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Toward a Place for Study in a World of Instruction
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Robbie McClintock
Institute for Learning Technologies
Teachers College — Columbia University
December 2000
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Section 6 — Study Schools for Children
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¶ 70
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I wonder if it would be possible to turn the elementary school
into a place offering the child genuine opportunities to study,
in a disciplinary way, the basic means that men have devised
for communicating and manipulating the forms that give rise
to culture. In thinking about elementary education, one has
difficulty not considering education as a process of teaching
and learning. The child seems so ignorant, so plastic, that
one is drawn to typing the child as a passive learner, as someone
whose business it is to absorb responsively whatever the kind,
experienced teacher should choose to teach. Yet observe a child
working to get the hang of a new game, tinkering with the innards
of an old clock, or exploring the sea life trapped in rocky
pools when the tide is low. Here is the child studying. And
if here, why not in the school?
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¶ 71
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In actuality, this question is not new. Many others have been
struck with the intensity of concentration displayed by the
child studying, and many reformers have often tried to make
room for this quality in the school through what is often called
the child-centered curriculum. Begin with the child's interests,
let him get involved, and then subtly teach in response to his
curious questions. The problem with this curriculum, aside from
its subterfuge instruction, is that the sobriety of the child's
interests is not taken into account. One makes the child childish
by thinking that to appeal to his interests one must begin with
something like a boat or some other thing from the grown-up
world that the child knows primarily as a toy. [ 63
] The child's real interests concern the mysteries of language,
basic categories of classification, techniques of calculation
and transformation, skills of gesture, of forming material,
of depicting thoughts and images, of sensing the sense of his
senses. Given the opportunity to study, not to learn mind you,
but to study reading, writing, and arithmetic, in a disciplinary
way, from the ages of six to thirteen or fourteen, many children
would seriously respond. These studies, qua studies, would be
the truly child-centered curriculum.
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¶ 72
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All these studies have one thing in common: they pertain to
real, vital problems that all people continually experience,
those of communicating their thoughts and feelings, of ascertaining
fact and fiction. All, no matter how accomplished, endlessly
encounter frustrating limitations on the powers of communication
over which they have command. Life is a litany: I meant to say;
it seemed that; so sorry you misunderstood. The child, too,
feels this frustration; and to deal with the basic studies,
qua studies, teachers might heighten the child's awareness of
this frustration and then assist the child's effort to overcome
his difficulties. Thus, to deal with these matters as studies,
not as topics for teaching and learning, it is essential for
the teacher to think first not of the corpus of communicative
techniques that people have devised, but of the real problems
of communication that the children before him are having. In
a study school, the teacher's job would not be to instruct,
but to provoke and oversee the incessant exercise of each student's
powers of communication and calculation.
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¶ 73
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This is not the place to lay out a course of study for such
schools in detail. Many variations might be tried, but in choosing
what studies to offer, it should be assumed that the student,
although a child, is nevertheless no slouch: he will want to
get down to the fundamentals of his real intellectual difficulties.
Hence, given the opportunity, he will concentrate on the basics.
Beyond this, suffice it to note one caution: the effectiveness
of opportunities for basic elementary study will depend considerably
on the responsiveness of both the students and their teacher
to the day-to-day actualities of their situations, and the teacher
will have a heavy responsibility to refrain from turning the
exercises he oversees into an ersatz system of instruction through
which he imposes a disembodied "right way" upon depersonalized
pupils. Instead of prescribing the right way, the teacher's
business is to help students explore and master the various
ways that may work for the particular purposes they have at
hand. And should this be done, the elementary school might well
become a place of study in which the young would have the opportunity
to begin asserting personal control over the diverse means of
communication, on the use of which all of culture depends.
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Endnotes
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| Note 63 |
See the example of the Lincoln School unit of study based
on boats for third graders given by Lawrence A. Cremin. The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American
Education, 1876-1957. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961,
pp. 283-6. [Back] |
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