March 9, 2024
Dear Parents of our Let’s Get Schooled elective students,
Now that the trimester has concluded, I want to fill you in on what we learned in our elective about, well, learning.
Actually, about schooling – which, as our students quickly realized, is not the same thing as learning. Each day, we wrote about and discussed a different question related to schools themselves, from the particulars of the school day to larger issues of politics and policy. After journaling for a few minutes, we typically examined a source document (an article, a video news report, a graph or chart) and used it to delve into debates and controversies related to the day’s question, both throughout history and in our contemporary context. On most days, we reserved a few minutes at the end to write about how our perspective has evolved.
Here is a sampling of questions our class explored:
What is the purpose of schooling?
Should children be forced to go to school?
Should most learning take place in classrooms?
Must all students learn the same things?
Should students attend single-gender schools? Religious-affiliated schools?
Should schools that teach mostly students from low-income households be different from schools that teach mostly students from high-income households?
Should students have to do homework?
Should teachers give grades to students?
Should schools enforce a dress code?
Should schools celebrate and/or close in observance of religious holidays? If so, whose holidays?
What time should school start and end each day?
Which disciplines should schools always teach? Which are expendable?
Should schools punish children? If so, how, and for what? If not, what should the consequence be for student misbehavior or rule-breaking?
Should school be out for summer?
Should students have internet access at school?
Should the government provide money for families to enroll their child in a private school?
Should parents have a say in what their children learn and read at school?
Should teachers carry weapons in order to disarm a potential active shooter?
When a student asks teachers to refer to them using a different name or pronouns, should the school automatically notify their parents?
Along the way, we learned about types of schools (public, private, parochial, charter, cyber, homeschooling); Horace Mann and the emergence of public education; experiential and project-based learning; No Child Left Behind and Common Core; private school vouchers, the school choice movement, and educational inequity; standards-based grading; school surveillance technology; Waldorf Schools and the push to minimize device usage; the ongoing effort to ban books and curriculum related to race, gender, and sexuality; and even the science of sleep.
We also brought in a number of guest speakers this trimester, both in person and virtually. We chatted with administrators of all-boys, all-girls, and Episcopal schools; with a Muslim teacher who works at a Christian school; with a teacher who spent much of her career in charter schools (our own Mrs. Larson); with an expert in restorative disciplinary practice (our own Ms. Verango); with a former parent advocate for “gifted and talented” children; and with our own school’s founder, Nan Hunter, who laid out her philosophy of discovering the gifts in every child, how she arrived at it, and the struggles and joys of trying to implement it in real life.
And of course, we embarked on two projects this trimester. Thank you to all of you who sat for interviews with your child for our Oral Histories of Schooling project; we had fascinating follow-up conversations about the diversity of schooling experiences across generations and cultures. More recently, each student articulated a philosophy of what school should be for and then designed an original school in alignment with their philosophy. They shared their designs not only with their classmates and me but also with Dr. Jorgenson and Mr. Adams on the last day of class.
It has been a true joy to share my passion for this topic with these ten students this trimester. I hope they found our conversations meaningful, interesting, and useful to them as they continue their ACDS careers and then proceed to high school and higher education, better equipped to understand and critique the systems around them.
Sincerely,
Mike Fishback