Let kids run their own schools. This is the reduced-to-essence message of author Susan Engel’s contribution to today’s New York Times. She writes about the Independent Project, in which eight high-school students in western Massachusetts designed and operated, from September to January, their own school. There were no grades, of course, only “evaluations,” and the kids created their own curriculum and taught it to each other—basically the blind leading the blind, which, as Jesus once told somebody, isn’t good. At the end of the term, the pupils “embarked on a collective endeavor” that, they all agreed, “had to have social significance.” Of course it did. So they made a film about how they started their teenager-run school and how other teens could start one, too.
Look, high school stinks, its current one-size-fits-all tack idiotic. But it’s foolish—worse, really—to think that because a few kids in Massachusetts who got to read Faulkner to each other for eight weeks had some sort of kumbaya experience schools across the nation should institute student-led classes teaching student-formed curricula. “Schools everywhere could initiate an Independent Project,” Engel writes, because if “the Independent Project students are any indication, participants will end up more accomplished, more engaged and more knowledgeable than they would have been taking regular courses.” Evidence for these claims (besides “more engaged”): lacking.
—Liam Julian, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow
A three-month experiment isn’t very convincing, but if you look at the broad range of goals parents and employers value for students, education that includes substantial student-initiated learning outperforms traditional education. That doesn’t mean kids have to run the physical plant or plan everything, but a third of the day could easily be student-initiated with teacher support. You’re unlikely to learn how to drive if they never put you behind the wheel, and kids don’t learn how to make good choices and initiate and complete substantive projects if they never get the chance.
There are schools like the Met that have allowed substantially student-chosen learning, then there’s Sudbury Valley, also in Mass., where every kid actually gets a vote every year on who the staff will be the next year, and students vote on budgetary matters and handle disciplinary matters (and the school is still around after 40+ years). In a former life, I directed a residential arts, sciences, and leadership program where kids got to plan part of the curriculum.
Our current schools actually have very low expectations for teens, because all we expect of them is to memorize and regurgitate more, when they need to be stepping up to the plate and learning how to help run something real and take on big challenges.
There’s an interesting motivation dynamic here: If you believe kids will always take the easy way out and so they need to be controlled and told what to do and learn what’s on Friday’s test, kids in fact play it safe and don’t take on challenges. If you have faith in kids’ motivation and create a psychologically safe environment, provide choices and autonomy support, kids in fact take on challenging tasks that pull their learning and development forward.
Also, once you give kids meaningful choices, learning and management all become much easier.
The real question is which self-fulfilling prophecy do we choose to implement? Which is more likely to create mature, creative, self-directed adults?
Perhaps this is not THE solution to our dysfunctional education system, but hey, its a start! Where are your suggests of a better way to address our schools? Why is it that high school has to stinks?
Perhaps it is because, as John Dewey stated, “Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming where everyone is interdependent.” Our schools are simply not designed to create thinkers or amass the creative power of our children. They are set into place to prepare workers for their “rightful place.” They are failing to do even that. Something must be done to preserve our nation. Social programs funded by a non-taxpaying, non-functioning, ill-prepared workforce cannot sustain this nation.
I would like to see more programs such as these in order to explore how to motive kids to think and engage in their work.