School’s Out: A reflection of a life spent in schools

This is my story. It’s the story of a life spent in schools—as student, teacher, administrator, parent, trustee, guardian ad litem, and tutor. It’s the story of disillusionment and hope.

Revelation

It began when I was 12 and riding my bike to school. The morning was warm and sunny, early June, the smell of freshly cut grass–the fragrance of freedom–signaling the last days of the school year. Thick green leaves shaded the street, and the summer stretched out before me in empty splendor. Two thousand years and six thousand miles separated me from Saul of Tarsus riding on the road to Damascus, yet that morning I felt a light shine around me, and I suddenly just knew that I wanted to become a teacher. This revelation came to me mostly as a feeling, strong and clear, yet accompanied by a very conscious thought: I want to be a teacher.   

I wasn’t a particularly good student. I liked middle school, liked being with my friends and enjoyed the easy banter with many of my teachers, but my grades worried my parents, so it is still a mystery to me how it was that on that morning, I felt this desire to spend my life in school.

Perhaps it sprang from my longing for this lovely day to last forever. Perhaps I was just feeling so good, happy to be alive, anticipating a pick-up baseball game with my friends after the final period of the day. Perhaps it was my affection for my teachers, for Mr. Glarrow and Mr. Heagy and Mr. Gray. They exuded warmth and humor and a love of the classroom. Perhaps it was the way they joked with each other. 

Of course, when I arrived at school, my revelation disappeared into the din of slamming  metallic doors and the laughter and shouting of middle school insults. I didn’t think about becoming a teacher again until toward the end of high school and college, when I had other revelations—these a whole lot less romantic than the one I had at 12 but just as motivating.

Senior moment

In high school, I fell in love with science. I had always loved the stars, especially when my friends and I slept under them during the summer and could still see the Milky Way, so I was eager to study astronomy. And I seemed to have a brain wired to memorize. I enjoyed memorizing the names of rocks, bugs, and chemicals, even though few of these names stayed with me beyond the final exam. I felt successful in science. For the first time, my grades were really good. Of course, the main attraction was my high school science teacher, a demanding man whose passion for science and affection for students glowed as steadily as his Bunsen burners.    

I spent my four high school years studying as much science as I could in preparation for a college major in chemistry. One day, toward the end of my junior year, I was sitting in the lab having just completed my umpteenth cookbook experiment—that ritual of following precise steps to reach a predetermined outcome. And I had an epiphany as I sat on a stool, doodling in my lab book and trying to think of a project that might satisfy our final assignment for the year. We needed to create an experiment to answer some questions we might have. I could think of nothing. Here, I had planned to major in science, but I realized I had no questions.

I was a good student. I churned out right answers. I had spent years memorizing dwarf stars and atomic weights and learning big bang and wave/particle theories. I had spent no time learning to do the real work of scientists. I had not thought about the world or the facts or the theories in relation to my own experiences or interests. I had never been encouraged to think that these things—world, fact, theory, experience, interest—had anything to do with each other. I had made no independent observations, recognized no patterns, asked no questions, posited no hypotheses, and designed no experiments. I had discovered nothing. Yet I was an A-student.

My experiences in my humanities courses were no different. I read As I Lay Dying and Le Petit Prince, Hamlet, T. S. Eliot, and John Donne, but made no connections between these writers’ visions of the world and my own experiences with the world. For me, as for my classmates, the literature and art we studied in the classroom were not sources of truth and understanding; they held no relevant personal meaning. But I knew the plot and characters; I could write “successful” essays about what these works meant to my teachers; I could identify a Browning poem without being told the poet.

In my history classes, despite my passion for reading Ayn Rand and Isaac Asimov in my free time, I never made any connection between my developing personal beliefs about excellence, mediocrity, social justice, and my classroom studies of the industrial revolution, capitalism, and Karl Marx. With my friends, I enjoyed raging late-night debates about morality. In class, I fought sleep and dutifully memorized dates and “the three causes” of the rise of Communism. I saw no patterns in historical events. I did no research using primary documents. I developed no theses. Never did my growing, but chaotic, mostly intuitive personal beliefs about humanity and institutions touch the academic world. I received A’s and remained among those in the top of my class.

I graduated from high school incapable of meaningful independent thought. When I read a novel, I looked for its meaning in a critical source or in my teachers’ lectures. I had no skills to explore consciously with any depth or rigor my mostly felt beliefs. My sense of the world was based on unexamined premises, some of which had been passed to me from my parents, others from my teachers, others from authors I had admired. What did I know?

Yet, like most adolescents, I had been more than ready to learn the skills of independent thinking. I was not entirely brain-dead. Signs of life were evident in my embarrassing epiphany in the chemistry lab, the passionate midnight debates, and my responses to Ayn Rand. However, instead of a thinker, my schooling had produced a parrot—a bright bird able to mimic the sounds of my teachers.

I graduated from high school angry and resentful. I began to imagine again becoming a teacher, though this time, not filled with the joy and light of a 12-year-old. I was no longer inspired by role models, teachers I wanted to emulate. I was simply convinced I could do better. I could fix our schools. Too many years of reading Philip Wylie had left me bitter and arrogant, and idealistic—a critic of all I beheld.

Another senior moment

In college, despite my misgivings, I persisted blindly in my intention to become a chemical engineer. But, as I waited in line for the few analytical balances available in the freshman chemistry lab, I had a lot of time to think about what I was doing. I wasn’t enjoying myself, and I began to wonder what I was doing in this lab. Then I began to wonder what I was doing, period. I had certainly not become any more creative as a scientist, and all my ideas remained echoes of Authority—lecturers, critics, teachers. I was dissatisfied. I was a fraud. 

Each day, in order to get to the chemistry building from my dorm, I had to pass the theater building. Hilarity and bright colors and life flew in and out of the doors to that building, stirring memories of the fun I had had in my high school theater. I decided I needed to change everything about myself. I needed to feel creative, needed to figure out how to think an original thought, and that building held my hope. By the beginning of the second semester, I had shed the drab, stained lab coat and the plastic goggles and headed for the theater department. I began working on becoming someone who could think for himself.  

That decision changed my life. Although it took years to undo the habits of memorization, imitation, and regurgitation, three things happened that eventually helped me understand what I wanted to do with my life and why I wanted to do it.

First, I experienced the exhilaration and joy of working with others on a common goal that was more important than any one of us. My first job in the theater was to sweep the stage and help with props during the running of a show. From the beginning, I felt camaraderie with everyone who worked on a production. The mantra of the theater department came from Konstantin Stanislavski, cofounder of the Moscow Art Theater: “There are no small parts, just small actors.” In this world, I actually felt my role was no less essential than anyone else’s. I was part of a team. 

Second, I learned that my studies outside the theater department mattered to my studies inside the theater department. This lesson came from one of my acting teachers, who worked on developing an acting technique based on a book called Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy, a book we read in my required psychology course. I had never imagined the obvious: psychology might be pertinent to an actor.

And third, I freed myself from my reliance on Authority. I discovered an interest in directing plays and got the opportunity to direct “Ile,” a one-act by Eugene O’Neill. Naturally, I had no idea what the play meant to me. Whatever attracted me to it was buried deeply in my subconscious. As usual, I searched the library for a critic who could tell me what to think, but “Ile” is not one of O’Neill’s major works, so I could find nothing on it. I was left alone with the text. In a panic, I read and reread the play, and eventually, guided by my emotional responses, I found my father in the whaling captain who was so obsessed with his job and reputation that he was willing to sacrifice time with his wife and family so that he could return to port a success, his ship filled with whale oil. I felt what it was to be my father. I had discovered “Ile.”

When I graduated from college, I had an idea that I could combine my love for theater with my desire to become a teacher, and, over several months, I developed this foolish, idealistic conviction that I could help students with a real interest in theater improve their skills and knowledge in other required disciplines—like history, English, and even some aspects of math and science—by relating these to their desire to become actors, directors, designers. So I wrote 15 or 20 letters to heads of various independent schools seeking work (I doubted public schools would have the freedom to consider such an interdisciplinary approach). Needless to say, I didn’t find a job. 

Life lessons

So I repackaged myself in the traditional mold and applied to be an English teacher and direct plays. I thought that once I found a school to hire me, I could begin to work from within the system to collaborate with other educators who might be willing to rethink our approach to education. I fantasized about a camaraderie of colleagues committed to a cause. And there were moments: joining with colleagues to oust a head of school who cared little about education; creating an arts department and fighting for its equality with other academic departments; working to eliminate lectures and multiple-choice assessments in favor of developing student voices—and, especially, to develop their ability to think like scientists or historians or mathematicians.

Eventually, after teaching in three different schools, I discovered a school that had two programs that embodied all I had come to believe about education. One program allowed students to choose an area of interest and, for two weeks, do the actual work involved in that area. If they were interested in the rainforest, instead of sitting in a classroom reading about it and listening to lectures about it, they conducted field studies in the rainforest. They learned to sail and navigate on boats. They worked with battered women in a shelter, learned about cars by working on them with a mechanic, composed songs with a professional songwriter, improved their Spanish or French in home stays in Spanish- or French-speaking locations, wrote short stories with a professional writer, toured a play, worked with the special needs population, were apprenticed to architects, doctors, lawyers, and environmentalists. These two weeks of immersion in activities that interested and mattered to students changed lives. Some discovered their eventual careers.

The second program was even more exciting–essentially a school-within-a-school that had only two criteria for admission: a demonstrated passion in some area of study and the ability to work independently. Students created individualized curricula built from their passion (remarkably like the interdisciplinary theater program I had envisioned years before). All other requirements were waived—no required seat-time in traditional courses at all.

Individual students over the years came to the program with interests in astronomy, painting, writing, music, genetics, architecture, medicine, international studies, film-making, mathematics, environmental science, computer science, and marine biology. They built their curriculum around these centers of interest, which led them to a mixture of some traditional courses at the school, some courses at colleges or at other schools, some independent studies with professional mentors, and some internships. These students created their own schedules, which usually involved work in their program not just during the regular class day but in the afternoon and evening, as well. And there were no grades. All assessments were narrative and included extensive narrative self-assessments and portfolios of projects, actual work, and public presentations. The focus was on learning and on the students’ development as thinkers, not on grades. The students made decisions and choices for themselves. They were guided by advisors and professional mentors, but their choices determined the direction of their studies. Any mistakes in their decisions were theirs, as were the successes. And they had the freedom to follow their interests if and as they evolved into different areas.

One of my favorite student voices from that program was Ian’s: “It felt like I was actually pursuing the long-term goals I had for myself, rather than just getting through the state-imposed mandatory four-year sentence of high school. In other words, I was waiting for school to end so I could start the real learning and work I wanted to do in my life. In this program, I felt like I my senior year of high-school was the first year of the rest of my life.”

Terminal senior moment

The research of the last 30 years about how people learn resonated with what I experienced in these nontraditional programs. Neuroscientists Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Antonio Damasio (University of Southern California) wrote that “we feel; therefore, we learn.” I was particularly struck by Immordino-Yang’s statement that, “It is literally neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about things that you don’t care about.” This insight ought to shake the foundations of schools everywhere. Clearly, emotion plays a critical role in learning. The more learners have the opportunity to pursue genuine questions and self-directed programs of study that matter to them, the greater the motivation and engagement. Certainly greater than memorizing answers to questions they did not ask. 

Why not, I naively thought, use evidence from these nontraditional programs in our school and the research from affective neuroscience as points of departure for exploring how to transform the whole school? Why not replace standardized, one-size-fits-all education with structures and policies that support individualized graduation requirements and curricula, allowing students to spend more of each day engaged in developing skills and conceptual understanding in areas that are emotionally engaging?

Why not, indeed? The simple answer? Substantive change scares the hell out of people, so resistance is fierce. I have been thinking about education for 75 years. Here I am. A senior again, awaiting my final graduation. And I’m left with two truths.

On one hand, the lesson I have learned is that humans hold tenaciously to the comfort and relative ease of the familiar. We are awfully good at repelling assaults on “the way it’s always been.” Experience suggests that we will not change our practices even to save the planet, to eliminate poverty, to end wars and famine. The majority of the teachers and administrators with whom I have worked lead me to conclude that, despite a few exciting exceptions, we seem unlikely to work together to fundamentally redesign our entire system of education. We’ll stick with, in the words of Lewis Carroll’s Mock Turtle, “Reeling and Writhing . . . and the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.”

On the other hand, a healthy quarter to a third of my colleagues in various schools lead me to conclude that it doesn’t have to be this way. Working with them–to shift our curricular focus from memorizing facts to developing skills and conceptual understanding and giving students more control over what they studied–allowed me to imagine what we might accomplish if we develop more substantive approaches to learning. Why not create schools that support the healthy development of young people and their ability to, in the words of Immordino-Yang, “invoke broader perspectives on themselves, other people, and social systems, and draw on cultural values and associated emotions to infer social and ethical implications and build deeper understandings”? Education is the key to saving the planet and requires a new generation of young people capable of combining deep disciplinary knowledge with ethical thinking. The research into learning and emotion provided by Immordino-Yang and her colleagues can fuel the optimism that motivates so many educators. We can’t give up.

And the moral of this story is, scratch a cynic and you’ll find a frustrated idealist.

Alden S. Blodget

I am retired after 38 years as a high school teacher (theater and English) and administrator (arts dept chair, assistant head of school). Since retiring, I have volunteered as a guardian ad litem in the Rutland County (VT) Family and Criminal Courts, working with abused and delinquent children and with adults who were incompetent to stand trial. Currently, now that I have moved back to Massachusetts, I am a pro bono tutor for students who want to work with a tutor but cannot afford the usual fees. I have published many essays, mostly but not exclusively about education.