More thoughts about school

I love the comments that the first post on this topic engendered, and so I thought I'd post again with some further ideas that are floating around in my head.

I've been fortunate in my brief public school teaching career to teach in several different structures and economic settings. I've taught in a multi-age classroom, a traditional same-age classroom, a couple of suburban schools, an inner-city school, and I've taught students from kindergarten to fourth grade. These different experiences put together and accumulated help me recognize the importance of the underlying structure of a school environment, below all of the standards and curriculum and particular idiosynchrasies of specific teachers or buildings.

My hopes and visions for the future of public schooling (how's that for a grandiose sentence!?) include a diverse and varied range of choice among particular institutional structures. In other words, I wish for parents to be able to easily select multi-age classrooms, or classrooms that are more cooperative and democratic vs. individualistic and competitive, or classrooms built upon "alternative" philosophies like Montessori or Reggio Emilia. These are just a couple of examples of the lines along which my thinking tends to travel.

When I say something like "I'm worried that the structure is breaking down," I mean principally that I'm concerned that the public school system is losing any hope of moving towards this diversification of structure that we once had. When I think about the way my own fifth grade teacher oriented her classroom ("contracts" with the teacher through which students set out their own individual curricular intentions, large amounts of cooperative work included, self-evaluation that wasn't just for show, etc.), it feels almost revolutionary now. I had team-taught classrooms twice when I attended elementary school (once in lower-el., and once in upper-el.), where there was a great deal of fluid movement between large- and small-group work and interaction with multiple teachers.

It seems to me that the public school system as a whole (I'm not talking about any particular schools or districts or anything here) is getting to be more Industrial Revolution-era factory-ish (back to basics, conservative, punitive, rigid, etc.) the further away from the Industrial Revolution we get. Is that overly dramatic? Probably. I fully admit that I'm probably drastically over-generalizing here ... but, on the other hand, having listened to Diane Ravitch on NPR several times over the last couple of weeks, maybe I'm not. (I need to read her book--I'm waiting for my library copy!)

What I appreciated so much about all of your comments is that you're all coming from such varying perspectives. How lucky am I to have such an awesome group of blog readers? :) Some comments pushed me in a more philosophical direction, while others reminded me of the importance of focusing on the local situation "on the ground," as it were. I appreciate that so very much, because I think that's where the main tension in my mind lies. I have enormous philosophical qualms about "the system," but I know that I do have a great deal of hope within my own local system to be able to find different paths and alternatives.

So, I'll keep writing and pondering ...