A School of Our Own

by Samuel Levin

  Watching Sam mull over his new school and figure out what the students would do each day, I began to realize that we had all been tinkering—longer periods, more hands-on activities, kids working on certain projects in groups, longer lunch, shorter lunch, Spanish requirement, creative project during May, more tests, fewer tests. All reasonable changes, but none that really get at the fundamental problem. Imagine you owned a restaurant, and each week fewer and fewer people came because they didn’t like the food. You could change the curtains, hire a friendlier waiter, play music in the background, or even offer $5 off the main course. Any one of those things might improve the restaurant a little bit, might temporarily distract your customers from the unsatisfying meals. But in the end, a mediocre meal doesn’t taste different because of new curtains. The only real solution would be to make better food. Similarly, if students are supposed to get better at thinking while in high school, but spend almost no time engaged in any real thinking, chances are that no matter how long the periods are, how often they take field trips, or how challenging the vocabulary worksheets, they’re not going to get better at thinking.

  There was a lot of emphasis in my school on family, teamwork, and collaboration. People used to say that when the high schools in the local area were characterized, ours was described as “one big hug.” My freshman year of high school I played shortstop and pitcher for the JV baseball team, and in my senior year I co-captained the varsity basketball team. For all three coaches, teamwork was the main thing emphasized. “That’s how Falcons excel,” they used to say. “By being the best teammates on the court.”

  And yet, I noticed, this ethic was entirely absent from the classroom. In school, collaboration is usually thought of as cheating. On the rare occasion when we did work together in school, for example, on a “group” project, it was largely superficial. The project, which might be to create a science poster or make a presentation together, was collaborative only because the teacher said so. These projects could have easily been accomplished by one person. Students had to artificially divide up the labor to make it a “group” endeavor.

  In the real world, as far as I could tell, collaboration was often necessary. Project Sprout had made this abundantly clear to me. It would have been physically impossible for me to cultivate a two-acre plot and organize pig roast fund-raisers for five hundred people on my own.

  Once again, it seemed wild to me that we never got to practice true collaboration in school. Time and again, it seemed, there was a skill with which we were expected to leave high school that we never really practiced while we were there. On top of that, I knew from the baseball diamond and the basketball court and the farm and the garden that collaboration felt incredible. If it was something we needed to learn, and something that was rewarding to do, why the hell was it missing entirely from the school day?

  I could’ve answered Sam’s emphatic question. When teens are together, sparks fly. The psychological literature on adolescent development is stuffed with articles showing how important peers are to teens. They feel dull, flat, and misunderstood when they are separated from their friends, and the opposite when they are together. In fact, when a group of teenagers who like each other gather, little else seems quite as important to them. Certainly not a teacher or a textbook. Or that’s the conventional wisdom, and the explanation for keeping them apart. How will they get their work done if they are flirting, fighting, plotting, and commiserating?

  And yet, a whole host of studies has shown that when students work together, they learn more. But it’s not just that collaborating doesn’t get in the way of learning. It is an essential skill in and of itself. In schools where kids are encouraged to help one another and solve problems together, bullying decreases, academic skills improve, and the overall climate of the school becomes more positive. Nor is this just a matter of encouraging friendships or discouraging meanness. It’s a matter of doing good work. If you could accomplish things only when you didn’t help anyone or get help, if you could work only when no one spoke to you, if you could do a good job only when you weren’t required to compromise, where would you be as an adult? If you think about it this way, as Sam began to while designing his school, it becomes clear that the enormous energy teachers expend keeping kids apart while they learn is the opposite of what they need. They are asked to learn separately, when in fact what they need is a chance to become good at learning together.

  There’s a single statue in front of my high school. It’s a giant hunk of oxidized metal, and it’s the first thing you see when you drive up. It’s meant to stand out because it’s supposed to represent what our school stands for. Carved into the face of the metal is the inscription “How will I make my mark on the world?”

  “Cool,” I used to think. Cool that I go to a school where that’s what matters. Not how will I excel, or how will I be happy, but how will I make my mark on the world, how will I make the world a better place? That’s what we care about here at Green River.

  But was it? All throughout my junior year, I felt my eyes opening a little wider every day. In thinking about how to make school better, in designing my new school, I began to see things that hadn’t stood out before. Did we really emphasize having an impact on the world? Did we have any real engagement with the outside world at all?

  The truth is, I started to notice, with the exception of Friday night basketball games, school was pretty isolated from the outside community. I had always assumed that one of the goals of education, particularly high school, was to engage you with the world, to make you care for it, and to teach you how to become a better steward of it. This, to me, was one of the ways education made the world a better place: by making people better citizens. It’s certainly what we said we were all about at Green River.

  And yet, when in our classrooms did we do anything that really contributed to our community, locally or globally? We learned about the world and occasionally (though perhaps rarely) about our local community. But did we try to contribute to it? Did we try to reduce hunger or make our school greener? Did we contribute to the proposals to redesign Main Street? Did we write letters to the editor about political issues? Did we clean up the river?

  None of that. Not in the classroom. In fact, we never practiced any kind of meaningful stewardship at all. We were never asked to solve any real problems in the real world. And once again, I found myself wondering how we could be expected to learn to care for the world, to want to dedicate our lives to making it better, to become thoughtful, contributing citizens if we never practiced any of that in school.

  Good question. And Sam wasn’t the first to worry about it. In his classic book on human development Childhood and Society, Erik Erikson argued that the mighty battle of adolescence involves finding one’s place in the world. It isn’t enough for a teenager to have a loving relationship with parents or do well at school or make good friends, though these are important. The real crisis of adolescence, Erikson argued, is figuring out how to fit into the larger community—what work you’ll do, what role you’ll play, what impact you’ll have. In adolescence children feel the first stirrings of responsibility. They yearn to have an impact on the adult world they are entering. This often unfolds hand in hand with their intense interest in right and wrong, their hunger for justice. One need only think of Vietnam War protests, Occupy Wall Street, or the climate change movement to see how powerful social concerns are during the teenage years. And yet, high schools tend to push activism to the sidelines, if they allow it at all.

  Schools, however inadvertently, go to great efforts to circumvent the teenage craving to be part of society. By keeping them all day in buildings where they are only with other people their age, or professionals trained to interact with them, we isolate them from the world they yearn to enter. By discouraging their activism, as so many schools do, we keep a lid on the very engagement they crave and need.

  These were the major problems I saw in the current system: lack of autonomy, lack of engagement, lack of m
astery, learning information rather than habits of mind, lack of serious thinking, lack of true collaboration, and lack of interaction with the outside world.

  Some of the solutions to these problems seemed simple and came to me immediately, and others took months of deliberation.

  How to increase autonomy was plain: just give students more autonomy. Make them the authors of their own education. Let high schoolers be in charge of high school. Given my experience with the garden, I had a hunch that if students were in charge, this would take care of the engagement problem, too. If you choose what you learn, you’re likely to want to learn it.

  Equally, how to increase the experience of mastery in high school was as easy as pie. Give students a chance to master something. In fact, in my new school, they’d have half the day to focus on mastering a single thing. For the whole school year, if necessary. Why half a day? It couldn’t be the whole day, because there were other things, like academics, that we needed to do. Anything less than half didn’t seem like enough time to really delve into something, to really become an expert. I’d call this something an Individual Endeavor. It could be anything—build a boat, write a play, conduct an experiment—as long as it was involved enough to take up your time and you were excited to do it.

  Figuring out how to approach academics was a little trickier. I had decided that subjects were totally last year’s news. Or last century’s news. So that part was easy. I would scrap the subjects in their traditional form. Rather than learn math or English, we would learn how to think like mathematicians or work like writers. Instead of focusing on what specific knowledge we would learn, the school would focus on making students better thinkers.

  But that didn’t solve the whole problem, not on its own. Because I would still be too late. We had all already gone through so many years of education in “subjects” that the students in my new school might already think of themselves as “math people” or “arts people.” Even though I was fascinated by psychology and loved to write fiction I, too, had somehow started thinking of myself as a math-and-science person, not an arts-and-humanities person. Many of my friends already had serious math phobias, so getting them to think like mathematicians was a daunting task.

  This second aspect of the problem plagued me all summer long. I spent hours mulling over how to break the curse of academic typecasting.

  We could have two weeks in the beginning of the year where students who thought of themselves as science people could study only the humanities, and vice versa. But that seemed forced and artificial, and suffered from the same ills that I was trying to cure. Forcing students to do science wasn’t the way to make them love it.

  So, instead, we could bring in scientists, historians, mathematicians, and artists and have them each give a talk on why everyone should be interested in their discipline. But again, I already knew how much high schoolers loved to rebel against things. As soon as some adult came in and told us we should like art, we’d decide we wouldn’t. I came up with endless gimmicks, tricks, approaches, and methods to solve the problem, but none of them rang true.

  Finally, I realized I needed to go back to square one. I had gotten so caught up in clever solutions, I had stopped thinking about the problem: that, somehow, in our educational society, math was linked to science and humanities were coupled with the arts and you identified with either one pair or the other. And that was the problem, wasn’t it? Those groupings were meaningless.

  The idea was simple: I would rejigger the traditional groupings of the subjects. I realized that the disciplines of science and humanities have a lot more in common with each other than science does with math or the humanities with English, despite the classic pairings. Similarly, math and English have a lot more in common with each other than either does with science or history!

  To work in the humanities and the physical sciences, you need to think like a scientist. You need to learn the art of asking a question and how to use the scientific method to find an answer to that question. To work in English and math, you need to learn how to think and communicate in a language. In the case of English, that language is, well, English, and you need to learn how to read it and write it. In math, that language is the language of mathematics, and you need to learn how to think in mathematical terms and express things in the language of numbers and logic. You use English to describe the world, and you do the same with math.

  So in my new school we would have two disciplines: the sciences and the languages. Mixing up the pairings of the standard disciplines would, I hoped, prevent the usual subject prejudices and would allow us to learn new habits of mind, not just information within each subject.

  The question, then, was how to actually go about learning the sciences and the languages. Well, it seemed clear that our method should spring directly from the nature of the disciplines. The sciences are about asking questions. So for the period of time when we were focusing on the sciences, the students would work on the art of asking and answering questions. They would start each week coming up with their own natural and social science questions. The other students, and any available teachers with expertise in the sciences, would critique the question and help make it a better question, thereby helping all of us to improve on the art of asking a good question. Then the students would spend the week answering their questions—doing research and experiments, reading, and talking to experts (both inside and outside the school), and on Friday they would teach their answers to the group. Again, the other students and teachers would give critical feedback on the way the students went about getting their answers, the quality of the answers they presented, and how well they taught their answers to the group.

  In the same vein, I proceeded under the conviction that languages are something you learn by practicing (by practicing I don’t mean drilling; I mean doing). So for the literary language, we would practice the art of reading and writing. Each week one student would choose a novel for the group to read, and at the end of the week each person would read from a piece of writing he or she did in response to the novel. For the mathematical language, we would practice logical and mathematical reasoning, with each student choosing a topic or challenge to tackle.

  So the problem of academics was solved. What about the problem of collaboration? Again, this was something I struggled with for months. It was very slippery for me, because the key was that the collaboration had to be genuine and necessary, not an artifice. So how would I make collaboration a required element of the school, but keep it organic and real?

  The answer came, as it so often does, unexpectedly. One night, maybe three-quarters of the way through my junior year, my mom told me about something she was trying out in an experimental school she had helped start. The idea was that young children could get their whole “curriculum” through collaborative enterprises. At the beginning of the year, the kids would pick a venture to work on together, and then they would spend the year creating and executing it. And here was the kicker: the endeavor had to be something that actually helped others in a real way.

  For example, one group of children, ages six to eleven, decided to run the school apothecary. Through this process, they would learn about botany and medicine and ecology. They would learn about financing, bookkeeping, and economics. But they would also learn about helping people, about being responsible for something, about building something from the ground up, about creating a real product. And all of it would occur in a natural, real, and exciting way.

  I knew immediately that this had to be a part of the Independent Project. It could solve not only the problem of collaboration but that of engagement with the outside world as well. At the very end of the school year, the group would come together and decide on a Collective Endeavor, the only requirement being that whatever they decided to do would solve a real problem in their community, either locally or globally: improve homeless shelters, clean up the water table, make the school carbon neutral—anything.

  The basic structure of my new school had take
n shape: half a day for an Individual Endeavor, half a day for academics; half of our academic time devoted to the sciences, asking and answering questions, and half of our academic time devoted to the mathematical and literary languages. Then, at the end of the school year, everything else would stop and the students would team up for a Collective Endeavor. And that was it: the whole “curriculum.”

  Because the students would be in charge, they would be engaged, they’d discover real responsibility, and they’d be empowered by their newfound ownership of their school. Through the Individual Endeavor, kids would discover and practice mastery. They would also get to work on something that truly excited them and, whatever their endeavor was, they would learn a variety of skills through it. In the academics, students would improve various habits of mind that weren’t focused on traditionally. They would learn to think and work like scientists, mathematicians, writers, historians, and in a way that granted them autonomy, making them more likely to digest and embody the approaches they studied.

  When I look at our educational system, I often think of the many horrible roadways I have traveled over the years. For instance, if you drive from Westchester County, New York, to Middletown, Connecticut, as I have, on occasion, you have to navigate a bewildering, senseless, and circuitous maze of raised highways, parallel roads, and unnecessary detours. As I make my way through all the hideous and confusing routes, it seems clear how those cement jungles occurred. As populations grew and car travel expanded, old roads no longer sufficed. So states added a highway here, an overpass there, a second expressway, another route to a bridge—in short, a series of fixes built on a system that really didn’t fit the new era. In the same way, our high schools have added, subtracted, extended bit by bit, to accommodate new educational goals and changing school populations. Often the system incorporates some particular practice based on the politics of the day, or one new finding from research. In many ways the overall approach, like those bad highways, makes no sense, though each piece seemed to at a given time. Such piecemeal change is forgivable with roads. You can’t easily dismantle highways and begin from scratch.