The New Dare to Discipline (13 page)

The idea of permissive education appealed to my mother in 1956 when she was a Bohemian and I was four. In Greenwich Village, she found a small private school whose beliefs were hers and happily enrolled me. I know it was an act of motherly love but it might have been the worst thing she ever did to me. This school — I’ll call it Sand and Sea—attracted other such parents, upper-middle-class professionals who were determined not to have their chil dren pressured the way they had been. Sand and Sea was the school without pain. And it was the kind of school that the back-to-basics people rightly fear most. At Sand and Sea, I soon became an exemplar of educational freedom—the freedom not to learn.

Sand and Sea was run by fifteen women and one man who taught “science.” They were decent people, some old, some young, and all devoted to cultivating the innate creativity they were convinced we had. There was a tremendous emphasis on the arts. We weren’t taught techniques, however, because any kind of organization stunted creativity.

Happiness and Hieroglyphics.
We had certain hours allotted to various subjects but we were free to dismiss anything that bored us. In fact, it was school policy that we were forbidden to be bored or miserable or made to compete with one another. There were no tests and no hard times. When I was bored with math, I was excused and allowed to write short stories in the library. The way we learned history was by trying to re-create its least important elements. One year, we pounded corn, made tepees, ate buffalo meat, and learned two Indian words. That was early American history. Another year we made elaborate costumes, clay pots, and papier- mâché gods. That was Greek culture. Another year we were all maidens and knights in armor because it was time to learn about the Middle Ages. We drank our orange juice from tin-foil goblets but never found out what the Middle Ages were. They were just ‘The Middle Ages.’

I knew that the Huns pegged their horses and drank a quart of blood before going to war, but no one ever told us who the Huns were or why we should know who they were. And one year, the year of ancient Egypt, when we were building our pyramids, I did a thirty-foot-long mural for which I laboriously copied hieroglyphics onto the sheet of brown paper. But no one ever told me what they stood for. They were just there and beautiful.

Ignorance Is Not
Bliss
. We spent great amounts of time being creative because we had been told by our incurably optimistic mentors that the way to be happy in life was to create. Thus, we didn’t learn to read until we were in the third grade, because early reading was thought to discourage creative spontaneity. The one thing they taught us very well was to hate intellectuality and anything connected with it. Accordingly, we were forced to be creative for nine years. And yet Sand and Sea has failed to turn out a good artist. What we did do was to continually form and re-form interpersonal relationships, and that’s what we thought learning was all about, and we were happy. At ten, for example, most of us were functionally illiterate, but we could tell that Raymond was “acting out” when, in the middle of what passed for English, he did the twist on top of his desk. Or that Nina was “introverted” because she always cowered in the corner.

When we finally were graduated, however, all the happy little children fell down the hill. We felt a profound sense of abandonment. So did our parents. After all that tuition money, let alone the loving freedom, their children faced high school with all the glorious prospects of the poorest slum-school kids. And so it came to be. No matter what school we went to, we were the underachievers and the culturally disadvantaged.

For some of us, real life was too much—one of my oldest friends from Sand and Sea killed himself two years ago after flunking out of the worst high school in New York at twenty. Various others have put in time in mental institutions where they were free, once again, to create during occupational therapy.

During my own high-school years, the school psychologist was baffled by my lack of substantive knowledge. He suggested to my mother that I be given a battery of psychological tests to find out why I was blocking out information. The thing was, I wasn’t blocking because I had no information to block. Most of my Sand and Sea classmates were also enduring the same kinds of hardships that accompany severe handicaps. My own reading comprehension was in the lowest eighth percentile, not surprisingly. I was often asked by teachers how I had gotten into high school. However, I did manage to stumble
not
only through high school but also through college (first junior college—rejected by all four-year colleges, and then New York University), hating it all the way as I had been taught to. I am still amazed that I have a B.A., but think of it as a B.S.

The Lure of Lear
ning.
The parents of my former classmates can’t figure out what went wrong. They had sent in bright, curious children and gotten back, nine years later, helpless adolescents. Some might say that those of us who freaked out would have freaked out anywhere, but when you see the same bizarre behavior pattern in succeeding graduating classes, you can draw certain terrifying conclusions.

Now I see my twelve-year-old brother (who is in a traditional school) doing college-level math and I know that he knows more about many other things besides math than I do. And I also see tra ditional education working in the case of my fifteen-year-old brother (who was summarily yanked from Sand and Sea, by my re formed mother, when he was eight so that he wouldn’t become like me). Now, after seven years of real education, he is making impressive film documentaries for a project on the Bicentennial. A better learning experience than playing Pilgrim for four and a half months, and Indian for four and a half months, which is how I imagine they spent this year at Sand and Sea.

And now I’ve come to see that the real job of school is to entice the student into the web of knowledge and then, if he’s not enticed, to drag him in. I wish I had been.

It was noble of the
Newsweek
publishers to print this emotional “confession” by Myra Wolynski. After all, the popular press has been a significant part of the problem, extolling the virtues of avant-garde trends in the classroom.
Newsweek
magazine, for example, devoted its May 3, 1971, cover story to the topic, “Learning Can Be Fun.” On the cover was an elementary school girl making something with papier-mâché. Four years later,
Newsweek
‘s cover story considered “Why Johnny Can’t Write.” I wrote the senior editor of
Newsweek
after the second article appeared, December 8, 1975, and suggested that maybe there was a link between the two stories. Perhaps Johnny couldn’t write because he spent too much time having fun in the classroom. I received no reply.

Please understand, I am a supporter of the arts in the curriculum, and I certainly want the educational process to be as exciting and as much fun as possible. But children will not learn reading, writing, and math by doing papier-mâché. And many of them will not pay the price to learn anything unless they are required to do so! Some educators have disagreed with this understanding and postulated that kids will sweat and study because they have an inner thirst for knowledge.

A former superintendent of public instruction in the state of California is quoted as saying, “To say that children have an innate love of learning is as muddle-headed as to say that children have an innate love of baseball. Some do. Some don’t. Left to themselves, a large percentage of the small fry will go fishing, pick a fight, tease the girls, or watch Superman on the boob tube. Even as you and I!”

It is a valid observation. Most of the time students will not invest one more ounce of effort in their studies than is required, and that fact has frustrated teachers for hundreds of years. Our schools, therefore, must have enough structure and discipline to
require
certain behavior from their students. This is advantageous not only for academic reasons, but because one of the purposes of education is to prepare the young for later life.

To survive as an adult in this society, one needs to know how to work, how to get there on time, how to get along with others, how to stay with a task until completed, and, yes, how to submit to authority. In short, it takes a good measure of self-discipline and control to cope with the demands of modern living. Maybe one of the greatest gifts a loving teacher can contribute to an immature child, therefore, is to help him learn to sit when he feels like running, to raise his hand when he feels like talking, to be polite to his neighbor, to stand in line without smacking the kid in front, and to do language arts when he feels like doing football.

Likewise, I would hope to see our schools readopt reasonable dress codes, eliminating suggestive clothing, T-shirts with profanity or those promoting heavy metal bands, etc. Guidelines concerning good grooming and cleanliness should also be enforced.

I know! I know! These notions are so alien to us now that we can hardly imagine such a thing. But the benefits would be apparent immediately. Admittedly, hair styles and matters of momentary fashion are of no particular significance, but adherence to a standard is an important element of discipline. The military has understood that for five thousand years! If one examines the secret behind a championship football team, a magnificent orchestra, or a successful business, the principal ingredient is invariably discipline. Thus, it is a great mistake to require nothing of children—to place no demands on their behavior. We all need to adhere to some reasonable rules.

How inaccurate is the belief that self-control is maximized in an environment which places no obligations on its children. How foolish is the assumption that self-discipline is a product of self-indulgence. How unfortunate has been the systematic undermining of educational rules, engineered by a minority of parents through the legal assistance of the American Civil Liberties Union and the tired old judges to whom they have appealed. Despite the will of the majority, the anti-disciplinarians have had their way. The rules governing student conduct have been cut down, and in their place have come a myriad of restrictions on educators. School prayers are illegal even if addressed to an unidentified God. The Bible can be read only as uninspired literature. Allegiance to the flag of our country cannot be required. Educators find it very difficult to punish or expel a student. Teachers are so conscious of parental militancy that they often withdraw from the defiant challenges of their students. As a result, academic discipline lies at the point of death in some of the nation’s schools.

The proposal to put standards and reasonable rules back in those schools which have abandoned them (many
haven’t
) may sound horribly oppressive to the ears of some Western educators or parents. But it need not be so. Class work
can
be fun and structured at the same time. Indeed, that
is
what happens in Japanese schools, and Russian schools, and English schools. And that’s one reason we get whipped when our kids compete against other nations on tests of academic achievement.

You’ve heard about international achievement tests, of course. You know that our students do poorly when compared to young people from other countries. American high school seniors recently ranked fourteenth out of fifteen countries on a test of advanced algebra skills.
¹
Their science scores were lower than those from students in almost every industrialized nation.
²
According to the U.S. Department of Education, only one in five eighth graders has achieved competence for his or her age level.
³
The United States ranks only 49th among 158 member nations of the U.N. in its literacy levels.
⁴
And SAT scores have been dropping for years.
⁵

Before we leap to blame the educators for everything that has gone wrong, however, we need to take another look at the culture. The teachers and school administrators who guide our children have been among the most maligned and under-appreciated people in our society. They are an easy target for abuse. They are asked to do a terribly difficult job, and yet they are criticized almost daily for circumstances beyond their control. Some of their critics act as though educators are deliberately failing our kids. I strongly disagree. We would still be having serious difficulties in our schools if the professionals did everything right. Why? Because what goes on in the classroom cannot be separated from the problems occurring in society at large.

Educators certainly can’t be blamed for the condition our kids are in when they arrive at school each day. It’s not the teachers’ fault that families are unraveling and that large numbers of their students have been sexually and/or physically abused, neglected, and undernourished. They can’t keep kids from watching mindless television or R-rated videos until midnight, or from using illegal substances or alcohol. In essence, when the culture begins to crumble from massive social problems that defy solutions, the schools will also look bad. That’s why even though I disagree with many of the trends in modern education, I sympathize with the dedicated teachers and principals out there who are trying to do the impossible on behalf of our youngsters. They are discouraged today, and they need our support.