by James Dobson
Many years have passed since those days of my callow youth when I still thought getting something for nothing was possible. I was dead wrong. Everything worth having comes with a price. The natural progression of the universe is movement from order to chaos, not the other way around. The only way to beat that curse is to invest energy into a project or objective. If improvement is to be made in anything, especially in the development of mental skills and knowledge, it will be accomplished through blood, sweat, and a few tears. There’s no way around it.
It is my belief that some, but by no means all, professional educators began to lose sight of that need for discipline in learning as we came through the turbulent sixties. They enthusiastically searched for an easier way to teach kids than putting them through the rigors of structured classrooms, examinations, grades, rules, and requirements. Society was changing, authority went out of style, and all the traditional values began to look suspect. Why not throw out convention and try something new? How about—an “open” classroom?
One of the most foolish ideas in the history of education was born. Let me cite excerpts from an article appearing in the Seattle News Journal, May 27, 1971, describing an open classroom in its full glory. Before doing so, however, let me emphasize that the excesses of the past are no longer evident in today’s public schools. I’m hearing good things about the Seattle School District, for example, that experimented back in 1971 with the unstructured program described below. If those days have past, then why do we focus on a time when schools went off the deep end? Because we can’t fully understand who we are today without examining where we’ve been. And because we can learn from the excesses of yesterday, when authority and discipline were distrusted. And because the remnants of this free-wheeling philosophy still lurk within our permissive society and the halls of academia.
The article referred to above was called “The School Nobody Talks About”, and was written by James and John Flaherty. As you read the following excerpts, imagine your own child enrolled in a program of this nature.
Picture if you can, five- to twelve-year-olds riding tricycles down the school hall, painting on the walls, as they wish and what they wish, doing what they want to and when they want, communicating openly with their teachers in three- and four-letter words, dictating school policy, teaching, and curriculum as they wish. And all of this in a public school in Seattle! Far out or impossible? No! Its happening right now in conservative old Seward Park. And the Seattle School District is picking up the tab.
The Elementary Alternative School is an experimental project of the school district. It began in November 1970 and was founded on the premise that regular elementary schools are too restrictive. It was cited that a school should teach the child to learn in a more natural environment and that his motivations to learn should arise from within himself. Also, that a child of any age is capable of making his own decisions and should be allowed to do so.
It’s a kid’s paradise. There is no formal curriculum, no age barriers, no classroom structure, no overall program. In fact, if the child doesn’t want to learn the three Rs he doesn’t have to.
On our tour, no formal classwork was being conducted. The children seemed to mill aimlessly in the three unkept classrooms. Apparently no class was in session. Then we entered the basement of the building next door . . . to consult with Mr. Bernstein (who directs the school). Bernstein . . . pointed out that this was a “fully new concept in learning, as exemplified by A. S. Neill at Springhill, a progressive school in eastern U.S.” Bernstein said that four-letter words are often used to get attention or hammer home a point in his college classes, and he didn’t see that it would harm any of the children in the Alternative School. “You have to communicate with children in the language they understand,” he said.
Bernstein [was] queried on the fact that no formal classes were kept, no grades given, and therefore, how could a pupil finishing the sixth grade enter a regular school. “In six years,” Bernstein replied, “perhaps all our schools will be like this one, and there’ll be no problem.”
Not many school districts experimented with programs as extreme as this one, fortunately, but the tenor of the times held authority and discipline in contempt. A depressing example of that changing philosophy was spelled out in a widely published book entitled Summerhill, by A. S. Neill, to whom Mr. Bernstein referred. I was required to read this ridiculous book while in graduate school. It contradicted everything I believed about children, and indeed, about life itself. But Neill’s writings and work were given great credibility in educational circles, and many teachers and principals (like Bern-stein) were influenced by his laissez-faire philosophy.
Summerhill in England and Springhill in the U.S. were permissive institutions that conformed to the easy-come, easy-go philosophy of their superintendent, A. S. Neill. Resident students were not required to get out of bed in the morning, attend classes, complete assignments, take baths, or even wear clothes. Rarely in human history have children been given wider latitude.
Let me list the elements of Neill’s philosophy that governed his much-vaunted program and which he recommended with great passion to parents the world over:
1. Adults have no right to insist on obedience from their children. Attempts to make the youngsters obey are merely designed to satisfy the adult’s desire for power. There is no excuse for imposing parental wishes on children. They must be free. The best home situation is one where parents and children are perfect equals. A child should be required to do nothing until he chooses to do so. Neill went to great lengths to show the students that he was one of them—not their superior.
2. Children must not be asked to work at all until they reach eighteen years of age. Parents should not even require them to help with small errands or assist with the chores. We insult them by making them do our menial tasks. Neill actually stressed the importance of withholding responsibility from the child.
3. Religion should not be taught to children. The only reason religion exists in society is to release the false guilt it has generated over sexual matters. Our concepts of God, heaven, hell, and sin are based on myths. Enlightened generations of the future will reject traditional religion.
4. Punishment of any kind is strictly forbidden, according to Neill’s philosophy. A parent who spanks his child actually hates him, and his desire to hurt the child results from his own unsatisfied sex life. At Summer-hill, one young student broke seventeen windows without receiving so much as a verbal reprimand.
5. Adolescents should be told sexual promiscuity is not a moral issue at all. At Summerhill, premarital intercourse was not sanctioned only because Neill feared the consequences of public indignation. He and members of his staff sometimes went nude to eliminate sexual curiosity. He predicted that the adolescents of tomorrow would find a more healthy existence through an unrestricted sex life. (What they found was a disease called AIDS and a firsthand knowledge of other sexually transmitted diseases.)
6. No pornographic books or materials should be withheld from the child. Neill indicated that he would buy filthy literature for any of his students who wished to have it. This, he felt, would cure their prurient interests—without harming the child.
7. Children should not be required to say “thank you” or “please” to their parents. Further, they should not even be encouraged to do so.
8. Rewarding a child for good behavior is a degrading and demoralizing practice. It is an unfair form of coercion.
9. Neill considered books to be insignificant in a school. Education should consist largely of work with clay, paint, tools, and various forms of drama. Learning is not without value, but it should come after play.
10. Even if a child fails in school, the matter should never be mentioned by his parents. The child’s activities are strictly his business.
11. Neill’s philosophy, in brief, was as follows: Eliminate all authority; let the child grow without outside interference; don’t instruct him; don’t force anything on him.
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If A. S. Neill had been the only lonely proponent of this assault on authority, he would not have been worthy of concern. To the contrary, he represented an extreme example of a view that became very widely accepted in educational circles. Herbert R. Kohn authored The Open Classroom and helped give respectability to a somewhat more sane version of the concept in public schools. Believe it or not, this was “cutting edge” stuff for more than a decade. We’ve now had twenty-five years to evaluate the fallout from the lessening of discipline and authority in the classroom. Look at what happened to the generation that was influenced most by it.
They concluded in the late sixties that God was dead, that immorality was the new morality, that disrespect and irreverence were proper, that unpopular laws were to be disobeyed, that violence was an acceptable vehicle for bringing change, (as were their childhood tantrums), that authority was evil, that pleasure was paramount, that older people were not to be trusted, that diligence was distasteful, and that their country was unworthy of allegiance or respect. Every one of those components can be linked to the philosophy taught by A. S. Neill, but also believed by many of his contemporaries. It cost us a generation of our best and brightest, many of whom still suffer from the folly of their youth!
Not only did the misguided philosophy set up the student revolution of the late sixties. It also caused serious damage to our school system and the kids who became the victims of it. I was a young teacher at the time and was shocked to see the lack of order and control in some of my colleagues’ classrooms. The confusion was evident at every grade level. Tiny first graders cowed their harassed teachers as systematically as did the boisterous high school students. In some situations, entire classes became so proficient at disrupting order that they were dreaded and feared by their future teachers. It seemed ridiculous for school officials to tolerate such disobedience when it could have been easily avoided. However, in instances when the educators did exercise firmness, many parents protested and demanded leniency for their children.
I have lived long enough, now, to have followed some of those kids into adult life. I’ve talked to them personally. I’ve read their testimonials. I’ve felt their anger. One of the most poignant statements I’ve seen was written in the “My Turn” section of Newsweek magazine, August 30, 1976. The author, Mara Wolynski, was a product of the philosophy I have been describing. Her story, “Confessions of a Misspent Youth,” tells it all.
The idea of permissive education appealed to my mother in 1956 when she was a Bohemian and I was four. In Greenwich Village, she found a small private school whose beliefs were hers and happily enrolled me. I know it was an act of motherly love but it might have been the worst thing she ever did to me. This school — I’ll call it Sand and Sea—attracted other such parents, upper-middle-class professionals who were determined not to have their chil dren pressured the way they had been. Sand and Sea was the school without pain. And it was the kind of school that the back-to-basics people rightly fear most. At Sand and Sea, I soon became an exemplar of educational freedom—the freedom not to learn.
Sand and Sea was run by fifteen women and one man who taught “science.” They were decent people, some old, some young, and all devoted to cultivating the innate creativity they were convinced we had. There was a tremendous emphasis on the arts. We weren’t taught techniques, however, because any kind of organization stunted creativity.
Happiness and Hieroglyphics. We had certain hours allotted to various subjects but we were free to dismiss anything that bored us. In fact, it was school policy that we were forbidden to be bored or miserable or made to compete with one another. There were no tests and no hard times. When I was bored with math, I was excused and allowed to write short stories in the library. The way we learned history was by trying to re-create its least important elements. One year, we pounded corn, made tepees, ate buffalo meat, and learned two Indian words. That was early American history. Another year we made elaborate costumes, clay pots, and papier- mâché gods. That was Greek culture. Another year we were all maidens and knights in armor because it was time to learn about the Middle Ages. We drank our orange juice from tin-foil goblets but never found out what the Middle Ages were. They were just ‘The Middle Ages.’
I knew that the Huns pegged their horses and drank a quart of blood before going to war, but no one ever told us who the Huns were or why we should know who they were. And one year, the year of ancient Egypt, when we were building our pyramids, I did a thirty-foot-long mural for which I laboriously copied hieroglyphics onto the sheet of brown paper. But no one ever told me what they stood for. They were just there and beautiful.
Ignorance Is Not Bliss. We spent great amounts of time being creative because we had been told by our incurably optimistic mentors that the way to be happy in life was to create. Thus, we didn’t learn to read until we were in the third grade, because early reading was thought to discourage creative spontaneity. The one thing they taught us very well was to hate intellectuality and anything connected with it. Accordingly, we were forced to be creative for nine years. And yet Sand and Sea has failed to turn out a good artist. What we did do was to continually form and re-form interpersonal relationships, and that’s what we thought learning was all about, and we were happy. At ten, for example, most of us were functionally illiterate, but we could tell that Raymond was “acting out” when, in the middle of what passed for English, he did the twist on top of his desk. Or that Nina was “introverted” because she always cowered in the corner.
When we finally were graduated, however, all the happy little children fell down the hill. We felt a profound sense of abandonment. So did our parents. After all that tuition money, let alone the loving freedom, their children faced high school with all the glorious prospects of the poorest slum-school kids. And so it came to be. No matter what school we went to, we were the underachievers and the culturally disadvantaged.
For some of us, real life was too much—one of my oldest friends from Sand and Sea killed himself two years ago after flunking out of the worst high school in New York at twenty. Various others have put in time in mental institutions where they were free, once again, to create during occupational therapy.
During my own high-school years, the school psychologist was baffled by my lack of substantive knowledge. He suggested to my mother that I be given a battery of psychological tests to find out why I was blocking out information. The thing was, I wasn’t blocking because I had no information to block. Most of my Sand and Sea classmates were also enduring the same kinds of hardships that accompany severe handicaps. My own reading comprehension was in the lowest eighth percentile, not surprisingly. I was often asked by teachers how I had gotten into high school. However, I did manage to stumble not only through high school but also through college (first junior college—rejected by all four-year colleges, and then New York University), hating it all the way as I had been taught to. I am still amazed that I have a B.A., but think of it as a B.S.
The Lure of Learning. The parents of my former classmates can’t figure out what went wrong. They had sent in bright, curious children and gotten back, nine years later, helpless adolescents. Some might say that those of us who freaked out would have freaked out anywhere, but when you see the same bizarre behavior pattern in succeeding graduating classes, you can draw certain terrifying conclusions.
Now I see my twelve-year-old brother (who is in a traditional school) doing college-level math and I know that he knows more about many other things besides math than I do. And I also see tra ditional education working in the case of my fifteen-year-old brother (who was summarily yanked from Sand and Sea, by my re formed mother, when he was eight so that he wouldn’t become like me). Now, after seven years of real education, he is making impressive film documentaries for a project on the Bicentennial. A better learning experience than playing Pilgrim for four and a half months, and Indian for four and a half months, which is how I imagine they spent this year at Sand and Sea.
And now I�
�ve come to see that the real job of school is to entice the student into the web of knowledge and then, if he’s not enticed, to drag him in. I wish I had been.
It was noble of the Newsweek publishers to print this emotional “confession” by Myra Wolynski. After all, the popular press has been a significant part of the problem, extolling the virtues of avant-garde trends in the classroom. Newsweek magazine, for example, devoted its May 3, 1971, cover story to the topic, “Learning Can Be Fun.” On the cover was an elementary school girl making something with papier-mâché. Four years later, Newsweek‘s cover story considered “Why Johnny Can’t Write.” I wrote the senior editor of Newsweek after the second article appeared, December 8, 1975, and suggested that maybe there was a link between the two stories. Perhaps Johnny couldn’t write because he spent too much time having fun in the classroom. I received no reply.
Please understand, I am a supporter of the arts in the curriculum, and I certainly want the educational process to be as exciting and as much fun as possible. But children will not learn reading, writing, and math by doing papier-mâché. And many of them will not pay the price to learn anything unless they are required to do so! Some educators have disagreed with this understanding and postulated that kids will sweat and study because they have an inner thirst for knowledge.
A former superintendent of public instruction in the state of California is quoted as saying, “To say that children have an innate love of learning is as muddle-headed as to say that children have an innate love of baseball. Some do. Some don’t. Left to themselves, a large percentage of the small fry will go fishing, pick a fight, tease the girls, or watch Superman on the boob tube. Even as you and I!”
