I stood in the sepia dark of the Hall of Human Origins at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Beside me was a knot of teenagers, each balancing a notebook on a palm. Their faces were inclined in the dim light toward a set of skulls not arranged in a tidy line but clustered to show how many different human antecedents walked the Earth at once. I watched the wide-eyed students scan the display for the humble skull in the corner of the display — man. It was a pleasure to observe the students as they wrestled to understand the process of human evolution. But I also found myself thinking about what evolution has in common with education.
I was in the museum with these students as an observer. I had traveled to Brooklyn for the Progressive Education Network Conference, which included visits to progressive schools in New York, one of them being the West Village’s City-As-School. Before the museum, I had spent the morning at City-As, learning about the school from students and the unflappable principal, Alan Cheng.
Cheng described City-As, a public transfer school, as many students’ “last chance.” But when these students — many of whom have experienced schools as sites of violence, exclusion, disaffection, or resistance — enroll at City-As, they do not encounter metal detectors and hall passes, endless rules and penalties. At City-As, students and staff address one another by first names and nearly every staircase landing has a sign that says “Curiosity Over Compliance.” The students spend part of each week in the cheery school building; the rest of the time they spend in internships in the city, learning by doing — working in veterinary or medical practices, nonprofits, and political and arts organizations, for example. Students new to City-As also choose workshops, where they develop the professional skills they’ll need in internships while also experiencing a traditional classroom-style learning experience.
The day I visited was the first day of a new cycle of workshops, including the course on human origins at the museum. The instructor, a museum anthropologist, asked the students to introduce themselves by sharing why they signed up for this workshop and what they already knew about human origins, evolution, or Neanderthals. Their answers were not unlike what I would expect from my own students. One girl said she had hoped the class would allow her to explore the museum and “actually do stuff.” As for what these students already knew, they were fuzzy but enthusiastic: Didn’t anthropologists dig up bones? And were Tasmanian devils extinct or not — or was that Tasmanian tigers? And weren’t there some new bones that had just been discovered in Africa that were total game changers?
This last question came from a boy — Jay, we’ll call him. Jay let us all know that this workshop was his second choice after a public art workshop that had filled up. Smiling, the instructor assured him that there was a lot of art involved in anthropology. “Yeah, all art is the same,” Jay shrugged good-naturedly.
As we headed down to the Hall of Human Origins, I caught up with Jay. “Those bones you were talking about,” I said. “Is that the Rising Star find in Africa?”
“Yeah!” he said. “I saw them on the news!” he blurted, dashing off to catch up with the group that was entering the Hall.
One can only imagine how enthusiastic Jay would’ve been for his first-choice class. I would love to have a class full of Jays; it’s difficult to imagine such an inquisitive, aware, and enthusiastic boy struggling in school. But I don’t know what kind of school Jay came from, and I can imagine why students might find traditional public schooling — which, when it is done particularly badly, features assembly-line models, rigid hierarchies, prison-prep curriculum, de facto segregation, inadequate funding, and too little “actually doing stuff” — boring at best and violent at worst.
I teach at a secular independent day school in Arizona. Annual tuition at our secondary school is comparable to the out-of-state rate at our state universities, though a nearly $2 million annual financial aid budget allows us to provide more than 20 percent of our students with financial aid. Our fenced, suburban 40-acre campus is surrounded by saguaros, not Sbarros. Our students are successful and happy in school. Our school is our students’ first choice, not a last choice.
Our school culture also differs from that of City-As: some classrooms are outfitted with Harkness tables, our students address us by last names, and we give letter grades. We have attendance requirements, a closed campus for all but seniors, required community service hours, and a dress code. A handful of our students with extraordinary interest in and aptitude for specific professions have customized their senior-year experiences to include off-campus work in business or laboratory research. For now, the students who do these “internships” are those with their own initiative and connections, and they are also those who have been most successful in our traditional classroom environment.
But like City-As, our school is joyful and kinetic. Our small average class size of 15 allows students and teachers to develop close, mutually supportive relationships that both groups cite as the best thing about our school. We offer exciting electives to meet student demand, like Coding as Art, Desert Ecology and Environmental Policy, and Ethics and Non-Human Animals. Every August, some of the previous year’s newly minted graduates mill around campus, eager to chat and help with classroom setup. In their last days before departing for college, they come to our campus because it is home. We are more School-as-City than City-as-School.
As different as they are, my school and City-As are two species of the genus school. Independent schools and public schools face different challenges, but both must evolve to better serve students in a changing world. Evolution — I began to realize at the museum — provides a rich cache of metaphors to help us think about the work we do as teachers as well as the changes we would like to see in our organizations:
- Throughout evolutionary history multiple hominid species populated the Earth, subject to natural selection. Our upper school faculty recently embarked on a qualitative research project in which every single faculty member shadows a student for an entire school day. We hope to get past seeing only the policies, values, and methods of our own work without considering the school day from our students’ perspectives. We are striving for a coherence and continuous experience for our students. After completing my own shadow day, however, I am reminded that no teaching style perfectly suits every learner, so we should encourage our schools to be complex learning ecosystems with many “species” of expert teachers, relevant and exciting material, and safe and diversified learning environments. We must then allow students to do the selecting.
- Those game-changing Rising Star bones were found by accident. Likewise, we in independent schools must look in unusual, unpredictable places for ideas and inspiration. We can’t learn only from schools that are culturally or demographically like our own. What if my own school adopted a “curiosity over compliance” approach to dress code? Faculty must be supported, as I have been, to attend conferences and workshops where they will meet and learn from teachers who work in different kinds of schools with different contexts.
- The differences between and among humans though perceivable and valuable, are not genetically encoded. Similarly, American students are diverse. Variations in socioeconomic factors, environment, luck, geography, and temperament mean students enjoy different levels of educational access and attainment, motivation and satisfaction. But all children belong to a single species: human learner. We must ensure that we do not have multiple educational standards for different populations. Whatever we believe is good for student learning — take small class size or the role of the arts or discussion-based classes, for example — we must earnestly endeavor, via political, activist, and civic engagement, to provide to all students, not just our own.
- Bumper stickers and T-shirts misrepresent the complex process of evolution as a simple process of stooped primate turning into man. Similarly, we need to resist the impulse to oversimplify and make a caricature of learning. Schooling is not a matter of inputting a knuckle-dragging kindergartener and, 12 years later, extracting an upright graduate who uses tools. Learning takes as long as it takes and it rarely happens all at once. We must be patient when students don’t seem to progress according to our linear visions. Also, though students don’t interact and create the way we did as students, they are not less sophisticated or complex. Evolution doesn’t go backward.
We must ensure that we do not have multiple educational standards for different populations.
After my visit, in celebration of the boon of bipedalism, I walked eight miles back to my hotel in Brooklyn, reflecting on that first museum tableau — empty plastic skulls to my left, flesh-and-blood students to my right — and I was reminded that to teach is not simply to fill the skulls of students with ideas or content like so much gunshot or mustard seed and then dump it out and see how much the skull held. Teaching is a messy, whole-brain, whole-heart, whole-body, feet-and-hands affair. To teach is to go, often in the dark, to the places where the bones are and start digging, to joyfully welcome the possibility that what you find might challenge everything you know.
Sidebar 1:
From Independent School Bulletin, January 1956
Creative Work And The Skills
Let us consider, first of all, the problem of achieving a sound balance between creative work and the skills. While schools differ in the degree of emphasis upon the two, with the more traditional putting greater stress on the tools of learning and the more liberal on experiences in creative participation, all schools today recognize the responsibility of providing both creative experiences and an adequate mastery of the skills. Thus all teachers must develop facility in finding with children appealing and developing outlets for their energies and at the same time insuring steady progress in the mastery of the essential techniques. In approaching this dual problem, teachers of course differ greatly by reason of temperament, training, and experience. Probably no teacher achieves a perfect balance, and there are excellent teachers who veer considerably to one side of the other. Nevertheless every one of us has to come to terms with the problem.
—From “What Makes a Good Elementary School Teacher,” by Henry H. Welles, headmaster at New Canaan Country School (Connecticut)