Why we think 1970s Open Education failed, and considering what the truth really is...

There are some of us who remember a time, both in the US and the UK, when education seemed to be in search for humanity. In this period test scores mattered less than accomplishments, students became far more involved in, and responsible for, educational decisions, responsibility was something it was assumed children and adolescents could handle, and pedagogy began to meet students where they were. It was a time when teachers and even administrators began to rebel against the American factory schools and the British Disraeli-designed colonial education system.

1975 Open Classroom

Today we are taught that this period was a chaotic failure, but the truth lies elsewhere, and the reason we are told of this "failure" can be keenly instructive.

Little Rock, Arkansas in school integration crisis of 1957 - before

Robert Kennedy touring
eastern Kentucky, 1968

We tend now, after years of political conservatism, to look back at the 1960s and 1970s as a time of dangerous and ineffective turmoil, of assassinations, riots, disruptions, inflation, and the decline of traditional values. Thus we rarely understand the accomplishments. But between 1960 and 1976 a vast number of Americans, including Women, African-Americans, and even some Latinos and Gays,were liberated from those traditional values, with earthshaking changes made in legal racial segregation, legal limitations of women's educational opportunities, job opportunities, and pay, legal exploitation of farm workers, legal arrests for consensual sexual activity between adults. The now much maligned War on Poverty lifted tens of millions of Americans - mostly white Americans to be clear - from "developing world" levels of poverty, by redistributing income from the Northeast and West Coast to states like Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas. When Republicans now say that the American poor have a lot more than the poor elsewhere, that is only true because of The Great Society program, its welfare structures, Medicaid, Medicare, and rural electrification.

"Still, a broad range of researchers interviewed by The New York Times stressed the improvement in the lives of low-income Americans since Mr. Johnson started his crusade. Infant mortality has dropped, college completion rates have soared, millions of women have entered the work force, malnutrition has all but disappeared. After all, when Mr. Johnson announced his campaign, parts of Appalachia lacked electricity and indoor plumbing." (Lowrey, The New York Times, 2014)

And in those years Americans made "old age" much less miserable by increasing income and supporting health care, ended the nation's first ongoing "peacetime" military draft, began enforcing actual rights in the criminal justice system, began allowing the wide use of contraceptives, put men on the moon, invented and built the internet, began cleaning up an environment toxified by years of industrial abuse, began making cars safer, more efficient, and less polluting, forced a corrupt US President to resign, limited the ability of the government to legally spy on citizens without warrants obtained openly, and radically expanded educational opportunity from pre-school through graduate schools.

Poverty rate with/without "Great Society" programs
Graphic, Washington Post (2014)

Maybe not a "golden age," but few periods have seen anywhere near that level of national accomplishment.

Among those accomplishments was broad progress against a systematized and legalized "achievement gap." Whereas in 1960 US classrooms, despite increasing numbers of Dewey-influenced classroom designs with large windows, movable furniture, and doors to the outside, were generally a one-size-fits-all environment of desks in rows, the teacher standing at the front with her or his blackboard, and mind-numbingly boring readers and textbooks turned to the exact same page by every student, by the late 1970s many, many students were experiencing something quite different - from Cuisinaire Rods for math, to Bank Street Readers, from desks grouped into table-like settings to new choice in secondary pathways, from New Math and Whole Language reading to a dramatic widening of the literary canon, from massive changes in dress codes and disciplinary codes to a few radical experiments in grading.

before... the Leave it to Beaver classroom

Classroom Discipline 1950s - as relevance and connection are beginning to be considered

These changes combined with racial integration and the massive expansion of very low-cost (or even effectively free) state university systems to radically alter opportunity in America.

Led by New York (State - expanding from about 35,000 students in 1959 to over 400,000 in 1975 - and City) and California, public universities expanded massively in this period, "In the year before Rockefeller became governor, New York State budgeted $44.5 million for the state university. In 1973, Rockefeller’s last year in office, SUNY state purposes budget was $464.4 million."

At the heart of all of this, however, was an inclusiveness previously unavailable in American or British classrooms, an inclusiveness born of abandoning both the "Protestant Church" classroom model (pews in rows, worshippers staring straight ahead, minister up front as the single focus, everyone in the same book, on the same page, at the same moment), and the "factory school" model (cells and bells).

"What is most striking is that there are no desks for pupils or teachers. Instead, the room is arranged as a workshop.

"Carelessly draped over the seat, arm, and back of a big old easy chair are three children, each reading to himself. Several other children nearby sprawl comfortably on a covered mattress on the floor, rehearsing a song they have written and copied into a song folio.

"One grouping of tables is a science area with . . . magnets, mirrors, a prism, magnifying glasses, a microscope. . . . Several other tables placed together and surrounded by chairs hold a great variety of math materials such as “geo blocks,” combination locks, and Cuisenaire rods, rulers, and graph paper. . . . The teacher sits down at a small round table for a few minutes with two boys, and they work together on vocabulary with word cards. . . . Children move in and out of the classroom constantly." - The New York Times Magazine 1971, as quoted by Larry Cuban

If this sounds a great deal like what progressive school systems are attempting to create today, well then you can understand the ongoing appeal of "human education" to those constantly and continually seeking to undo the industrial education model, from John Dewey to Marie Montessori to John Holtto Neil Postman to Alfie Kohn. Actually, this battle goes back much further, to the initial struggle between those who believed in William A. Alcott's humanistic schools of the 1830s and 1840s, and those who believed in the Prussian Model of factory preparation and compliance training imported by Horace Mann in the 1840s and Henry Barnard in the 1850s.

"Mann grew up in Massachusetts during the early part of the 19th century, where religious tension between Protestants and Catholics dominated public life. Parochial schools, in his view, only reinforced these divisions. The Prussian model, on the other hand, was designed to build a common sense of national identity.

"Applied back home, Mann thought, large groups of students learning together would help to blur the divisions among religious groups and establish a more unified and egalitarian society. And as that model became the American blueprint, Mann's vision ultimately became the foundation for our national system of schooling.

"Mann's vision also made sense for the industrial age in which he lived. The factory line was simply the most efficient way to scale production in general, and the analog factory-model classroom was the most sensible way to rapidly scale a system of schools. Factories weren't designed to support personalization. Neither were schools." - Joel Rose, The Atlantic, 2012

The alternative vision, beginning with Alcott, had children moving about, wondering, investigating, and established multiage environments with children learning from each other. Even the technologies Alcott pushed into American schools - the individual student slate and the big "Black-Board" - were designed to elicit student independence and collaboration. The slate allowed children to lower the cost of failure by not making writing the permanent thing it was with ink. The Black-Board allowed students to gather together on a large surface to work. The individual student desk allowed children to get up and move when they needed to, without kicking each other as happened with benches, "To some children, five minutes would be long enough ; and to most, ten minutes would he the full extent of what would be useful," Alcott noted about sitting still.

So, this tension between industrial education - education as a combination of filtering the population into "useful careers" and education as a method of instilling moral rules on the poor and different - and human education, where children were expected to be children, learning, playing, exploring. And the power in this battle has shifted back and forth over the 180 years of public (state) education.

There isn't any set of age limits in the theories behind the humanistic vision, nor limitations of income class or rural/urban - though in the years since the Reagan Administration the practice is far more common among the wealthy than the poor, and far more common in elementary than secondary. At the peak of political acceptance the concepts reached from kindergarten through high school, with the idea that freedom and responsibility were built in tandem, and that maximum freedom worked most effectively for those whom "regular school" had failed: "The School without Walls was a public school that accepted many of the young people for whom there was really no place anyway, who had already suffered debasement at the hands of parents, other school officials, welfare officers, truant officers, police officers. Parkway offered immunity to truants and “misbehavers” and instead of operating like a waiting room, in which students become accustomed to confinement until the time is right to release them on the assembly line, the school most radically unleashed these young people upon the city itself, asking them to recognize it and use it as their own," writes Sasha Moniker of Philadelphia's legendarily effective Parkway Program. In New Rochelle, New York, the Program for Inquiry, Involvement, and Independent Study - a creation of local teacher Alan Shapiro, NYU professor Neil Postman, and New Rochelle High School Principal James Gaddy, could boast that, "Ninety-seven percent of a 1980s 3I graduating class attended four-year colleges and universities, compared to a regular-school continuing-education rate that was much lower despite including vocational schools and military service," and despite a very high rate of special needs and behavioral issue students. "The traditional dynamic of student as recipient of the teacher’s knowledge was replaced by the question of what kind of experience will be valuable when studying a particular subject. Fundamental to such a situation is the premise, shared by [Elizabeth Cleaners Street School] and Parkway, that teachers are students and students are teachers," writes Moniker, and this altered the essential colonial structure of school - the missionary structure of the classroom in which teachers attempted to 'save and enlighten' those 'in the dark' - and which thus allowed a vastly wider range of students to find success. Even in this over-tested century, "Vicki Gustavson, president of the Connecticut Association of Alternative Schools and Programs and a teacher at the Wallingford Alternative High School, said there was a shorter day — and no clocks or bells — at her school. “Alternative schools are really the grass-roots effort to make sure that no child is left behind because these students would have fallen through the cracks and dropped out of high school,” she said" in The New York Times, and, in the same article, "The [Great Neck, NY] Village School chooses students based largely on referrals, transcripts and their individual needs, and tends to attract an unusually large percentage of special education students — about 50 percent— even though it does not offer special education services beyond that of a traditional high school. Mr. Goldberg said that students with learning disabilities and social and emotional issues often found their problems exacerbated by the stress of a traditional high school."

Open education, the open classroom and the schools-without-walls, succeeded when teachers understood the idea, had time to learn this radically new format, and were given the time, space, and resources to build a new system. The chaotic failures were the result of the opposite - unprepared teachers dumped into vast undifferentiated rooms by incompetent administrators, and schools where the political will to truly embrace universal access to learning did not exist.

"By itself, dividing a classroom into interest areas does not constitute open education; creating large open spaces does not constitute open education; individualizing instruction does not constitute open education. . . . For the open classroom . . . is not a model or set of techniques, it is an approach to teaching and learning.

"The artifacts of the open classroom–interest areas, concrete materials, wall displays–are not ends in themselves but rather means to other ends. . . . In addition, open classrooms are organized to encourage:
• Active learning rather than passive learning;
• Learning and expression in a variety of media, rather than just pencil and paper and the spoken word;
• Self-directed, student-initiated learning more than teacher-directed learning." - The Open Classroom Reader, 1973, Charles Silberman as quoted by Larry Cuban

So, did "Open Education" fail? That's a key question - because it is that assumption which lies behind every teacher, administrator, politician, or parent who says, dismissively, "we tried that before." But to answer the question, perhaps we first must decide whether the purpose of education is social reproduction and wealth preservation, or if it is to expand opportunity for the widest range of children and for society itself.

Because in terms of expanding opportunity, no period can touch the years between 1965 and 1985, the high water mark of alternative education and humanistic educational theories. The mixture of changed pedagogies, racial integration, and aggressive anti-poverty efforts - all of which began to be dramatically undone once Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" entered its second four years - altered, fundamentally, the achievement gap which leaders like Barnard, Elwood Cubberley, and Woodrow Wilson had built into the system.

The data to prove this comes in many forms - in the success of the graduates from the period, those who built the new American information age. In the way the US adapted to a completely changed economic reality with the leadership of the much maligned "Generation X." And in the data itself, the longitudinal test results over the past 40 years.

Alumni of Chicago's Metro High School (1970-1989)

As these changes took many forms, the opportunities opened, and thus the achievement gap closed. Children and adolescents were no longer dissed the minute they entered school, and "at risk" students, whether at risk due to poverty, race, or disability, found an educational system far more willing to meet them where they were. Is it any surprise there was success?

1960 Reader

1972 Reader

OK, still doubt this? Let's look at the data:

"Actual research on the effectiveness of alternative education in the 1970s was thin at best, and much of it was comprised of self-studies and impressionistic data. A review of research on alternative schools by Daniel Duke and Irene Muzio in 1978 concluded that data in 19 evaluations and reports examined did not permit any generalizations about the effectiveness of these schools in educating students. What was clear from the research, however, was students' attitudes about themselves and about school were more positive in alternative settings than in the conventional schools they had previously attended. Other reviews of research on alternative schools in the late 1970s drew the same conclusion. Studies also indicated that positive changes in student' attitudes about schools contributed to higher attendance rates and lower incidence of dropout in alternative schools, particularly among "special needs" students, those "at risk" of failure and/or dropout." (Neumann 2003, p.186)

If I take this paragraph and break it apart based on what I understand about educational research, I see that, back in the 1970s, studies of "alternative educational environments" were often "self-studies" - like, I suppose, those done by Robert Marzano and Robert Slavin in this century - and that they failed to include enough "numbers" - of course in a time of relatively few standardized tests, outside of New York State - but that the clear indications were the same as those claimed - but not quite yet substantiated - by the KIPP Foundation which has caused the federal government to pour millions into that program.

But we can get to numbers if we must, despite schools which were notoriously hard to describe via numbers.

Life Magazine, December 17, 1971

Despite that difficulty, however, the numbers, through the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), we can find evidence much more clear than that for almost anything on the Department of Education's "What Works" Clearinghouse.

The school without walls, Philadelphia's Parkway Program, by John Bremer, Michael Von Moschzisker (1971)

For those whose elementary experience began to be radically different in the mid-1960s and 1970s, the gains at the end of high school - for those traditionally "filtered out," were both remarkable and unmatched. For those at the top, nothing went down.

For those entering their high school senior year, the smallest reading achievement gap
was achieved by those entering school in the mid-1970s, the high point of open education theories.
Four years later, as Reaganism began to have influence, the gap had widened.

The same evidence is clear in mathematics, the much maligned "New Math" led to the
smallest historic racial achievement gap.

The same curve is obvious among those reaching middle school, the growth in achievement for those "at risk" was greatest with "New Math" and "Whole Language" and open classrooms, and it pushed that stubborn "achievement gap" to historically low levels.

For children entering school between 1970 and 1978 the reading achievement gap
was cut in half on the NAEP measurements by age 13, to a level not matched since.

For both African-American and white students, the 1970s were clearly the high point of achievement. Now the political narrative we hear is quite different, but that's why, here, I am using their "facts" and not just the observational data which indicates happier, more engaged, more likely to stay-in-school students.

The peak of equality of outcomes (17-year-olds in the darkest line), came for those
students most impacted by the open education movement.

Is every bit of the above debatable? Well, of course. Its especially debatable within the context of my argument. I have three things going on - racial integration, open education, and dramatic anti-poverty programs all coalescing, and augmented by a fourth, the rapid expansion of very inexpensive university opportunity, so, what was the most important factor? Was there a most important factor?

But what seems difficult to argue is what is often argued - that the educational paradigms of the 1970s proved to be a complete failure - or that open education was a failure - or that open education represented a decline in educational standards. None of the quantitative data supports that view at all. Neither does any of the observed qualitative data.

So when people say, "we tried that before," perhaps it is time to say in reply, "yes, and it worked."

- Ira Socol

Finding UX, Designing UI

Rocking Reading Duck

If you want to design your school... from scratch or in reshaping... you need to begin with two questions...

First: What is the point of your school, in blunt terms, or, in more "professional" words, What is your school's ethos? Why should a child come to your school? What will your students have at the end of their time in your school which will move them toward being happy, competent, capable, passionate adults who will have real choices in their lives in the Mid-21st Century.

And Second: What is the "User Experience" of your students, and what should that User Experience be to best move all students who come through your doors to get to their goals?

Only if you answer these questions can you begin to imagine/design/create the "User Interface" - which in schools is our building, our grounds, our schedules, our curriculum, our pedagogy, and all of our rules - so that all that our "process" is contributes to our goals.

A few days ago I asked a group of elementary (primary) teachers who were wondering about their cafeteria, "begin with, what are you trying to help students learn while they are eating together in your school?"

In the user experience of "school" our users, our kids, see and respond to absolutely everything. Yes, adults do that as well, but adults, in that "the more you know the less you see" filtering, actually see/hear/feel/smell/taste far fewer environmental clues than do kids. So, when a group of American teachers told me, after I had told a story from an Irish Primary School, that "those teachers are teaching life philosophy and not just content," I responded, "I think we are teaching philosophy every minute, it just might be life philosophies we don't much like."

Kids respond to everything...

Henry Barnard, the "evildoer" who designed the American multi-classroom school as we know it, wrote that everything which students saw and did from when they first saw the school in the forming was important - that every entrance, corridor, even where a child hung up their coat was part of the educational process. And he was, in this, absolutely right. It explains why school architecture from 1850 to 1950 often mimicked the authority structures of their age, from churches to courthouses, and it explains why students were pushed to line up - to form queues - entering the school, as compliance, order, and hierarchy were being enforced long before a kid ever got to his or her seat. And why schools after World War II looked like the factories and military facilities of that age.

An hour before school - high school library, Charlottesville, Virginia

website where I found this 1960s
school image sees nothing in doors
to the outside but, "poor security"

But school design and user experience have hardly ever been joined. Even the John Dewey influenced schools with all the doors to the outside of the 1950s and 1960s (really just a recall of William Alcott's ideas of the 1830s-1840s) were taken from the architects by school administrators who never asked the kids how these spaces could be used. And the "failure" of the 1970s open classroom school buildings was never a failure of architecture, but a failure of almost every adult who worked in those buildings to comprehend the idea of "user experience" - they tried to run Henry Ford's 1913 assembly line in a renaissance studio.

Simply put, the reason we find ourselves stuck in Industrial Revolution Era schools, the reason school success in the United States has only crawled from the 1850s adult design of succeeding with 20% of students to our present succeeding with 33%-40% of our students, lies in our inability to begin to match the User Experience of education to what we really want education to accomplish.

Third graders create their computer lab

So, what do we want for our children? If we want them - all of them - to grow up to be critical thinking global communicators who can investigate and succeed with the widest range of choices possible... effective citizens of democracies able to collaborate with each other and make a better world... voracious creators who absorb stories and information and use all that to dig out the problems which bedevil us and build solutions to those problems... empathetic, healthy members of a planet, a society, a tribe, and a family... well... what is the design of our schools - again, spaces, schedule, pedagogy, curriculum - contributing to those goals? and what is doing the opposite?

Working voluntarily and comfortably, in many ways

Last week we turned to our users to try to understand. We asked 500+ "elementary" school (primary, grades K-5) students - all the students of one school - to participate in a charrette to help begin to design the future of their school. We did show them a few images to begin to free them from "the understood," but we worked really hard to limit any adult influence on this work. We adults have seen so many schools, and we "know" way too much - especially about what we think is impossible - and we needed kids to show us the vision they would build with their unblinkered eyes.

We got many, many ideas - from Kindergärtners wanting cow tables and a castle with a dragon (what good is a castle without a dragon anyway?), to multiple requests for rooftop reading decks and reading treehouses, a cafeteria softserve machine, a soft student lounge, rolling science labs, movable cubes to read/work in, carpets, bean bag chairs, more outside doors, a big slide to get between the upper and lower playgrounds (ending in a trampoline or not), more art, gym every day (they currently have it four times a week), a zip line to get from one end of the school to the other, far more color - and kid-relevant color - in the school, a "giant robot bluebird which would walk the hallways saying hi to students," and choice - choice - choice...

Third and Fifth graders at work in Charrette, we had paper, and we had video cameras
they could explain ideas to...

Choice in classroom seating (or choosing not to sit), choice in tables/worksurfaces, choices in how to read books, choices in when to do what, choices in working inside or out, choices of where to play, and the choice to do work in school - with their peers - not at home with their parents.

The ideas spilled out in all directions...

None of this is absurd. None of it. Why can't kids get softserve frozen yogurt after lunch? Why can't the school build a castle and a dragon with the 5-year-olds? Maybe a zip line could cross the playground? You'd have to be a pretty weak teacher not to be able to use that in teaching many parts of the curriculum. When I mentioned the robot bluebird to Melissa Techman, one of my favorite school librarians, her immediate response was, "that's why I need those big cabinets I want so I would have all the stuff to build that kind of thing all ready."

And why can't school teach constant, continuous, internal feedback informed choice? How else can we help kids grow up into citizens of a true democracy, and able to make choices which work for them as adults?

Fifth graders eat lunch and debrief the ideas - "what will grownups say no to, and
how do we argue with them?"

Essentially, if I took in the vast amount of ideas and grouped them quickly - they wanted choices, comfort, warmth (many requests for wood floors), the ability to be outside, better lighting (dimmer switches, lamps), and places to both work together and to get away to quiet. They wanted to explore the world not just read or hear about it. Plus they wanted a school that was fun and that they looked forward to entering every day.

Anything radical there? Anything which really isn't part of our kids learning how to be the mid-21st century citizens and humans we want them to be?

Our next steps seem like a curriculum built in a great dream - some kids will inventory the school and grounds - what do we have now? how do we use it or not? Others might label the trees and plants around the school. Some might consider how a swing becomes a place to teach physics and math and perhaps poetry and decide how that might work. Still others might work over the idea of what might be quick, and what takes big resources and thus more time, along with what might be easy - and what might be very hard.

And we think the end result will be a better school, better learning, and kids with more skills and more capabilities. Which is what we want our user interface to help create, right?

- Ira Socol

Re-thinking the Middle School

We tend to do everything wrong for kids between 12 and 15. We pretend they are "adults" in terms of care needs and responsibilities, which they are not. We pretend they are children intellectually and physically, and in terms of rights, which they are not. We dismiss their capabilities and hype their potential as threats. We are cruel to them, and we send every possible message that we don't care about them.

And then we're surprised that they don't like us, or do what we want them to do.

We need to stop denying who these kids are..

I wonder if "we" - that collective we - are looking at these kids at all. Sometimes I wonder if we are interested at all.

I begin by being stunned that every teacher of teens has not read this National Geographic article on the New Science of the Teenage Brain. This was not written in "journal speak," it is not long, and yet, it captures the essence of contemporary brain research regarding teens, and a professional educator not reading it (since it is free to read), smacks of malpractice.

Here is a key passage from that article: "We're so used to seeing adolescence as a problem. But the more we learn about what really makes this period unique, the more adolescence starts to seem like a highly functional, even adaptive period. It's exactly what you'd need to do the things you have to do then." Followed by a critical analysis: "Let's start with the teen's love of the thrill. We all like new and exciting things, but we never value them more highly than we do during adolescence. Here we hit a high in what behavioral scientists call sensation seeking: the hunt for the neural buzz, the jolt of the unusual or unexpected ... Although sensation seeking can lead to dangerous behaviors, it can also generate positive ones: The urge to meet more people, for instance, can create a wider circle of friends, which generally makes us healthier, happier, safer, and more successful. This upside probably explains why an openness to the new, though it can sometimes kill the cat, remains a highlight of adolescent development. A love of novelty leads directly to useful experience. More broadly, the hunt for sensation provides the inspiration needed to "get you out of the house" and into new terrain, as Jay Giedd, a pioneering researcher in teen brain development at NIH, puts it."

National Geographic photo by Kitra Cahana

That teenage brain is supposed to be both sensation-seeking and dismissive of adult opinion. If, in evolutionary terms, the teenage brain did not do those things, ten-year-olds would remain ten-year-olds - emotionally, socially, cognitively. 

The problem is that, despite claims to the contrary, many, or most of the actions of "middle schools" seem to be designed to keep kids at age ten, and seem designed around only the idea of training compliance. But that is not what our kids need, and it really is not what our society needs.


The Re-Think

What kind of "school" would these early teenagers really need? What could it look like? How would it work?

Middle School often begins with the definite division of learning into so-called "content areas," an idea pushed firmly into law in the past twenty years with the myth of the "highly qualified teacher." Of course being a "highly qualified teacher" is not about subject/content knowledge, as anyone who has attended a university lecture can testify, it is about being a leading learner for a group of kids. But this "qualification" mentality - "subject area" mentality - is exactly the opposite of what kids, especially 12-14-year-olds, need. They need a holistic view of learning which encourages them to build bridges across knowledge areas, and across areas of the brain. 

no comment necessary...

Middle School also introduces an absurdly false concept of "adult responsibility" which tells kids that the adults in the school are clueless.We insist that every middle school kid "act like an adult" when it suits us, but never when it suits them, and if you have any memory at all, you know that every middle school kid knows this. "You're old enough to be responsible for yourself," counts when it comes to being marked "late" for class, but not if you are ever out of direct line of sight for a seated librarian. It counts when you get a grade but not when you ask to do something. It counts when they charge you adult admission to a theatre, but not when you want to see a film about high school. Of course it counts if you commit a crime, not if you want a drink.And Middle School starts with violating all sense of teenage time and space. The adolescent brain struggles with contemporary temporal standards - actually - most humans do, but 13-year-olds haven't yet been fully beaten into submission.

'"Bully," an documentary about the nation's teen-bullying epidemic, would exclude much of its intended school-aged audience if the Motion Picture Association of America refuses to ease its R rating"

So teens are either, depending on need and mood, in a great rush, or moving very slowly. Sometimes they run to things without much forethought, other times they need 15 minutes with a mirror, or staring out a window. Sometimes they're up at dawn, more often they really are not functioning before 10 in the morning. And in space, teens seem - to both my observations and memory - to need equal parts touching each other, and being quite isolated. They, and this seems especially true of today's more global teens, are not likely to tolerate the nonsensical Puritan "American Distance" (always an imposed value, never a natural one for most). They want real physical (not necessarily sexual) contact - perhaps because they do not get much of it from adults these days - and they need distance - "alone time" - for private processing.

Our Middle Schools frown on all of these needs. "We" don't tolerate time flexibility. "We" don't want kids touching. "We" don't want them off on their own.

In all, our Middle Schools are a recipe for disaster. And the recipe works in most places.

Our early adolescents need something completely different. They need schools designed for them, not for us. Schools designed for growth and learning, not compliance and conformity. Schools designed to build the skills teens need, not designed to be the holding cages we have created.

First of all, teens need ownership, they need to believe that spaces and programs are "their's" not "our's." Is that really such a foreign concept?

Well, begin by stopping your references to how your middle schoolers don't respect "your things" or "your room." I'm sorry folks, few prisoners respect their prison - and prison, according to Barack Obama's State of the Union speech and the statements of many other "leaders," is exactly what school is for most adolescents.

School as a learning studio suite... Brussels, Belgium

If your school is not a "prison," if students are in control of their time, space, comfort, academic choices, tools, and methods - like adults - then students will have "ownership" of their environment, and like most of God's creatures, they will respect that environment. And you know what? These kids have nothing to prove to you... it is you who have to prove your trust and value to them. Remember, their brains are already designed to ignore the older generation, so it might be wise to stop giving them reasons to do just that.

Classroom furniture from Herman Miller

Second, teens need comfort. Really. Comfort. Just put that word at the top of your list. Not your comfort, teachers - administrators - legislatures, their comfort. ""We too often consult our own convenience, rather than the comfort, welfare, or accommodation of our children," William Alcott wrote in 1832. This means choices in seating - real choices - including standing or lying down. It means choices in work surfaces, choices in tools, choices in time.

William A. Alcott
"the comfort, welfare, or
accommodation of
our children"

If this was 1832... and it was, in the book which "designed" the American classroom: "Again—no provision has been made for the pupils standing at higher desks a part of the time, because it is believed they may sit without injury for about half an hour at a time, and then, instead of standing, they ought to walk into the garden, or exercise in the play-ground a few moments, either with or without attendants or monitors. Sitting too long, at all events, is extremely pernicious...

"The relative position of each pupil should occasionally be changed from right to left, otherwise the body may acquire a change of shape by constantly turning or twisting so as to accommodate itself to the light, always coming from a particular window, or in the same general direction.

"If a portion of the play-ground is furnished with a roof, the pupils may sometimes be detached by classes, or otherwise, either with or without monitors, to study a short time in the open air, especially in the pleasant season. This is usually as agreeable to them, as it is favorable to health. A few plain seats should be placed there. A flower garden, trees, and shrubs, would furnish many important lessons of instruction. Indeed, I cannot help regarding all these things as indispensable, and as consistent with the strictest economy of space, material, and furniture, as a judicious arrangement of the school-room itself.

"Sensible objects, and every species of visible apparatus, including, of course, maps, charts, and a globe, are also regarded as indispensably necessary in illustrating the sciences. They not only save books, time, and money, as has been abundantly proved by infant schools, but ideas are in this way more firmly fixed, and longer retained. In the use of books, each child must have his own ; but in the use of sensible objects and apparatus, one thing, in the hands of the instructer, will answer the purposes of a large school, and frequently outlast half a dozen books," how have we gotten so stupid in the 180 years since?

Finally, adolescents need a curriculum which engages. If you read that National Geographic article you will learn all about adolescent decision making, and, you'll realize that every kid in that Middle School is making perfectly logical decisions about what you, the teacher and administrator, are offering.

Is there any reason that any adolescent would care about what you are offering?

This is a microeconomic decision. For anything we do, there is an opportunity cost. Even the decision to pay attention to the teacher for five minutes has to be weighed against the other things you might be doing during that five minutes - daydreaming about the boy/girlfriend, wondering who'll get into the NCAA tournament, imagining tonight's soccer game, considering a more interesting subject. If what you are "selling" isn't understood as worth that five minutes, your students would have to be fools to listen to you. And they are not fools.

In a favorite school moment, a math teacher walked up to a school librarian and complained, "This kid drives me crazy, he'd rather go to Saturday School than come to my class." The librarian looked at the teacher and said, "Well, you have to think about that."

Indeed. As I once wrote in a short story, "They all say I "make bad decisions." Everybody says that. But they're wrong about that too. I make decisions they don't like, but they're not bad." Keep in mind, there are two sides to decision-making, and "reasonable alternatives" lead to better decisions.

So if you offer adolescents project-based learning which connects with their passions, you may suddenly find a bunch of kids lined up and ready to work. If you offer them pointless arithmetic, or books no one really wants to read, they will - they should - make other choices.

The time to change is now. Every year, in almost every place, 5th graders doing great work turn into sullen, unhappy 6th graders who fail those high-stakes tests. That's not genetics, and its not hormones, that is "us," with our high-school-styled, classroom-changing, grim-corridoring, bell-ringing, subject-divided, planner-driven, recess-missing Middle Schools.

So before another school year begins, if you are in the business of Middle School, there is probably damn little that you are doing that shouldn't be changed. And there are really no good excuses for not making those changes.

You're the adults, right?

- Ira Socol

Learning Space

Above is the best educational space in the College of Education at Michigan State University. Just off the building's entrance, in a heavily trafficked zone, there is this space overlooking the Red Cedar River. Behind "the photographer" is a coffee shop, and in this area there are booths and big tables and small tables, high tables and desk height tables. Regular chairs and bar height chairs. Bar stools. Benches, couches, and soft chairs. And a broad window sill to sit on. At the far end of the picture are quieter rooms with similar furniture mixes, including a couple of tables separated from other spaces by a level change. To the left, out of the picture above, is a small maze like zone of screens creating places for one to four people to gather quietly, and next to that, is an open zone filled with creation equipment - powerful computers and tools for video production, interactive white boards, giant monitors, etc.

This arrangement allows people to find their comfort zone, whether individually or as groups. It affords them "what they need" - whether that be fast wireless or "decent" coffee or a pita wrap or a doughnut or, yeah, a flip camera or a powerful scanner. You can have quiet and (a certain level of) privacy, or you can be loud and very public.

But most importantly, this space is an intersection. It is where people from every different part of the college bump into each other, meet, discover, talk, share. It is where silos break down and communities mingle and overheard conversations become opportunities for intellectual cross-pollination.

It is our "commons."

How different that is from our classrooms, our formal conference rooms. How different this is from the K-12 classrooms our students work in.

In 1832, when William A. Alcott wrote his "Essay on the Construction of Schoolhouses" and introduced the classroom-as-we-know-it, with desks and chairs all the same in rectangular rooms, he was advancing a certain idea of education, and a certain conception of society. He was trying to both make students more comfortable, protect female dignity, and support teachers. Alcott is no villain here, but we might think that (a) times have changed, (b) student needs have changed, and (c) our knowledge of the young brain and the learning process has grown in the 178 years since. Alcott, a keen observer, would - I think - be shocked to find his designs still central.

Alcott's classroom, 1832

This notion of "the commons" really matters, on so many levels. If your school is broken into little dis-connected rooms for discrete age-groups and subjects, if your classrooms are filled with one kind of desk and one kind of chair, you have created extreme limits on your pedagogical opportunities.

You have prevented much "peer" tutoring, you have prevented kids from joining ideas together, you have forced yourself into disciplining uncomfortable children, and you have blocked "natural" learning paths.

Remember, when Alcott created his rows of desks, at least his classroom already included all ages, dealt in all subjects, had no set time-schedule, and offered big windows looking outside on two-sides, specifically arranged to the natural sequence of the day would be obvious. Your classroom probably lacks many of those benefits.

Those are not the only ways in which we actually offer our students a "worse" experience than what Alcott was recommending:

"Again—no provision has been made for the pupils standing at higher desks a part of the time, because it is believed they may sit without injury for about half an hour at a time, and then, instead of standing, they ought to walk into the garden, or exercise in the play-ground a few moments, either with or without attendants or monitors. Sitting too long, at all events, is extremely pernicious...

"The relative position of each pupil should occasionally be changed from right to left, otherwise the body may acquire a change of shape by constantly turning or twisting so as to accommodate itself to the light, always coming from a particular window, or in the same general direction.

"If a portion of the play-ground is furnished with a roof, the pupils may sometimes be detached by classes, or otherwise, either with or without monitors, to study a short time in the open air, especially in the pleasant season. This is usually as agreeable to them, as it is favorable to health. A few plain seats should be placed there. A flower garden, trees, and shrubs, would furnish many important lessons of instruction. Indeed, I cannot help regarding all these things as indispensable, and as consistent with the strictest economy of space, material, and furniture, as a judicious arrangement of the school-room itself.

"Sensible objects, and every species of visible apparatus, including, of course, maps, charts, and a globe, are also regarded as indispensably necessary in illustrating the sciences. They not only save books, time, and money, as has been abundantly proved by infant schools, but ideas are in this way more firmly fixed, and longer retained. In the use of books, each child must have his own ; but in the use of sensible objects and apparatus, one thing, in the hands of the instructer, will answer the purposes of a large school, and frequently outlast half a dozen books."

In other words, we don't even afford our students today the best ideas of 1832, but a pale reflection of that design science.

So today we must do better. Today our students are much more isolated from society than they were in 1832. Today our students are not parts of big, multi-generational households with numerous siblings around them. Today our students do not play in village squares or farm-yards where all the news and sciences of the world are on display.

So we need not simply dispose of Alcott's rows, we must create Jeffersonian "Academical Villages" with the kinds of urban intersections and parks and coffee shops where people gather, get comfortable, and share human knowledge. We must allow - encourage - our kids to interact, to learn with each other, to collaborate and grow together.

Please, lets stop teaching in a bad replica of an 1832 learning space. We can do better.

- Ira Socol