Theodore Sizer, author of Horace’s Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School and founder of the Essential Schools movement, died this week. (If you’re not familiar with his work, read the New York Times obituary for a brief summary of Sizer’s accomplishments in education.)
I thought that those of you who are carrying on the interesting and lively comment-discussion below about high school at home might find this excerpt from Sizer’s 2004 book The Red Pencil: Convictions from Experience in Education thought-provoking.
Americans have long been on a search for order, expecially in communities composed of peoples from varied geographic, racial, and religious quarters. Public education has been perceived as a pivotal mechanism, often the prime mechanism for such order….
To all too many in our time, however, “order” in schools has in effect meant the appearance of order: a clearly demarcated district plan, a fully outlined step-by-step curriculum, complete with local, state, and Federal “benchmarks” for students and teachers to meet, quiet hallways, a low hum of teachers explaining things, an absence of graffiti and litter, well-groomed students, unruffled principals, a generous cup of hot coffee and a quiet, uninterrupted briefing for visitors. Most of us who have lived in schools know, however, that such an appearance is a means, and often not the best means, to the end of orderly minds.
There is plenty of noise these days about the necessity of order in schools and a frightening silence about what it takes to help shape orderly minds. The hard, familiar reality is that learning is both idiosyncratic (you and I do not learn everything in quite the same way and pace) and messy. Most serious learning is not nicely sequential; rather, it often spirals, with each of us circling back–if we have the opportunity–again to where we thought we were but, ideally, now better informed and thereby finding ourselves at a deeper place. It is situational, depending on immediate conditions for each of us as individuals and the appropriateness of our surroundings…
….The damnable problem is that no one of us learns, in whatever fashion, in precisely the same period of time. As an eighth grader, my heart froze when I heard Mrs. Hitchcock, our teacher, say to me and my classmates, “It’s quiz time!” She turned to the board and wrote a question. “You have ten minutes.” Pause. “Now, Go!” The hearts of some of my quick-working classmates leapt with joy. Another chance to show off how good we are! For me, the set time was paralyzing. Whatever good work I produced as an early teenager emerged from slow, time-consuming toil. Timed tests were a poor demonstration of what in fact I could do.
If the end is learning by each student, the time expended to get there has to some practical degree to reflect each particular learner at each moment. Some of us are “fast” learnings, in some subjects but perhaps not others, and some are “slow.” The time each one takes and when he or she takes it are major factors. On a Monday morning I may be sleepy and inattentive, but on a Wednesday I am brimming with energy. For the teacher and for the distant curriculum planner, that is terribly inconvenient….
What to do? This is a solvable problem. Clarify what the student is expected to show (that is, know and use) in order to receive (say) a high school diploma. Insist, assist, and cajole every young person to work toward this target as attentively as possible. Assess the progress of each student regularly. Recognize the student’s hitting of the target when in fact he hits it…whatever his chronological age. None of this is arcane. I am describing what good soccer coaches and violin teachers do routinely with each of their players.
Is such practice totally impractical? No, but it is surely complex….Students will have to be taken one by one, just like patients in a good hospital and candidates for drivers’ licenses in sensible departments of motor vehicles….The process is necessarily cumbersome but far more sensible than the inefficient and profoundly discriminatory time-driven/age-delimited system that we have now.
I have had many opportunities over the past two decades to make the preceding argument. Few disagree with it. Few choose to follow its logic into decisive practice, however, and the worship of “time” continues in most schools today. With minutes as coins, the creation of “a school day” is a ready and standardizable possibility. It is superficially rational. It certainly appears orderly. It has the weight of tradition behind it….However, it flies in the face of both common sense and generations of research on human learning.
(From pp. 56-57, 62-63 of the 2005 paperback version.)
There is clearly a great deal that still needs to be said about the decision to educate high school students at home, and I hope to join in this discussion over the coming months. Here’s a starting place: although Sizer’s not here suggesting home education, many of us who have chosen to bring (or keep) our high school students home despair of finding classrooms that are capable of this level of flexibility and personalized attention.
“flexibility and personal attention” – yes!
and, Nan commented on the other post:
“Academically, we may not be doing as well as our very excellent public school, but I think education-wise, we are. And just because the public school does a good job teaching something doesn’t mean my poor children manage to learn it. We figured that out the hard way.”
Yes, again!! That’s exactly how we stumbled into homeschooling half-way through my oldest’s 5th-grade year! It matters not that we live in one of the “best districts” that offers Associate’s degrees at graduation to the top students. *My* kids weren’t learning in that environment – no matter how “good” or “orderly” it was.
I admit, I’m re-learning and learning and struggling along with my oldest in 9th grade this year. I was so busy learning “how to homeschool” and filling in “gaps” during his 5th-8th grade years, I am unprepared to be the uber-voice-of-wisdom and fount-of-all-knowledge to my DS. I have searched hard and long to find tools which hold my hand and provide schedules and – yes – even make learning “easy” in the subjects that are the least pleasant for DS.
I admit, my kids are pretty average, and thankfully I only have one in high school!!! So, I’m not shooting for the stars academically. But, I know that even if I’m not giving him the “ultimate at-home education” that I *am* meeting him where he is, and we are moving toward his goals. I keep repeating to myself your words (greatly paraphrased!): “I *can* homeschool this child for high school, because I love this child enough to help him find his passion.”
In spite of all my limitations and lack of expertise, I have been so encouraged spiritually and emotionally by my journey with my 9th grader this year, and I really have you to thank for that!
“Clarify what the student is expected to show (that is, know and use) in order to receive (say) a high school diploma. Insist, assist, and cajole every young person to work toward this target as attentively as possible. Assess the progress of each student regularly. Recognize the student’s hitting of the target when in fact he hits it…whatever his chronological age.” Sizer’s idea of messy sounds so very, very neat! It sounds like what people continually are looking for on the homeschooling board. (And usually not finding.) Even with one child, not a whole school full, I have found this description to be far off. When we began homeschooling high school, I did indeed sit down and write out what I wanted my high schooler to be able to do by graduation. It is a good list (for our family). It covers the academic part of our children’s education, not the other parts, so it is appropriate (I think) for homeschooling goals. It is about half a page long. And therein lies the problem… Or possibly the advantage? The messy part, anyway. Our state’s goals are about an inch thick. The difference between those and my half page leaves an awful lot of room for mess. Sizer makes it sound as though you can just set goals and then persuade the child to achieve them. Any child. He obviously hasn’t worked with either of mine. Mine have their own goals. They are good, worthy goals that need to be taken into account. And they change. They also have their own ideas about how to work towards them. Fortunately, they like my goals, too, but on a day-to-day basis, they don’t necessarily take precidence over their own immediate ones. That would be where the “insisting” came in, except that often, their immediate goals are very good ones. Which messes things up even more. Add to that the things that I’m not very good at assisting them with, and the gaps between my interpretation of the goals and theirs, and you get more mess. TWTM helps define goals and explains how to achieve them, but it still needs to be adapted to my particular children. Mine excell at altering anything and everything in their vicinity, especially directions.
Rhondabee, I, too, spent 5th – 8th trying to undo the damage caused by public school in k-4th. Put that together with a slightly different brain wiring, and things get even messier. I alternate between wishing I had just backed up in TWTM to where he could actually do things in a reasonable amount of time and worked forward from there, and being glad I waited until my late bloomer bloomed to do some of them (by which time there wasn’t time to do much).
-Nan
And you know, the problem with high school might be that the goals vary more from person to person than they do with elementary school. Everyone needs to learn to read and write and do arithmetic, but not everyone needs to know how to weld or computer programming or how to set up a complicated chemistry experiment. Deciding what to teach each child for high school is a pretty scary process. It closes doors. You have to guess.
-Nan
I find it ironic that so many home schoolers who have rejected the paradigm of traditional school simply replace it with another paradigm in the form of prepackaged curricula or structured programs. I understand the need for hand holding especially for those with poor educational backgrounds, and I understand the time constraints for mothers schooling several children of different ages. I also understand the daunting prospect of the college application process at the end of the high school years, and feeling the need to have met all those prerequisites. But by choosing to rely on these “programs” they are once again following the scope, sequence and timetables created by “distant curriculum planners”. Are missing the opportunity to creatively meet the idiosyncratic needs of their children?
Like every other issue in parenting, there are many solutions, some of which work better with one family than another. High school is harder, as Nan pointed out, because the needs and ambitions of each teen is so different. Even within a family, MY family, high school is completely different for each child. We decided early on with one child that a 4 year college was not the next logical step in his journey, and adjusted his schooling to fit his plans and build upon his strengths. It was a frightening decision to make but ultimately it was liberating, and so far is proving to have been the right choice.
I agree with Mr. Sizer, that the first step in education is to decide what the outcome is going to be, then start working from where your student is with that goal in sight. There are many paths to that final outcome, what matters is steady forward progress toward that goal and not the time it takes, not the grade-level based expectations of how it should be reached. Sounds so simple and obvious as I type this, but the realities of it don’t feel so simple!
I’m not sure I agree with choosing a goal and then crafting a curriculum to meet it. It does sound good, and it probably is infinitely more practical than the way I’d like to teach. I guess I’m a little more “organic;” I like to be able to go with the ebb and flow of interests and needs. This is more reactive than proactive. I think my preference is because “shutting doors,” as a pp said, seems so…final.
But (sigh), there is limited time in the four years of high school. Acknowledging that limits allow freedom is a mark of maturity, I’ve heard. There are certainly sequential skills (like grammar, maths, etc.) that build upon each other, and without a plan, those skills (goals, as it were) will never be accomplished. One cannot wander forever–have to get somewhere eventually. Sometimes I just wish the journey of becoming a whole and healthy adult allowed more time as a teen for exploration.
I guess one can still explore as an adult–it seems life intervenes so heartily at times that gently exploring one’s world, inner and outer, becomes a luxury.
Just some random thoughts here. Enjoying this blog so much!
What Nan said about students having their own goals really struck a chord with me. In the younger years, it is more about the teacher setting the goals. But as our children grow older they develop their own goals. And this is good. But it may interfere with our goals. As another poster said, time is limited. Some of my goals have had to be laid aside for some of my son’s goals. He will delve more into math and science this year, and have less time for great books and English. But, I think (hope) that a good foundation in those areas has been laid that will stand even if we do not focus on those areas. One of the great things about homeschooling is the fact that we as parents can listen to our children’s dreams and goals. But it is also the scariest, in that we hope we’re helping them choose the right goals.
If what Sizer describes is a more individual approach to education, I doubt public education will achieve this end any time in the near future. From my perspective, it seems public education is moving more toward homogenizing the educational experience, and if your child should have the misfortune of falling outside the parameters outlined by a school, too bad for you. Alternatives abound, and homeschooling is but one solution for a parent and student who find themselves on the outside. Personally, the challenges of homeschooling through the high school years are being the parent of a hormonal teen who needs to establish a separate identity and being a parent who lacks the expertise to guide this teen through subjects I may know of but am ignorant to teach. There is a reason why high school teachers are single subject certified.
Education, as with so many parenting issues, is messy. It is a bit like birth, messy and fraught with uncertainty. As my 7th grader and I look toward scaling the mountain of high school we are standing at the foot of what seems a monstrous peek trying to find a path of assent. On days when school comes unraveled, the appeal of outsourcing everything to some virtual, online academy sounds like the perfect solution. It would be so neat and orderly.
Finally, I am thinking my dilemma of homeschool, high school is going to come down to meeting a combination of goals: Educational goals, student goals, and parent goals. The last few words from the above quote “…it flies in the face of both common sense and generations of research on human learning.” merit further thought. What does generations of research on human learning say about how people learn best? I have been reading *Talent Is Over Rated: What Really Separates Wold-Class Performers from Everybody Else* by Geoff Colvin from Fortune Magazine. Colvin’s discussion about practice, particularly focused practice is worth reading. Colvin pulls together fascinating research on what most of us believe talent to be, demystifies the idea of innate talent, and offers a similar perspective on learning that Sizer describes.