Grit Part 4: Abundance, Authenticity, and the Multi-Year Mentor

A number of us in the school central office I work in share a common thread from childhood. Whatever the circumstances of our lives, whatever the challenges, we were afforded a key luxury: we had in our lives some adult who stuck with us for more than a single year. We had a multi-year mentor.

Industrial education has many destructive effects, but one rarely focused on is the refusal of our school design to allow adult support to stretch beyond a single school year. We have sixth grade teachers and tenth grade teachers. We have middle schools and high schools. We have programs, and thus teachers, who only work with certain age kids. We sometimes even have separate coaches for different age-defined sports. And this is disastrous. By doing this we create the ultimate scarcity of support.

"Beside my father, Coach Conaway was by far the most important man in my life. He knew about my family and the struggles we had. He gave me a chance. When I spent time with him, I felt smart and supported. He asked me tough questions. He told me stories about his childhood. He let me know when he was proud of me and when he was disappointed, and I always came back for more.  He got the best out of me. He helped me go on to college, and when I became an English teacher and wrestling and track coach with my first job, I emulated his approach." - Matt Haas

If resilience is our goal, I suggest we need, at a minimum, three things: The abundance which allows children space, time, resources, and safety. An authenticity of task which makes effort relevant. And, I now want to add, the luxury of multi-year mentoring, multi-year adult support, in a deep and meaningful way.

For me these three things came together in one person, a teacher named Alan Shapiro. Alan offered me space - the ability to not be in a classroom, time - a lack of deadlines, resources - a city full of learning opportunities instead of those limited by school walls, and safety - the certainty that I would always be welcomed back. He offered me authenticity of task - I did real work, language arts at a radio station, social studies at city hall, with real audiences. And perhaps most importantly he was there for me for four years, long enough to allow trust to build, long enough to impact my habits in significant ways, long enough to alter my long-term thinking.

Outside Chicago's Fenger High School,
if we're waiting to fix this here, we are
way, way too late.

At its heart, the debate between Paul Tough and I about "grit" is about who the primary burden of change should lie with. Tough's book - How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character- is primarily about how to "cure" (I do not necessarily mean this negatively), how to change, children. In his follow ups, and apparently now in his book tour speeches, and yes, in the last chapter of his book, he argues for some social change - improved welfare systems, better "wrap around" services, increased funding, yet his book is - titled, if we remember, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, not, "What Children Need: The Supports Our Society Must Provide." This is one perspective.

As you know, my writings are primarily about how to change systems. (This is different than my argument with Angela Duckworth, which is about both imposing religious beliefs in schools and beliefs in Social Darwinism.) This is another perspective.

In this debate Mr. Tough believes me to be elitist and theoretical. He doubts my understandings of "reality." I, on the other hand, have to admit to seeing him as an elitist diletante, at best a reporter for an elite news organization with no commitment to fundamental change, at worst a person willing to use the misery of children for profit without even having the courage to tackle the big issues. Both characterizations are likely unfair, and yet, these characterizations expose the depth of the divide which separates the "character camp" from those of us opposed to that.

School not working? Cure the child...

A number of years ago, I can't believe I actually found these, at the beginning of our northern hemisphere school year, both The New York Times and the Guardian ran stories about the difficulties of children beginning secondary school. What struck me then - what still hits me in the face - was that The Times story was about what psychiatric medicines should be given to children traumatized by their schools, while the Guardian article was about how schools needed to change adult behaviors, class organization, and even architecture in order to make students comfortable.

So Tough and I have been working parallel stories, like those two news organizations were, one embedded in the North American myth of individual responsibility, individual fault, and an individual relationship with God, the other based in, OK, a more Catholic/Socialist, even European, vision of social responsibility. Yet the fact that they are parallel does not mean that they do not collide, and it does not mean that we're not entitled to make our own moral judgements on the argument.

Abundance: Space, Time, Resources, Trust (High School HackerSpace)

For me, it is essential that we first ask questions about our systems, that we first ask what we can do to stop damaging children. If we do not, as I've said in this series before, we create damaged children at a far faster rate than we can possibly help them. Whatever the merits of the interventions Tough's book champions, from poorly prepared principals and questionable chess coaches on one end of the spectrum to deeply caring, deeply involved support on the other, nothing he promotes will halt the damage going on daily. I think we must be better than that.

Focusing instead on those three essentials, abundance, authenticity, and adult long-term human support will change the damage equation. We know that. And since we know that, we need to do it.

Authenticity: If the task has inherent value to the child, they will persist
(Elementary MakerSummer School)

Abundance: the spaces, time, resources, and supports our children need. This does require things to change, from taxpayer/community attitudes to those of teachers and administrators who put adult needs above the needs of children. It may require changing structures - architectural, time, and curricular. It may require changing work days. It may require different school district divisions. It may require teachers to give up "ownership" of classrooms. It will require investment. It will require new professional learning.

Authenticity: One of the keys to persistence on anything in life is relevance. How long would most people stay in a job which did not offer some kind of direct reward? For most jobs that comes as pay which enables the worker to have many other things and to avoid many miseries. For some other jobs - long term volunteering, for example, this comes with somewhat less tangible, but still quite real rewards. But in school we expect children to work - in some cases to work really, really hard, for completely intangible rewards. If you are one of those students for whom As matter, there can be a reward to schoolwork. That's the wonder of school for those completely dependent on adult approval and extrinsic rewards - grades and behavior rules actually work. But for others, what might we offer? We cannot even offer any promise that "education" will be a successful path out for children in poverty, as Paul Thomas makes clear in his most recent post on "The Grit Narrative," the odds are against this being true. A child might be the best, hardest working, best grade-making student on the South Side of Chicago or in inner Cleveland, or even in Martinsville, Virginia and still walk out of his house and get shot. This is, as Thomas says, no meritocracy.

So, why would kids in poverty put in the effort? Hell, why would any kid? I say all the time, why would a child who struggles with reading - and a large percentage do - put in that effort if the only reward is the worthless literature of school "leveled reading" books? And we all know that math becomes a disaster when math teachers cannot offer any relevant reason why anyone would need or want to know any of that subject. But for children in poverty this divide begins to extend to everything in school.

Eric Juli, who leads an inner-city school in Cleveland, Ohio wrote - on the issues of "grit," "slack," and "abundance":
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"I know students who travel two hours to come to school; a place where they don’t feel valued, respected, cared for, and accepted...

"I have plenty of students who are below grade level. But I have plenty of students who are at or above grade level too. Regardless of how they read, write, or do math, most of my students are currently failing. And yet they are the toughest kids I know. If grit is just being tough, and persevering, then why are my kids struggling academically so much? Here’s what I think. The toughness my kids exhibit in life does not transfer to school. Academic perseverance, academic stick-to-it-ivness, academic courage, academic behaviors, academic skills, academic dispositions, do not transfer just because a student is “gritty” outside of school.

"My students with one shirt, no food, who travel two hours to get to school, who give up at nothing in life outside of school, give up all the time, a thousand times a day, in academic settings. I don’t really know Ira, but I think I can hear him say at this point, that this is what white middle class conformity expects of them and it isn’t right.

"To that I say, of course it isn’t right. But it’s the world. It also isn’t right that my students are in poverty to begin with. But they are; so we deal with it. I can only address what we have control over. To get out of poverty, my students need to be successful in school. I’ve built a career believing that education is the ticket out. To be successful in college and careers, my students need school-tough. And they just don’t have it. What’s right has very little to do with what is. 

Why doesn't "life tough" translate to "school tough"? Because school, all too often, has not a thing to do with the lives of our students. And if school was bad about this historically - think of Mark Twain's documentation of this in Huck Finn - we make it worse every day. Two key fallacies of our Common Core are, (a) that age-based curriculum makes any sense at all, and that (b) localized curriculum - what Yong Zhao calls "mass localization" - is somehow bad. Only a person with no understanding at all of the diversity of America would think that its a "great idea" for Eric's tenth graders and those in Scarsdale, New York to have the same curricular and academic design.

It isn't just that it's OK for Virginia kids to get a different sense of history and literature than do New York kids or Michigan kids, it is that the very understanding of how we read and analyze text might need to change between Fairfax County, Virginia and Esmont, Virginia, between Shaker Heights, Ohio and Eric's school's neighborhood. Why? Because children begin in very different places and live in very different worlds, and the path to success is not made equitable by making it equal.

Now "relevance" does not mean "less," but it should mean "very different." We might need to alter the way we teach completely, the order in which we teach things completely. We might need to make our work much more hands-on for some kids, or connect the work to worlds we, if we're middle class adults, do not know very well.  We may need to read different texts, use numbers in new ways, consider science differently. And we're incredibly dumb about that in schools - we all know, for example - that once we put dollar signs in front of decimal numbers kids tend to understand them, but most American schools still refuse to do that first. I once saw a ninth grade biology teacher complain on Twitter that her students weren't interested. "Really?" I tweeted back, "you must be talking about the wrong bodies if you're boring 14-year-olds." I've had to fight with middle school teachers to use YouTube sports videos in speed and velocity lessons. I've seen hundreds of history lessons made completely uninteresting by focusing on dates and the adventures of long dead white guys. And that's what we refuse to do for middle class kids...

Teaching the structure of mythic storytelling need not be a lecture

Breaking the rules of outdated, honestly never particularly effective, pedagogy is step one, for every child, but a crucial step one for our most "at-risk" children. Breaking the boundaries of traditional school rules is step two. From attendance requirement to assignment due dates, we need to think differently to allow children a greater abundance of options which can offer authenticity. Rethinking control can help too. If your school has any WiFi at all, open it up, then go beg Verizon and AT&T to collect used Android phones for you and build your technology options that way. Contemporary technology builds relevance in ways textbooks and the walls of a classroom cannot possibly. Afraid that will open up drug-dealing and bullying? I've got news for you, you are not solving those problems by blocking technology use.

Your mission is to make every class, every day, worth your student's time and attention. Not worth it by your standards, worth it by their standards. Every day, every minute, every child makes the microeconomic decision to do the work of your class by comparing the apparent reward to the apparent cost (effort). For kids, all over, who spend an hour or more just getting to school, for kids for whom school attendance has a direct and immediate cost vs. not attending, your need for relevance goes way, way up.

But in the end, it's all about relationships. What keeps adolescents on track, as I referenced at the top, are adults who are there. "Look," President Obama said in July 2012 in Roanoke, Virginia - bizarrely controversially, "if you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own... If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help." And that help works best when it extends across real time, not school time.

"somebody along the line gave you some help"

"School time," a class a day for even a year, isn't "adolescent need time" or "child need time." This is why kids usually do better in elementary schools than in secondary schools. Why they do even better with teachers who loop with them, why they do even better than that with long-term multiage environments. This is why high school graduates looking back are most likely to thank their coaches or the rare multiple year or multiple class teachers when they look back. 

"The term "mentor" has its roots in Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey. In this myth, Odysseus, a great royal warrior, has been off fighting the Trojan War and has entrusted his son, Telemachus, to his friend and advisor, Mentor. Mentor has been charged with advising and serving as guardian to the entire royal household. As the story unfolds, Mentor accompanies and guides Telemachus on a journey in search of his father and ultimately for a new and fuller identity of his own." (Anderson and Shannon, 2012)

Length of the mentoring relationship, even the perception at the start of the expected duration, can change everything. "[Y]outh may have experienced unsatisfactory or rejecting parental relationships in the past. Consequently, they may have developed internal representations of relationships that incorporate fears and doubts about whether others will accept and support them (Bowlby, 1982; Egeland, Jacobvitz, & Sroufe, 1988)," say Grossman and Rhodes, 2002. "When such adolescents encounter cues that relationships will not proceed, however minimal or ambiguous, they may readily perceive intentional rejection from their mentors." In simpler terms, ones we see every day, research supports what we know. The "at risk" ninth grader is far more likely to invest in the relationship with a sports coaching staff he expects to have alongside him for four years than in the relationship with an English teacher he knows will end in nine months. Why would we provide this kind of essential support for football, basketball, even cheerleading but not with academics? I think that's a question we must ask ourselves.

We could reorganize ourselves as faculties. We could assemble teams which might carry middle school or high school children across their time in our schools. That might make our work a bit harder, but it might begin to offer our students that abundance of time, support, and trust they most need.

Laura Deisley wrote on Eric Juli's blog that kids, "are coming to us from different and very real contexts and yet equally yearning for relationship and purpose. What your kids learn outside of school, and we are associating with "grit," is driven by both relationships and purpose. It is not their choice, and God knows they should not have to be in that situation. And, you're right we cannot change their immediate condition. However, if we too narrowly define outcomes--academic "success" as you call it--then they aren't going to see a purpose that is worth expending any more effort."

Abundance offers opportunity. Authenticity offers that purpose. Relationship offers that support. And I do not care where we teach, or who we teach, I believe that we can alter our systems to provide more of those three things than we do today. And by doing that we can begin to change the equations which defeat our children.

- Ira Socol

The System Effect

The interesting thing to me about Ayn Rand - well, it's not her writing, her books are as fourth rate literarily as they are philosophically - is that she is perhaps the last Leninist quoted by any "mainstream" American political figure.

portrait of a young Leninist:
a 1925 Ayn Rand bookcover

Now Ayn Rand is, of course, no Marxist. Marxism being a rather "Catholic" utopian vision of the perfectability of all humanity (my translation). But Ayn Rand is a pure Leninist - "The principle of democratic centralism and autonomy for local Party organisations implies universal and full freedom to criticise, so long as this does not disturb the unity of a definite action; it rules out all criticism which disrupts or makes difficult the unity of an action decided on by the Party." (Lenin, V.I. (1905) Freedom to Criticise and Unity of Action, from Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1965, Moscow, Volume 10, pages 442-443. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1906/may/20c.htm  ). Leninism includes ideals of global revolution - which Ayn Rand also insists on - as well as a belief that one is not permitted to disrupt the "inevitable march of history" - and that basic framing, "the ends justify the means," which is the point of Ayn Rand's novels.

Just as, no matter how he might object to the label, Nathan Harden, author of that new right-wing porn best seller Sex and God at Yale (which I suspect all male Romney campaign staffers are reading on their private jets at night while their wives are at home banging the pool boys), is a "classic Yalie," as smug and superior and intolerant of the world as any sexually-active Ivy Leaguer in New Haven, Connecticut has ever been. In this - and not at all intellectually - does Harden reflect one of his claimed heroes, William F. Buckley, Jr.

"The hidden curriculum is the curriculum," my friend and mentor Lynn Fendler is fond of saying, and Rand, Harden, Buckley are all deep proof of this concept. Ayn Rand is a proud product of Petrograd State University in the early 1920s, one of the students there who most purely absorbed the Leninist theories flowing around here, no matter her reaction to whatever academic content was in play. She writes like those other boring Soviet polemicists of her time, she argues as they do, she is as one-sided as they are. 

She cannot really help it. The affect of the educational system which "created" her has had its expected effect. Compare Rand, for a moment, to John Reed, the oft-forgotten early developer of "New Journalism." Reed was the child of wealth, but in the America of his time, a kind of "wild west wealth." He was a "poor student" who, upon admission to Harvard in 1906, failed to become part of the club and football culture, and instead ran with a kind of "Cambridge underground" of swimmers, Lampoon writers, theatre majors, and socialists. "All this made no ostensible difference in the look of Harvard society, and probably the club-men and the athletes, who represented us to the world, never even heard of it. But it made me, and many others, realize that there was something going on in the dull outside world more thrilling than college activities, and turned our attention to the writings of men like H.G. Wells and Graham Wallas, wrenching us away from the Oscar Wildian dilettantism which had possessed undergraduate litterateurs for generations," he later wrote. (Hicks with Stuart, John Reed, pg. 33.)

Sergei Eisenstein (and Company), Oktyabr. - or - Ten Days that Shook the World, film 1927

Reed was a Marxist. A dedicated Marxist.  But Reed could never quite get to Leninism, no matter how hard he tried, and he tries very hard to convince both the reader and himself in his masterwork, Ten Days that Shook the World.

Reed tried very hard to be a Leninist, but remained more poet than committed revolutionary (Beatty, Warren. Reds, 1981)

John Reed remained the system outsider he was from the moment he entered school. The weird kid. The poet, the comedian, the one who never saw his name on an honor roll, and with the comply or defy choice schools offer their students, he defied, every bit as much as Rand, Buckley, and Harden complied. All, however, might be considered victims of their educations.

Rand and Buckley, Mitt Romney, and even - to an extent - Barack Obama, never acquired the empathy needed by real leaders who could understand and work for others. Reed, like Scott Fitzgerald who followed him from west of the Appalachians into struggles with the Ivy League, could never turn his skill as one of the greatest writers of his generation into a way to communicate successfully with, or negotiate successfully with, "power" - and so suffered all of his life.

"[My brother is] a really, really smart guy, and where I was always great at memorizing facts and applying rules, he was always able to look more deeply into subject matter and understand it in a different way.  But schools wanted people like me and not people like my brother, who has dyslexia, ADHD and other learning difficulties, and who was called by one horrible teacher "stupid" in front of an entire class filled with his peers.  And who still believes that teacher." - Rachel Ash on Google+

The System Effect

Teachers need to be better, sometimes much better, at what they do. I understand this, I have said this. But when the Carnegie Corporation of New York says, "that quality teachers have a greater influence on pupil achievement than any other school-based factor," they are so completely wrong it is embarrassing to hear them say it. Because the Carnegie Corporation - largely responsible for at least the secondary education system we struggle with today - never bothered to include as a variable the system of school itself.

The Carnegie Corporation - education research which hurts American children for more than 100 years (?)

School is an environment - a built environment, a social environment, an authoritarian environment, a temporal environment - and like all living things, humans respond to all the clues and components in their environment.

I might focus on teacher education (for example), because it does not matter how 'progressively' we speak at the Michigan State University College of Education, as long as our undergraduate teachers-to-be go through prescribed class hours in a prescribed and divided curriculum while sitting in chairs in classrooms and getting graded - traditionally - on both their work and their attendance, we are reinforcing the system we claim to be overturning. "Let's all sit down for the lecture on differentiation," as we say.

Nor, no matter how brilliant our conversations in PhD seminars, will we not create change-agent leaders unless we stop making the doctorate a program of prescribed hoop jumpings. Successful hoop jumpers are far too likely to become hoop setting leaders. Students taught "the old way" tend to reproduce that - or to flee the profession. Comply or Defy. (Pink, Daniel)

None of this is said to let individual educators off-the-hook - I believe in the moral responsibility of all of us to subvert the system in any way that we can - but I also know that real change requires system change. The "Prussian Model" plus the factory system of treating human children as industrial parts - championed by the Carnegie Foundation at the turn of the last century - are the dominant influences on every child entering an institution of American education today. The biggest influence? Of course it is home socio-economics. But the reason that remains the biggest influence is that every systemic part of our education system was designed from the start, and remains designed to, exacerbate those home differences and reward wealthy parents, instead of creating equitable opportunity.

Yes, everything. Age-based grades. Grade-level content. Grade-level "standards." "Common Core" curricula. Classroom shape. The early focus on symbolic languages. Classroom chairs. Standardized testing. The school clock and calendar. Homework. Many "behavior standards." The division of secondary content. The way we pay, or don't pay, attention to students. Our view of attention... All of it is designed to control who wins and who loses in a way which will protect, not reduce, the class divide in the United States (and in England, and elsewhere).

And if we want to change that, it is a political question. And if, as I believe, education is the most important thing a society does, then this is the political question.

So we need to ask the questions, every day, and of every leader. Really? as Yong Zhao recently asked, will the Common Core increase equity? What, exactly, is the point of "value added" assessment - other than to emphasize the "defective" nature of many incoming students? When we say "high standards," whose "standards" are these? When we insist on grade-level curriculum, or grade level content, who are we rewarding, and who are we hurting? When we insist on multiple years of algebra - or anything in particular - for secondary graduation, who are we turning into losers? When we create arbitrary behavioral standards - from insisting that children sit in horrible chairs to banning mobile phones - who gets the win?

The system affect is very difficult to escape from, as Ayn Rand and John Reed indicate. And the the system effect will stay with our children for their lifetimes. Change seems almost impossible.. but if we are responsible adults, change must occur as rapidly as possible.

- Ira Socol

The Multiage Magic

Conor Galvin sent me a link to poem I had almost forgotten, and it started thoughts spinning... (Dr. Galvin on Twitter)

St. Kevin and the Blackbird

And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird.
The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
His cell, but the cell is narrow, so

One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
and Lays in it and settles down to nest.

Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,

Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.

*

And since the whole thing's imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time

From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth

Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in Love's deep river,
'To labour and not to seek reward,' he prays,

A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank forgotten the river's name.

- Seamus Heaney

"And since the whole thing's imagined anyhow, Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?" Part of the magic of imagination in the education of ourselves as young people lies in our seeing - and in our constantly changing understanding - of the older people around us. We see, we assume, we imagine, we project, we play at, we practice... and then we cycle through all of that again and again. 

This is the natural rhythm of human learning. It includes steady doses of myth, of vocabulary we do not understand, of subject matter we cannot yet fully comprehend. We guess wrong a great deal, and then we test those guesses, find them wanting, and guess again...

"Belfast was impossibly far away. Only Aedan had been there and he talked about how big it was and how the giant cranes towered over the shipyards. "They built the Titanic there," he told us, "I saw where. It was the biggest ship ever but it hit an iceberg and sank and everyone died." This was an amazing story. We argued about when it might have happened. "Long back." "Very long?" "Before the war." "In the war the Germans sank a lot of boats with torpedoes ." We knew this. There were uncles and grandfathers lost on those Royal Merchant Ships, and even American ones. But before? "Maybe 1938 or like that," Aedan said. This seemed possible. An iceberg! Eventually someone would have to ask an adult."

Multiage Titanic 100th Project
Scoil ag An Ghleanna, Baile an Sceilg, County Kerry

At St. Finan's Bay in County Kerry, the Atlantic and hundreds of sheep outside the school windows, young children could offer clues to why the RMS Titanic sank, "it wasn't blessed," "it said "no pope" in one of the mirrors," mythic answers in a place hardy unfamiliar with either shipwrecks or the mythic. Are these answers wrong? They lack the technical certainty of a St. Mocholomog's School (in County Cork, near Bantry) eight-year-old's description of the length of the tear in the hull and the number of compartments flooded, but... who knows what brought that ship and that iceberg together that night 100 years ago? There is nothing wrong with children looking out at their fog-shrouded sea and hearing the old tales and imagining, before they begin to test and evaluate.

We lose so much when we divide students by age... We lose peer mentoring, we lose the aspirations to be "like the big kids," we lose the ability of younger kids to become leaders, and we lose the ability to let kids grow at their own rate. We also lose the shared public space which lies at the heart of community, culture, and democracy.

"Culture, beyond all the definitional difficulties, is based on what we share," Uachtarán na hÉireann Michael D. Higgins writes in his book Renewing the Republic. "It is a process, one that is continually reworked. In addition, because culture is shared, it constitutes the bedrock of the public world  - a public world that is under threat from the demands of a destabilizing, privatizing world, predicated on consumption, and the protection of a life-world often based on a fear of others.  Thus, the shared trust of citizens in the public space is replaced by the insecurity of protecting private possessions."

Multiage Hurling at a Multiage Primary
Dualla NS, Dualla, County Tipperary

In our not too distant past, we grew up in families with many children, in communities with many children, with the older supervising, teaching, supporting, the younger. In the neighborhood of my childhood perhaps 50 kids, in a 12-year-or-so age spread, played together. When I lived in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, I would look down from my third floor window on South Oxford Street, and see the youngest kids playing on the sidewalks, protected from traffic by the parked cars, and watched by the young teenagers - who played in the street, and the older teens who watched from their gathering spots on the stoops of the block.

But now, if I suggest that younger children should learn from and with older children, many parents - especially American parents - re-coil in fear. They expect, well, they expect all kinds of corruption, which is part of our belief in adolescents, and even "almost adolescents," as dangerous aliens.

In schools across Ireland over the past two weeks, from Dublin on south and west, in suburbs and cities, in formal schools, at a CoderDojo, at Bridge21Learning, I saw the values of multiage education at work. 

National Film Award Winner created by multiage
St. Mocholomog National School (Cuppabue NS), County Cork

Students built their knowledge in skills at a personalised pace which seemed to differ by subject area. Students mentored each other. Students relied on each other. Students cared for each other. James Gee has long written and spoken of the value of video game multiage groupings in building the expert vocabulary of students and their interests in a wider world - and how those informal groupings triumph over our age-segregated schools.

All ages share together at the CoderDojo in Thurles,
County Tipperary (Limerick Institute of Technology)

When I watched the children I saw over the past two weeks, the great lies of "industrial processing education" were exposed. America's "Common Core" with its age-based parameters. Our "grade-appropriate curricula," our "age-limited content," our notions of "must accomplish "x" in "x" grade." All of these, whether in American, British, Australian, Canadian, Secondary Irish, or any other form, are destructive to children and to learning.

Children are children. Individual human children. Learners are learners, and all are different. They grow best in a diverse ecosystem which allows the greatest level of cross-pollination, not in artificially limited, engineered monocultures created by testing and mandated curricula.

"And since the whole thing's imagined anyhow, Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?" Let "Kevin" imagine. Let us imagine Kevin. Let Kevin find "himself linked into the network of eternal life," of the world, of our world.

- Ira Socol

One Third Bored, One Third Behind

Asked to create a policy brief regarding any reauthorization of the US "No Child Left Behind Act." I thought about all the ridiculousness of that law, but what I wanted to focus on was the essential fallacy, of NCLB in particular, but of our educational structure in general.

In the mid-19th Century many nations, including the US and Britain, adopted the Prussian notion of "age-based grades." Age-based grades are "efficient," as an educational solution, and they echo the form of industrial processing, but age-based grades, as well as the kinds of exams mandated by NCLB, assume that every child learns at exactly the same rate, in every subject. And we know that's a ridiculous idea.

Of course those age-based grades do more: They require special education because many children fall behind. They require "gifted and talented" and "AP" classes because so many students are bored. In fact, age-based grades were truly designed as a filtering system, geared to getting rid of students who "couldn't keep up" and would thus be consigned to "capitalism's dustbin" - the low skill, low wage jobs, and the poverty which market-based economies need as a cautionary tale for the potentially lazy.

The ideas of breaking students up by age, or of breaking lessons up by subject, are not "natural." These strategies replaced the tutor and "one room schoolhouse" which preceeded it. Whether or not it was a successful strategy for 20th Century industrial societies can be answered elsewhere. But what's important now is knowing that we no longer live in the world our educational systems were designed for. And it is time to change.

Every Childs Time

View more presentations from Ira david Socol. (tags: education multi-age)

- Ira Socol