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The world is in a much worse state right now than most
people realize. In all sorts of ways we’ve been killing off the
biosphere since the beginning of civilization. In the last few years,
however, we’ve really gotten this down to a science. We’re killing off
the biosphere in a faster and cleaner way than a farmer kills a chicken
when he breaks its neck with his thumb before cutting it up and cooking
it.
If we’re going to put a stop to our current stock in trade of destroying
the world, we’re all going to have to pull together. But we won't be
able to do that unless we all get a whole lot smarter very quickly.
Acting smarter to survive
Right now, as I am writing this, education must find a way to become
something that makes us hundreds of times smarter than we are at
present. It has become essential to fill the world with the kinds of
intelligence that can paint its way out of the corner humanity has
painted itself into. If we don’t do this soon we can forget about it
because a hundred years from now there won’t be any schools. There won’t
be any schools because there won’t be any people. It is remotely
possible that there are brains in the world that currently hold the
solution to the salvation of our species.
Here’s what’s going on
Every human being is born with a destiny that’s just right for that
particular person and not right for anyone else on the face of the
earth.
Most of us spend the first five years of our lives trying to connect
with that destiny. If we have loving, supportive parents who are more
interested in finding out who we are than in telling us who we should
be, it’s a lot easier for us to do that than if we have to fight the
system from the moment the first spanking has been applied.
Or even (heaven help us) before the first spanking even looks like it’s
coming our way.
My own problem with being born was that my mother smoked. It took me
many, many years to get over the toxic effect of that, but eventually I
did. I have always told people I gave up smoking at birth, but that’s
not quite true, since I carried its toxic effects around inside my body
for so long.
I can also remember having to get over the horrifying experience that
happened to me when they hit me with anesthesia while I was making my
way down the birth canal. That wasn’t easy because I was coming out
bottom first, and I seem nearly to have died. The doctors, at any rate,
were much more worried that they let on. My mother wasn’t though,
because they’d knocked her out. The whole thing was an experience
inseparable in my mind from the experience a cow must have when it
confronts the slaughterhouse.
Being born a boy
I eventually got over those problems, though, and in that it was helped
enormously by the fact that my mother really, really wanted me, and in
addition, really, really wanted me to be a buy. When they first showed
me to her, I was wrapped up in a blanket. They said, “Here’s your baby,
look, isn’t he beautiful?”
And she said, “Yes, but I want to see ALL of him.” So they had to take
the blanket away so she could catch what I looked like in my birthday
suit. Then she was happy. And I have been happy to be a boy ever since.
If my mother hadn't loved me so much, life might have been much more
difficult for me. It was important that I was born into a family who
thought I was the most important creature on earth. They hung on my
every word, and watched my every new development, just the way parents
are supposed to. My mother even put up with the fact that in my retarded
way I sniffed the bottom of her friend’s skirt while the two of them were
chatting on the playground.
“He thinks he’s a dog,” my mother tried unconvincingly to explain – but
it was true. I did think I was a dog. Or let us say that I was
experimenting with being a dog.
The importance of being me
I learned from a very early age that I was an important person, and that
what I thought about and wanted to do were both important.
I sometimes had reason to doubt those things about myself, though. I
doubted them whenever my mother flew into a rage and wouldn’t speak to
me for a long time. I doubted them when I went to school and my teacher
thought I was “feeble minded” because I kept drawing pictures on my math
paper or writing a comic strip called “Professor Rooster” instead of
studying stuff about the Iroquois Indians. What were the Iroquois
Indians to me, anyway? The most interesting thing about them was that
the book about them was published by the Iroquois Publishing Company. I
was passionately interested in publishing companies because I was going
to write books when I grew up and get them published. I wasn’t
interested in American history because it was all about dead people, and
nobody explained to me why I should care more about those dead people
than all the live people around me. I wasn’t supposed to talk to my
neighbor in class, I was supposed to read about famous dead people and
memorize their birth and death dates.
Enduring school
Thus when I was a child, public school was something I had to endure.
While I did learn to read and develop a limited ability to calculate
with numbers, I primarily learned two things, which seemed to take
precedence over those trivia: The first was to switch off my mind
whenever I entered a classroom. This was a classical Pavlovian
stimulus-response situation, and it was my saving grace, because it
meant that when I left school my mind would switch back on and I became
free to explore my environment on my own without being overly influenced
by what had happened that day in school.
I was reminded of this when my eldest daughter came home from her first
day in school. “What did you learn?” I asked her.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Of course not. No one ever learns anything in school,” I said, even
though we were then sitting in the dining room of the boarding school
where I made my living as a teacher.
“Then why did you ask me that?” Stephanie growled in the annoyed
motherly voice she always used when she was pretty sure that she was a
good deal older and more mature than I was. (She still thinks that.)
“Mommy, is Daddy teasing?” (I still haven’t figured out whether I was or
not.)
The second skill I developed was clock-watching. I became transfixed by
the motion of the hands on the clock as they worked their plodding way
towards 3:00 p. m. when we would be released from our prison house. I
have noticed that many people live their lives in this same spirit.
“Thank God it’s Friday” is evidence of that.
I, on the other hand, confined my clock-watching to school. When I went
home, the clock took care of itself, and I became involved in my own
activities. My greatest fear was boredom, which I fought to stave off
any way I could.
Once in a while I would initiate a long term project. My mother, who for
some reason seemed to understand the kind of stewardship children need
from their parents, would support these efforts to a remarkable and
often Herculean extent. For example, when I decided I wanted to write
books but could not yet do so because I hadn't learned to write, she
took dictation and read back to me the story that I had written.
When I was in high school I wrote a story that was badly written, but
contained psychological material that turned out to have supreme
importance to me in later years. The story was probably written in 1950.
More than forty years later I started to wonder about that story.
My mother used to make scrapbooks of artwork that she cut out of
magazines. She had twenty or thirty of these.
By chance, about the time I wanted to find that story, I happened to be
looking through one of those scrapbooks and found it. It was there in
two separate drafts, returned to me after an absence of forty years. It
was obvious to me that I had written the story as a high school student
and given it to my mother to get her editorial wisdom. She had read it
and then laid it aside on top of the open scrapbook. Later the scrapbook
was accidentally closed and the story preserved there for me to find
more than forty years later without the pain of having to learn what my
mother thought of it as a piece of writing. By that time I was able to
guess.
The legacy left from childhood
This little incident from my childhood tells me a great deal about why I
was later able to write and publish so many books. Whenever I had the
impulse to move in that direction, my mother was there, supporting and
encouraging me. But she never made me sit down and write anything. She
left me completely to my own devices to write as I pleased and do with
my writing whatever I liked.
Puppets and the love of theater
When I was in sixth grade, she gave me a paper back book that was
designed to be turned into a puppet theater. It had cut out puppets, a
cut out theater that you could build, and a story for the puppets to act
out.
I used the book to assemble the theater and put on a puppet play for my
family.
My mother could see how much that had meant to me, and not long after,
she made me a birthday present. This was a much larger puppet theater
and it included tiny dolls that she had painted and put strings around
so they could be puppets. These were the characters in The Wizard of
Oz, which she knew was my favorite story. She had also written a
play for the puppets to perform. It was based on The Wizard of Oz.
But she had ingeniously completed only half of it.
Only a few years later I started a theater that performed one act plays
in the family garage. At least one of these was a 19th century comedy
that I copied out by hand form the Library of Congress. Friends from the
neighborhood participated. That performing arts group, called the Lyric
Theater Company, gradually grew into the largest teen-age theater in
Washington, D. C. For fourteen years it continued to perform. It
performed many operas and plays, some of which I had written myself, and
it received its first newspaper review when it as still functioning in
the garage. Our neighborhood newspaper, The Uptown Shopper,
carried the story.
Later, when the productions became full length performances of Gilbert
and Sullivan operas with major local performers and complete orchestras,
they were reviewed and publicized extensively in all three city
newspapers that existed at the time, drawing a series of very favorable
reviews from music critic Paul Hume. Eventually a couple of them that
had never been recorded were issued in our recording by a company in
England, and reviewed in magazines on both continents.
How much did my mother, in making me that puppet theater, have to do
with my creating a major community theater movement that eventually
involved more than 200 people in its productions?
Time and again she helped me do better the things I had decided to do,
sometimes working quietly through the night to get out a set of programs
I had been unable to finish. By capturing the child’s interest and
supporting it as it develops under its own impulse, following the lead
of the child rather than trying to force the child in a certain way, it
is possible to help all children everywhere become original thinkers
with a strong ability to make a major positive contribution to their
social sphere.
The secret of creating genius
This business of being human has never been popular in civilized
society. The Power Elite thinks that its various forms of commerce can’t
work properly if human beings are allowed to remain human. It thinks
that we’re all supposed to be just alike and learn the same body of
knowledge. It thinks that there are things that are true and we need to
know those and things that aren’t true, and we shouldn’t waste our time
with those. But no two people can agree on what those things are. That
doesn’t keep the school administrators, though, from believing they have
all the answers.
I think the students have all the answers – at least the ones they need
for themselves. I believe that if the school works properly, the
students will manifest their genius in wonderful and mysterious ways.
Outstanding schools around the world have proved that point by creating
schools in which students become multiple geniuses. The secret lies in
finding their passion and developing that.
Every moment you spend following your passion is probably fifty times as
productive as any moment you spend doing something that someone else is
making you do. The math tells the whole story here.
The passion you feel for something is nature’s way of directing you to
carve out the structure of your life. The passion provides the energy
you need to do that. We are very familiar with the way this works in
sexual reproduction. Few people have ever had to be persuaded to engage
in the activities that lead to the multiplication of our species,
because nature has taken great care that we are going to want to do that
sort of thing entirely of our own volition.
George Bernard Shaw made it clear that creative thought is indeed the
greatest of passions – greater even than the reproductive one. You can
hear his enthusiasm for that concept in the rhythms of speech that his
characters indulge in whenever they are moved to sound off about ideas.
Man and Superman is an excellent example of the passion to which thought
can aspire: philosophical discussion that can hold an audience
spellbound. His prefaces and other books contain this same passion that
he had his characters utter in his plays.
It was from him that I learned my passion for thinking. I now find that
a discussion about ideas with friends at a table can last for six hours
and feel like five minutes. There is no joy greater than being involved
in the creation of something – whether it be the development of a new
idea, the writing of a book, the construction from twigs of a lean-too
in the woods, the decoration of a room while finding the right place to
hang the paintings, and so on. Passion picks us up and carries us with
the illusion that time is not passing and the joy of seeing something
come together that moves us to give it our best efforts.
Nothing that is not created with passion should be created at all. This
has always been nature’s way. It should be our way as well. Let’s find
those who have figured out a way to put passion into the experience of
getting educated, and pay attention to what Darwin or God (whichever you
believe created the universe) has always wanted us to do.
I never did a day’s work
When I was a child I determined that I had one goal in life. I was never
going to do a single day’s work. Now, at the age of seventy, I think I
can honestly say I achieved that. I have worked, from time to time,
which meant I spent some time doing things I didn’t really want to be
doing. But I never spent an entire day doing that. Even when I was
engaged in activities I didn’t particularly enjoy in themselves, it was
often true that I was doing them in the cause of something I wanted to
accomplish because my passion had driven me to it.
Beyond that, however, I now spend all my time doing what I want. Since I
want to do it, it’s fun. And since it’s fun it must be a form of play.
My commitment never to do a day’s work didn’t always serve my financial
interests, and sometimes it was hard to pay the bills. But as I look
back on all of that, I can’t imagine people spending their lives doing
things they don’t want to do just so they can pay their bills. That
looks to me like a form of certifiable insanity. What we should all
spend our time doing is finding the genius in ourselves that will enable
each of us to fulfill our destiny.
Discovering the genius within ourselves
I once wrote a book called The Everyday Genius, which is based on
my heartfelt belief that all of us were born to be geniuses, but school
is an institution designed to prevent that. I believe that, because my
experience of school was that it was doing the best it could to prevent
me from learning. I loved learning things, but it wasn’t my experience
that school was a good place to do that. At least, not most of the time.
Occasionally I learned something in school because I was given an
opportunity to express my opinion about something, or write a story, or
illustrate a book. But most of the time school was just in the way of my
learning process.
I never lost track of this feeling when I talked with my own children
about their education. For example, I once had a conversation with my
daughter Maureen about the course in art history she had just begun at
Sidwell Friends School.
“It’s boring,” she told me.
”Why?” I asked, playing with her a little. “You know, art history is the
most important and valuable subject that you can ever learn.”
“Why?”
“Well, ordinary history isn't really much fun, is it? That’s because
it’s all about military and political history, and who cares about them?
Both war and politics are more likely to make us miserable than anything
else. But art history is a different matter. It’s the history of our
creative impulses. It tells us how, throughout the ages, different
individuals and groups of people have seen the world they lived in and
tried to make it more beautiful. What could possibly be more important
than that?”
Today Maureen speaks fluent Italian, lives in Italy, and writes
sometimes for the Wall Street Journal, and sometimes for Business Week
about issues that have to do with the economic situation in Italy. After
graduating from Sidwell, she attended Yale and did graduate work at the
London School of Economics. She is now involved in creating a television
show that is focused on weekly discussions of economic developments, and
she intends to keep doing that until she can shift its subject to the
one to which she wants to devote her life. This is the study of the
human spirit and its development.
Her projects right now include the possibility of doing a book on
Egyptian mummification and a novel based on the life of the Italian poet
Dante.
The thing I like best about all three of my daughters is that they have
all lived their passions and carved out careers for themselves that have
made them truly outstanding in their chosen field, each in a different
way.
My eldest, Stephanie, is a first grade teacher and a devoted mother.
These are her two passions, and she has spent her life teaching first
graders in the most satisfying and effective ways possible. Her life is
filled with the artistry of decoration which has been her love in
teaching and in building a beautiful home for her family, and her
children are all wildly excited about playing the violin, performing in
operas and developing their imaginations in other ways.
My youngest daughter, Wendy, has a passion for the history of women. She
achieved tenure a year earlier than usual at the college where she
teachers, and the evaluation of her work is one of the most laudatory I
have ever read of anything. Her PhD dissertation was published as a book
which is having an important impact on our understanding of the
connection between the development of the concept of the IQ and the
eugenics programs that led to the rise of Hitler. She, too, is a devoted
mother, who once lectured to a large class with her son straddling her
neck because he was too sick to be left at preschool.
I believe that my children found ways to follow their passions, just as
my mother encouraged me to follow mine. Even though they experienced a
relatively rigid schooling, they were nevertheless able to integrate
what they learned with their personal interests and keep alive inside
themselves a determination to live the kind of life that they gradually
discovered they wanted to live. They are different from each other, but
each has achieved the kind of success in life that makes the experience
of parenting (which takes a whole village, by the way) worth everything
that any of us put into it.
Realizing individual potential
I am very grateful that I had the kind of school experience I had, and
also that I had the parents I had. The combination of the two convinced
me that I should devote my life to changing education. My general theory
of education can be expressed in a single sentence: Do whatever it takes
to help a human being realize the full potential built into the
structure of the particular brain her or she was gifted with.
If the brain is designed to function in a certain way, and you try to
make it function some other way, you create brain damage, just as you
would if you tried to turn your car into a snowplow. Because outstanding
educators put the brain in charge and don’t let anyone force it to be
something that it wasn’t, they are successful. Anything that we can do
to put the brain in charge even more than they did would be all to the
good. But until we can do that we should AS A MINIMUM accomplish what
our best schools have accomplished. If we don’t do that, we are going to
be guilty of speciescide.
In some ways I had one of the best educations anyone could ask for. But
my perception of it was always that it lacked almost everything that it
should have included, since it didn’t teach me in a way that I found
delightful, and often it seemed to make the subjects I was supposed to
be learning more difficult to understand when my teachers should have
been able to make them easier to understand. After all, if you can’t do
that, what are you doing in the teaching profession?
When I went to Amherst College, I had heard that it was one of the best
colleges in the country. But as I put in my time there, I kept thinking,
“Is this really the best that human beings can do to educate one
another?” It didn’t make sense. The only times I seemed to learn
anything were when we sat around in the dining hall and someone who was
excited about something would try to get the rest of us excited about it
too.
I can remember a fellow student talking about the invention of printing
and how ideas spread rapidly through London during the Elizabethan Age.
Books spread then similarly to the way cell phones are spreading today.
I have been fascinated by that concept ever since.
I can remember a fellow student from Korea ranting and raving on the way
up the staircase about how society wants you to adjust. “Adjust to what?
“he cried out again and again. He couldn’t seem to get enough rage into
the phrase, and kept repeating it over and over, searching for the vocal
inflections that would give this hideous expression the full benefit of
his contempt.
I resolved that whatever happened to me, I would be sure never to adjust
to it. Adjusting to things, my friend succeeded in convincing me, was a
fate worse than death.
About another thing he was unconvincing, however. He said that he
thought all tests should be unannounced. I thought that was a crazy
idea. We should always be able to prepare for a test, I thought. Today I
believe, though, that he was right. If you can’t test your students from
moment to moment and find that they are sufficiently knowledgeable, then
your teaching process is all wrong. In my school all the students were
aware of how much all their classmates knew, and how well they were
doing in class. This, quite naturally, inspired everyone to do they best
that they could. They did it because it was more fun that way.
My classmate David Durk taught me about sex and about the Living Lie
that Byron wrote of. I became a devotee of the idea of the Living Lie,
and I have found that it is the one great truth. David went on to become
a cop in New York City, because he became convinced that you could do
more to improve society by deciding who to arrest and who not to arrest
than you could any other way. David became a famous policeman and wrote
a book about his experiences and later had a book written about him. The
book and film Serpico are really to a certain extent about him.
My point here is that we learn so much more from our friends than we do
from our teachers that the whole idea that you shouldn’t talk to your
neighbor is part of the Living Lie, and part of the “what” that you’re
supposed to adjust to, but never really should, because you’ll lose your
soul if you make that mistake. I believe that the folks who ruined Enron
were very well adjusted people. The question remains: what were they
adjusted to?
Schools and educational transformation
From my earliest years I wanted to redesign schools. I felt as if I had
been born to do that.
It all started in first grade when my report card said things like,
“Understands what he reads.” That’s nice, I thought. They have one set
of printed cards for the boys and another for the girls. Then I found
out the ugly truth, the Living Lie. If girls wanted to understand what
they read, they had to renounce their gender.
From this I learned that the people who ran the school thought boys were
better than girls. I didn’t agree. I thought girls were better than
boys. They were nicer, they smelled better and they looked a whole lot
better. I couldn’t understand why the principal, who was a woman,
thought boys were better than girls, but finally decided it might be for
the same reason that I thought girls were better than boys. Maybe report
cards that said that had been invented by women.
Later I discovered that that was wrong.
No one every explained to me what was right in that particular instance.
I don’t think anyone knew. Maybe no one ever will. Some things are meant
to be forever mysterious.
When I was quite little I dreamed up a way of making people smarter. It
had something to do with playing music to children in their cribs. Maybe
you could sort of pump intelligence into them that way.
Gyorgy Lozanov and his methods
In 1972 I found out that I was definitely on the right track with that
one. If classical music is used in the proper way in teaching, it can
actually make people a whole lot smarter and help them to understand
things better. That idea came from Bulgaria. The person who first
developed it was a psychotherapist and yoga practitioner named Gyorgy
Lozanov. When I read about Lozanov’s work I knew that I had found what I
had been looking for ever since that early time in my life when I
thought about how to make babies smarter.
So I trundled down to the Department of Education (which in 1972 wasn’t
called that yet) and told them they should import the Lozanov Method
into the United States and replace the nonsense that was going on in the
Public Schools with something that made sense.
They stared at me blankly and said they couldn’t do that.
I wondered what in God’s name our taxes were paying their salaries for
if they weren’t willing to be in the business of improving education.
I’m still wondering that. No one has ever opened the heat of this great
mystery to me, and I’m beginning to think there isn’t one. Bureaucracy
is, I suppose, by its very nature heartless.
So I, who had wanted to start my own school ever since I had become a
teacher, actually did start a school. With a small group of likeminded
people I started what has since come to be known as the Thornton Friends
School. My purpose was to import the Lozanov method and use it there.
The trouble was it was very difficult at that time to find out what the
Lozanov method was and how it actually worked. Since there was no direct
information about that, we had to guess. So we made up our own version
of the Lozanov Method. We found as many different ways as we could to
get our students to express the wisdom that was in them. We had them
read their papers aloud to each other and learn how to write by
observing each other’s writing success. In math class we learned basic
principles of mathematics, instead of just doing math problems. We
talked about the language of math and did experiments with it like
figuring out the likelihood that the room we were sitting in right then
would blow up in the next five minutes. We got a fairly decent answer to
that question, and it made us feel pretty safe.
When we studied history, we made each student figure out and explain to
the class a different theory of history.
I taught a year of basic science by beginning each class in the same
way. “What would you like to learn about today?” I would ask. About five
suggestions would be forthcoming, and I would write these on the board
in the order in which they were offered. Then we would discuss as many
of them as we could.
I would explain what I knew about the science of whatever had been
suggested. If I didn’t know something I would say that we should look it
up when we got home and report back on it the next day.
By the end of the year it happened that I had taught a year of general
science without ever saying anything to my students that they hadn't
asked me to tell them about. I also learned a lot of science, and I
learned that science is meant to be something you learn to understand by
thinking about it. Most of the best experiments done in twentieth
century physics were thought experiments. We did a lot of those in our
science class.
For example, suppose someone asks you how a plane flies, and you don’t
know the answer. You think about what probably makes it fly. You figure
that it has to float on the air somehow, and the way to do that must be
to make the air on the bottom of the plane more solid than the air on
top of the plane. You look at the shape of the wings and you notice that
the air going under the wing goes in a straight line, but the air that
goes on top of the wing goes up and then comes down again. That means it
has farther to travel, so it goes faster, and moving air creates a
vacuum. So the wing floats up to fill the vacuum.
The thing that was wonderful about this experience both for me and for
the students was that it was an exercise in discovering how easy it is
to figure out explanations of things if you don’t already know the
answer. After the students watched me doing this for a while they
started doing it too, so collectively we would all try to figure out why
things worked the way they did, or whatever the topic of discussion was
asking us to figure out. I was even able to teach the equations on which
the theory of relativity is based. Everyone paid attention, because
everyone was interested.
Never in my formal education had I been asked to think this way. I had
always, in science class, been asked to memorize what someone else had
thought or figured out, despite the fact that what scientists are
supposed to be doing is figuring things out for themselves. The course I
took all seemed to be screaming at me, “As for you, you’re not a
scientist and you never will be.”
Barry Morely and Romeo and Juliet
I wasn’t completely happy with the school, though, until I took a walk
with my friend Barry Morley, who had also started a school program at
the same time that I and my friends had started ours.
I told Barry I felt we needed something to help the school year tie
together better. So he told me to put on a production of Romeo and
Juliet and take it on tour to other schools.
I did that and suddenly found that the missing piece had been
discovered. None of the students in our school had had any significant
acting experience. My goal was to turn all of them into Shakespearean
actors. We were going to act the play, but we had to act it, not just
say the lines. That meant that each actor had to understand what every
line meant and how to feel about it.
That Romeo and Juliet was hell on wheels to rehearse for the
first six months because everyone stubbornly refused to act with the
tenacity that only high school students can muster. But in the end I
have never seen a production to equal it. My Juliet, who at first could
only giggle whenever something serious was supposed to happen,
eventually got over that and discovered that she could express her own
emotions through Shakespeare’s lines. When, in the performances, she
looked at Romeo from across the room for the first time, you knew
without question she had suddenly fallen in love. All the lyrics of
“Some Enchanted Evening” came to life in that brief glance. I had had to
fight a war with her to get her to do that, but in the end I won the
battle, and it was one of the proudest achievements of my life.
The speech in our productions wasn’t as good as that in professional
productions, because it takes ten years to learn to speak really
effectively (unless you happen to be born knowing how to do that), and
some people can never learn. However, it was enough to convey the
emotions, and the emotional power of several of our productions made me
very dissatisfied with professional productions I later saw of those
same plays. My young actors had found much more in the plays (partly
because they spent a whole year rehearsing them) than professional
actors usually find.
School – an extension of the nursery
School should be a place where you try out various ways of experiencing
life, just the way little children do in the nursery. If you watch a
child at play, what you see is very similar to an artist working on a
canvas. The child is exploring possible relationships with various toys,
and revisiting them with an enriched experience each new time, until
finally the toy is no longer of interest and is put away in favor of
something else. But in the meantime, the toys in the nursery go together
sort of the way the instruments in an orchestra do. It ought to be that
way throughout the educational process, but traditional education
generally speaking labors to make it dull, and more difficult than it
should be.
After thirteen years of the Thornton Friends School I was asked to train
teachers in public schools and corporations how to teach using the
Lozanov method. I protested strongly that I didn’t want to do that,
because I knew it couldn’t be done. Under protest I trained a group of
teachers in Chicago for a week and left feeling I had wasted my time and
theirs. When, two and a half years later, I found out that the lives of
all the fifteen teachers I had trained had been transformed by the
experience, I knew that I had to spend the rest of my life bringing that
experience to teachers everywhere I was asked to go.
I found in corporations where there is no value in training that does
not translate into changed performance in the work place, that the
Lozanov Method was more times as effective than traditional teaching
than I am willing to tell you. If I told you that it was twenty-seven
times as effective, you wouldn’t believe me, so I won’t tell you that.
I will tell you, though, that when I trained the entire faculty of the
Guggenheim Elementary School in Chicago, the result of that week of
training plus a principal who was a brilliant leader was that the school
which had been 18th out of eighteen schools in its district rose to
number two and achieved grade level average performance in grades 4
through 8 for the first time in its history. The following year it won
two firsts, two seconds and a third in the city-wide science fair,
despite the fact that before the training it had no science program at
all.
This state of affairs lasted in that school for fifteen years. You could
visit on any random day and see things in any classroom that you never
would have expected to see in any school. The students were always
enthralled, and usually when the teacher asked a question every hand was
up. You found yourself learning in a fourth grade class about things you
had never heard of before.
And then, after fifteen years, the Chicago Board of Education shut down
this wonderful program that had drawn people from all over the world to
visit it, and made the school settle down and do things right, just like
all the other schools.
After all, you can’t have a school in your district that’s a whole lot
better than any of the others. That isn't fair, is it? And after all, we
live in a democracy, so we must be fair.
Everyone can be gifted and talented
Nancy Ellis, an enthusiastic teacher at Guggenheim, who eventually
became the principal, started a special program called the Superlearning
Lab. Students who were in trouble academically attended it one period
each day. Nancy told me that when people visited that class they assumed
it was for the gifted and talented, and after a while she realized that
it was, because those students were continually demonstrating that they
were gifted and talented.
Nancy sometimes came to my workshops and described her experience in my
class. “He told us that if we redesigned our classes we could teach our
subjects much faster. I didn’t believe him, but I decided to see whether
it was possible. I had a course in paragraph writing that I had taught
five years in a row. It took five weeks and when I gave the test at the
end, everyone always failed. I had taught it by the mastery learning
system, but the students did not achieve mastery. However when I used
accelerated learning, I gave the test at the end of one week and
everyone passed.”
Nancy later admitted to me privately that her story wasn’t true. She had
not taught the course in week as she said she had. She had taught all
the essentials of it in a single class period. So the class was
twenty-five times as effective as it had been when she had taught it in
all the previous years.
“I had to lie about that,” she told me. “They never would have believed
me if I had told the truth.”
Naturally these experiences made me feel pretty stuck up. I had to step
back and realize that these remarkable successes, which pretty much
happened every time I trained teachers in a variety of different
educational settings, didn’t depend on me at all. I was the conduit for
them, but other instructors who trained teachers using the same
methodology got roughly the same results. The results included the fact
that in addition to learning the material, the students became in their
own eyes and these of others, better people. They understood things
better in general, their self esteem was stronger, they were better team
players, and they were better leaders. This was true regardless of
economic background, age, level of advancement or subject matter. It
seemed to work everywhere, including in every culture in the world that
tried it. But the American Public School system still isn't
interested.
I doubt that one in a thousand in this country has heard of Lozanov. The
Lozanov Method failed to take the nation by storm for the simple reason
that public schools do not exist to educate children by developing the
best methods possible. Unfortunately, schools exist for the status quo
in most communities. Teachers still stand in front of the classes,
individual subjects are taught behind four walls. Nothing much has
changed in one hundred years, except a few computers may have been
added.
Parents want their children taught as they remember being taught, or if
they were neglected, as others their age were taught, not realizing that
schools have to change just as their work has dramatically changed. They
fondly remember their friends, Friday night games, and not fascinating
but rigorous, challenging projects to complete. Consequently they keep
expenditures down. Many administrators, unfortunately, try to get by as
best they can with limited resources.
Teachers are a different story. 90% of the teachers I have trained have
gone on to do magical things with the tools I taught them. They have
been very grateful for the help these provided them, and they have often
shared them spontaneously with their fellow teachers. If they had their
way, the teachers of America would rise up and embrace the Lozanov
Method, or something very like it. But they don't. The administrators
make all the decisions, and some administrators care more about the
quality of their toilet seats than they do about the quality of their
calculus classes. Unfortunately, they’ll get their retirement, and
that’s all that’s important, isn’t it?
There are some administrators, however, that have been able to build and
run truly marvelous schools. They have an opportunity to lead us out of
this dark tunnel of ignorance.
From the time a child is born until the beginning of formal education,
that child is at least 90% of the time in charge of the learning
process. Inner impulses guide almost everything the child does.
The structure of those inner impulses is driven by the child’s inner
programming, which is based on billions of years of cellular search for
survival. Cells survive because they can interact successfully with
their environment. The environment thus shapes them to an extraordinary
extent, since unsuccessful interactions can lead to the death of the
cell.
With billions of years of programming behind it, the child sets out on a
quest for successful encounters with everything in the environment. The
only way the child can learn and grow is to find the things there that
cause an improvement in the child’s overall perspective, state of being
and happiness. Those that do not are rejected so the child can go
elsewhere and explore potentially more productive things.
What is unproductive today may prove productive tomorrow. The child
tries something for a while, then moves on somewhere else. Eventually
all the things that have been tried are revisited. Sometimes the
revisiting will last a long time, sometimes it will be cursory. However,
one may be assured that the child over time will get the most out of the
environment that it has to offer, because the seemingly random series of
visits to different things to interact with them are prompted by the
child’s need to build a vocabulary of successful interactions. The child
does this by seeking out those that at any given time are challenging
enough to be interesting and easy enough not to be frustrating. Thus
there is a powerful balance in the student’s exploration, which is
laying the foundation for all that will be learned later. Experts tell us that most of our learning occurs within the first five
years, before we get to school. But why should this be so? School, if it
provided us with the same opportunity to interact in many different ways
with many different things, would allow us to continue the search that
leads to ever deeper understanding at the ideal pace that we are
designed to work out for ourselves.
Systems of learning – stimuli and responses
Simple models of stimulus and response tell us that learners will be
attracted to those experiences that are pleasurable for them and
repelled by those that are not. A child who has experienced a number of
severe traumas will be unlikely to learn in the areas in which those
traumas occurred without the chance to get over the trauma. In extreme
cases of this sort, it sometimes makes sense for a therapist to
intervene in such a way that the trauma is, by whatever means,
desensitized and the learner can distinguish between the specific
circumstances that caused the trauma and the more general ones that are
likely to occur when encountering things that are reminiscent of the
cause of the trauma.
I mention this possible need for intervention because it is probably the
only way in which active teaching can be justified in the classroom. A
therapist, for example could stage a series of interventions between the
learner and the fearsome object that would gradually decrease the threat
of the object and enable the learner to develop a more normal
relationship with that object.
When, however, there has been no trauma, the internal instincts of the
learner should guide the learning process as much as possible. If I am
sensitive to my own internal states, I am the best judge of how much
time I should spend with something in order to understand it better, and
what new challenges I should take up in approaching it.
However, the ordering of the progression of challenges may sometimes be
useful, as the collective experience of humanity over a long period of
time in dealing with certain forms of complexity may have led to
sequences in experiencing something that are more productive than the
chance sequences that the individual encounter my otherwise lead to. The
film Karate Kid is an example of how programming the sequence of
actions that can lead to a successful outcome can be extremely helpful
and productive. Systems of learning that provide this opportunity can be
extremely valuable in speeding up the learning process.
However, the decisions about when those experiences should be undertaken
are much more likely to be productive if they are made by the learner.
As a learner, I should decide when I want to learn a certain kind of
thing, such as playing a musical instrument or reading a certain book.
If I am sufficiently attentive to my experiences and inner states, I
will develop a great deal of proficiency in designing learning programs
for myself in the larger sense of selecting them. The learning programs
themselves, however, may vary greatly in their subsequent usefulness to
me, and I will welcome the assistance that helps me find the right kind
of approach to a subject or skill too complex for me to work out
intuitively myself.
It’s interesting that some learners can intuit extremely complex
learning experiences, while others cannot. There is the child who can
look inside the hood of a car and instantly understand everything that
is going on there. Or the child who can watch somebody play a musical
instrument for a short time and then start playing it successfully.
Such instances tend to be rare, but they would become far more common if
children spent their time in environments that were totally supportive
of their attempts to explore and structure things for themselves as much
as possible.
These would be schools in which the students determine what they will
learn and when they will learn it, and this enables them to follow an
inner light that grows stronger the more they follow it until, as
adults, they are able to make significant choices about their life plans
that lead to unexpected and remarkable results, often with children who
might otherwise have experienced life only as a series of failures.
When we move forward into the future we are afraid to
cast off the burdens we have and fly to others that we know not of. If
we assume that we are going to run a school that looks more or less like
a school and then try to improve it, we risk less, but we compromise a
great deal more.
In the school that I helped to found, we had classes, but we tried to
make the classes as student-centered as we could. And we saw all kinds
of learning taking place spontaneously in the halls. We saw remarkable
things happening, but they did not, in the end produce incomparable
genius, although a few of our students ended up living commitments in
the world that without us they would probably never have been able to
come to.
One of the interesting phenomena I observed at my school differs from
the sociological wisdom reported in Edward T. Hall’s The Hidden
Dimension. Hall tells us that human beings are a non-contact
species. He shows a photo of birds sitting on a phone line, evenly
spaced, and compares it with people standing in line waiting for a bus
in the same evenly spaced manner.
In an assembly you usually see people sitting in that same way. But not
in the assemblies in our school. The students freely huddled together
with one another, arms around each other, heads in laps, the kind of
contact you see in kittens and their mother cats, or in families that
love to snuggle together. That feeling of family pervaded the school and
broke down the distances between people.
What kinds of schools do we want?
What I learned to want as a teacher in that school was tools that would
teach certain kinds of skills that some people don’t learn easily but
want to. Those tools were not available then, but they are today, and
can be used to augment what our finest educational models can accomplish
by giving people access to the kinds of structure that will make it
easier for them to follow their passion. I know this to be true, because those kinds of tools have made it much
easier for me to follow my passions.
Other than that, it seems to me that over time we could work out the
means to train large numbers of people to run schools in the way that
our children really need. It won’t be easy, but it is essential that we
do it.
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