Joyless, Mindless Schools

"It is not possible to spend any prolonged period visiting public school classrooms without being appalled by the mutilation visible everywhere--mutilation of spontaneity, of joy in learning, of sense of self. Because adults take the schools so much for granted, they fail to appreciate what grim, joyless places most American schools are . . . what contempt they unconsciously display for children."

Such a jeremiad is not the conclusion of a radical school reformer but of a concerned FORTUNE editor who visited more than 100 schools during a 3 1/2-year, $300,000 study sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation. Charles Silberman, 45, is the author of a perceptive summary of race relations, Crisis in Black and White. His new book, Crisis in the Classroom (Random House; $10), is likely to be as widely discussed as James B. Conant's 1959 report, The American High School Today. Silberman finds that even highly reputed schools are so preoccupied with order and discipline that they neglect real education.

No Questions. In a $3,000,000 suburban "school of the future," reports Silberman, promotional brochures describe the central-core library as the school's "nerve center." Yet during the school's first year of operation, children were allowed to go there only once a week, and then not to read but to practice taking books from the shelves and returning them. The second year they were not permitted to go at all because the part.-time librarian had returned to teaching spelling. Prejudice compounds primness, says Silberman. In one fifth-grade classroom, a black youngster raised his hand to ask a question. The principal, visiting for the day, snapped, "Put your dirty hand down and stop bothering the teacher with questions."

Equally depressing, writes Silberman, most of the reforms suggested by academics touting new courses and computers have left "the schools themselves largely unchanged"--chiefly because their proponents fall into the same trap that hobbles school staffs. "It simply never occurs to more than a handful to ask why they are doing what they are doing . . . What is mostly wrong with the public schools is mindlessness--a failure to think seriously about purposes or consequences."

Baking Cakes. Silberman's ideal of what schools should be doing is hard to fault: he is convinced that they can help "create and maintain a humane society" by making their first priority the production of "sensitive, autonomous, thinking, humane individuals." In a glowing chapter, he reports that his ideal is already close to reality in about half the primary schools in England, where orthodoxy is giving way to highly informal "open" classrooms. At first glance, they look like chaotic kindergartens: children move around talking; rows of desks are replaced by "workshop areas" arranged throughout the room and in nearby corridors.

The whole idea is to free children to follow their curiosity through a rich variety of gamelike experiments. Math is encouraged, for example, with a real stove in which young children can bake cakes, carefully measuring the ingredients while a teacher explains concepts like ounces and pounds. Reading and writing occur almost painlessly as the children follow instruction cards for science experiments, and then record the results in their notebooks.

"How do the children get any work accomplished if they do nothing but play all day?" one U.S. principal asked. Silberman points out that well beyond first grade "play is a child's work"--an insight that draws, as does the entire informal approach, on the experience of Italian Educator Maria Montessori and the research of Swiss Psychologist Jean Piaget. Though academic structure is outwardly minimal in such informal schooling, says Silberman, it becomes apparent to children as they explore the books and materials that knowing adults select for them. Moreover, teachers freed from lockstep group discipline can observe individual children more carefully, prodding them to move beyond easy materials and stick with difficult ones.

To date, Britain's informally educated children have scored as well on most standard tests as those in traditional classrooms. Best of all, says Silberman, eager kids begin to show up for school early--and instead of running wild, they avoid many of the discipline problems that can drain up to 75% of a teacher's time. One of Silberman's most interesting discoveries is that techniques similar to the British approach have been spreading quietly in U.S. public schools. In the past three years, varieties of it have worked well in at least 28 school districts in North Dakota, the first six grades in Tucson, Ariz., "learning centers" in nine Philadelphia schools, and nearly 40 poverty-area classrooms in New York City.

To anyone over 40, informal education strongly resembles John Dewey's ideas--the "progressive" education that excited Americans in the 1920s and angered them in the 1950s. The trouble with progressivism, Silberman admits, was that too often it degenerated into shoddiness, partly because few teachers were properly trained to carry it out. For that reason, Silberman joins a host of previous school critics in urging a drastic upgrading in the training of U.S. teachers.

Beyond all that, Silberman's admirable ideas for reform collide with current national frustration at the increasing cost of schools and the decreasing discipline in classrooms. According to a recent Gallup poll, most U.S. adults think that their community's schools are not strict enough--and that curriculums need no substantial change. Nonetheless, Silberman's vivid examples of educational failings and his catalogue of existing alternatives will help produce pockets of progress and serve as a powerful agenda for those who still believe that the rest of the nation's schools can and must improve.

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