I’ve been reading a fair bit of writing on progressive education over the past few weeks, starting with Alfie Kohn (linked from The Fat Nutritionist; I love the Internet). And oh my, it is fun: delicious, enraging fun. Sometimes I have to put the books down, when my own massive cynicism overwhelms me: oh, you poor dear deluded thing, trying to prove that Punitive Technique X doesn’t help children learn, as if learning had ever been the point…
It’s hard for me to discuss this stuff without sounding as if I think I had some uniquely horrible childhood and every moment I spent in school was hellish, when really I had it pretty good. But you know, that’s kind of the point: I had a fair number of good school experiences and lots of okay ones, but I also had plenty of stupid, pointless, degrading, harmful experiences, and that counts as having it pretty good.
The “best” school I attended, my prestigious private junior high for the “academically able”, was the source of my worst experiences by far, which is why I look askance at most prestigious private schools. And as a response to Holt, Kohn, Gatto, Meier etc., I am going to blog some of the things I learned there, so that you can have the benefit of a first-rate junior high education without having to pay tuition!
Our first lesson will be in science, a subject for which I admit I had no extraordinary aptitude.
How To Do A Grade 7 Science Lab, Prestigious Private School, ca. 1994
1. Learn from teacher what lab will be testing, what hypothesis will be, and experiment procedures. Laboriously copy it all down in your neatest handwriting, under headings “Purpose”, “Hypothesis”, “Methods” etc. Get hand cramp.
2. Conduct experiment. Enjoy playing with Bunsen burners and beakers; feel like alchemist.
3. Observe and record results. Observe that results do not conform to hypothesis. Try to ignore feelings of panic at prospect of getting in trouble.
3a. If this is the first time you have got the “wrong” results, ask teacher for help. Carefully absorb lesson in how you cannot possibly really be getting the results you are getting and you are probably deliberately misusing materials or lying to waste teacher’s time. If this is not the first time you have got the “wrong” results, disregard this step.
4. Weigh possibility of getting in trouble for fake results against certainty of getting in trouble using real results. Erase or cross out measurements from actual experiment. Falsify data.
5. Write up results. Try to sound as if understood why class was doing experiment or actually gave shit about subject matter. Fail. Try to explain results, but have trouble coming up with more than simple sentences like “gravity exists” or “water boils at 100 degrees Celsius.” Fight feelings of despair at own hopeless stupidity and likelihood of miserable death in poverty and squalor, because not good enough for Prestigious Private School.
6. Hand in lab sheet. Slink out of class.
