any “brownie points” this afternoon, I thought.
“Okay,” I replied, frowning a little. “One concern I have is that we’re here today to observe what makes a Coalition school different. Yet the biology class I sat in on this morning was one of the most traditional ones I have ever seen.”
Sheila, the head of the school where we were visiting for the day, nodded again and pursed her lips.
“Yes, I know the individual you’re talking about.” She answered. “And you’re correct: some of our faculty have embraced the principles of the Coalition of Essential Schools more fully than others.”
“But that’s my point.” I implored, looking at my own principal. “Just because we suddenly declare ourselves an Essential School isn’t going to magically transform how the teachers back at our school teach. Nor is it going to suddenly turn all of our students into gifted scholars. We can talk all we want about ‘student-as-worker/teacher-as-coach’ and ‘helping young people use their minds well,’ but if the adults at our school won’t dramatically change how they act in the classroom and our students keep coming to us unable to read, then all we’re doing is fooling ourselves with some ‘emperor’s new clothes’!”
Jack and some of the others like Brenda scowled at me, but I continued anyway.
“Look,” I said, gesturing toward Sheila and in the general direction of the school around us. “The kids in this school come from completely different socio-economic backgrounds than ours. The Coalition principles are going to work well here because these children are ready to learn anyway. They could receive the worst education in the world and still succeed in life. But I’ve got seniors in some of my classes who are functionally illiterate; there are limits to what I can do with them without the support of learning specialists who are not even in our school.”
“But that’s the whole point of focusing on a few, essential high expectations for all students, David,” argued Brenda. “By doing so, we raise the level of learning for everyone and get our students so that they are able to function in our society.”
“Right!” Jack chimed in, looking at me pointedly. “Remember that each Coalition school decides for itself what their students really need to learn–what they think is essential for them to know–and our goals will obviously be very different from the ones here at Oberfeld.”
I shook my head.
“But if they are, then we’re not really helping prepare our students to succeed in the way the students here can.” I argued. “Look, I don’t think you understand what I’m trying to say here. Employing Coalition principles in our high school is not going to change the nature of the raw material that arrives on our doorstep. If I were a metalsmith making bowls, I could be the most gifted metalsmith in the world, but if you give me pewter instead of gold….” I once again gestured at the school around me. “The final bowl will still be pewter.”
It was my turn to look deliberately at my principal.
“Pewter ‘bowls’ in a world that values gold ones more.” I told him pointedly. “We need alchemy at our school, Jack, not just sophisticated metalsmithing, and all our talk about ‘Socratic Seminars’ and ‘student as worker’ may be good ‘metalsmithing,’ but it won’t change pewter into gold–which is what we seem to keep trying to convince ourselves it will.”
There was a silence as everyone digested my words, and ironically, the expression on the private school principal’s face held more understanding than the one on mine. But then, the look on Jack’s face was menacing and suspicious, and those on the rest of my colleagues ranged from bewilderment to distrust. Brenda actually glared openly at me in disgust.
“If you’re so doubtful we can make it work, then why are you here?” she asked, barely trying to conceal her contempt.
“Because our kids deserve to have us talking about what it will really take to educate them to be as successful in life as the kids here.” I responded. “And not another naked con job.”

Fulfilling the Niche

As noted educational reformer, Roland Barth has observed, “the problem with schools [today] isn’t that they are no longer what they once were; the problem is that they are precisely what they once were,”¹⁰ and though we know there are some biological forces that can contribute to perpetuating this fact, we also know that we have the power to uncover and disable “mindbugs” and to provide the early childhood education for all brains to help them grow well.  Which, as Barth points out, begs the proverbial question:

why, then, are the conditions hospitable to human learning so dramatically unrecognized and conspicuously absent in so much of the thinking and practice in state departments of education, central offices, universities, and all too many schools–all institutions professing a commitment to promoting human learning?¹¹

The answer, I think, is because the authentic engagement of educators discussed in this project—which could transform all our academic institutions into places of genuine learning—poses a potentially powerful threat to the illusions our society wants to maintain about itself.  I think that as a society, we want to see ourselves as this grand example of social justice, political egalitarianism, and economic freedom in the world–with universal education providing the foundation for achieving all these things for anyone willing to work hard.  But we are only able to maintain this illusion to the extent that this same education does not confront us with evidence to the contrary, and good teaching invariably reveals that the emperor may be missing clothes.

To understand how, we first need to recognize that if we employ the “ecological” paradigm for education that produces good teaching and learning, we have to acknowledge that the corollary to the “niche” or role the teacher must successfully occupy in the classroom is the one each student must inhabit as well—meaning that the functional well-being of the classroom “environment” depends as much upon the students as it does upon the teacher.  Students are fully accountable for actually participating in the learning process and good teachers will hold them as such accordingly because otherwise, as we have already seen, the “ecological” web of relationships everyone must form with reality in order to have knowledge of it cannot take shape. 

To make the analogy explicit, in a healthy ecosystem, no organism can do what it does in the environment without all the other organisms doing what they do in the environment.  For example, fungi cannot dissolve minerals in the soil without the energy from the sugars that plants provide, and the plants cannot make these sugars without the minerals the fungi provide.  So, too, in order to have a fully functioning classroom, the students as well as the teacher must authentically fulfill their role in the educational “ecosystem.” Hence, what the “ecological” paradigm for education confronts us with is the reality that children are in vital ways as accountable for the quality of their education as their teachers are.

But children can only be as authentically engaged in the classroom as the adults outside of schools have prepared them to be.  Even the most brilliant educator can only accomplish what the raw material who arrives in his, her, or their classroom allows, and in this country that regularly treats children as “necessary evils,” the lack of adequate resources, parenting, and other forms of adult support means that the raw material who enter our school doors are all too frequently malnourished, unwanted, ill-prepared, or otherwise maltreated.¹²  Eye-popping lessons won’t catch the attention of a child who’s blood sugar is so low that he, she, or they can barely stay awake, and even at the other end of the socio-economic spectrum, the child who is abusing alcohol to cope with an authoritarian parent’s unrealistic demands is not going to be focusing on a classroom assignment; she, he, or they is going to be wondering how to make it to the next day.

Hence, whenever students do perform poorly in a situation where good teaching is providing high quality education, these kids act like a huge, blaring siren in the middle of that community, declaring loudly and unequivocally that no one with the power to do so has addressed the material poverty or street violence or physical abuse or parental neglect or chemical addiction or…anything else that is keeping those children from having what they need to fulfill their “niche” in their school “ecosystem” and engage in genuine learning.  Thus, by holding students completely accountable for their role in schools in the way any “organism” in an environment would, what authentically engaged schooling exposes is just how badly the rest of society has failed in any claims to be providing equity, equality, and opportunity for all its citizens—thereby, of course, implicitly criticizing the systemic power structures in our society that bear responsibility for the inequity, inequality, and lack of opportunity in the first place.¹³