IN-CLASS ESSAY
To me, the entire grade-school situation appears, by design, impossibly fragmented. Where, more so than at school, are people and ideas so intentionally partitioned into such narrow and isolated/ing frameworks? What do you think? Would you disagree? Well, as it turns out, I’m not alone in my thinking. This is something education guru Sir Ken Robinson so continually and eloquently attempts to remind us of. And as I go looking, I find nearly countless other scholars have done the same going back a century or more to people like John Dewey (1910s), Thomas Hopkins, and Lev Vugotsky (1930s) to name a few.
If you go into almost any school you’re there able to witness the internalization of this lived fragmentation: the social becoming psycho’. On the social front, students are continually modelled how to physically and mentally atomize the world and their experience of it into perilously narrow frames, and even disjointed and, arguably, near-meaningless segments therein.
From what I’ve experienced, while often attempting to be the center of a community, schools tend to be exclusive spaces, spaces-unto-themselves. The schools I’ve been to are physically separated and highly conditioned zones. Schools are controlled and strictly organized long before any children are even in attendance: from the land schools occupy to the design and arrangement of fields, play structures, and buildings; from who may attend and under what circumstances, to what time of day and year the school and its services are available to them. In all the schools I’ve seen, not only are people of different ages systematically separated but physical walls are even placed between them – a constant reminder that age is the most important variable at school. (You’ll note that within a school we formally call these classrooms “divisions” and even go so far as to identify each by number! And, like me, you might wonder if this is to make the obvious separation still more glaring or whether it’s to drill into everyone’s minds a firm military analogy?) Even classes that combine people of similar ages and grade levels, a grade two-three class let’s say, is commonly labelled a “split class”. Yes, we actually take what could not be more clearly a combination and rework it in our minds to convince one another that what we have is a division. Madness! (Yes, I understand that teachers are encouraged to refer to such classes as “combo” classes; but, like the change from ESL, English as a Second Language, to ELL, English Language Learners, it’s extraordinarily rare to hear anyone apply the new phrasing – outside of academia or meetings attended by administrators, that is.)
At my practicum school (undoubtedly a “good school” by any measure), once in their assigned “division” children are divided further, with every student being issued their own private locker. (One to which they’re encouraged to affix a 3/4 inch hardened-steel, double armed, pry-resistant, saw-proof shackle. Why, exactly?) Here too, as in every other school I’ve ever visited, gender is continually enforced as a defining characteristic of each child. Groups of kids are addressed as “girls and boys”; we direct them as gendered cohorts with phrases like “All the girls... Now all the boys...”; gendered groupings are passively encouraged when students work collaboratively; genders can be observed dividing themselves and regularly competing against one another; we insist upon gendered washrooms in schools, despite the absence of any such a division in the home (or any number of other places) where different genders appear to capable of using and even sharing the same room.
(To flog this a little further: if the gendered separation of washrooms is about sex and sexuality – because why else would it exist – then aren’t we pretending that our LGBTQ friends and family don’t exist? And if that’s the case then I don’t understand how you’re going to have a “safe” and “inclusive” school/society without eliminating the whole gendered washroom thing. Further, my brief research on this topic resulted in horrific anecdotes and statistics showing washrooms as the dominant site of violence against these minorities; and, perhaps surprisingly, this violence occurs disproportionately in ladies washrooms. So, some kind of change seems necessary.)
As if that wasn’t enough, children are further physically separate from one another by being placed into personal desks. (Desks: hysterically egocentric zones [yes, both meanings of the word hysterical: mad and hilarious]) in which each child owns theirs with a name tag, making what would be public and shared now private. And then, once the private property of the desk is established, each student gets their own personal equipment. They are made to have their own notebooks and textbooks, their own pencil and eraser and ruler, and more. And like other private property this causes no end of problems. Any teacher will tell you that the desk is the suburban garage of the classroom: never big enough and quickly overflowing with all manner of justified junk. Even the teacher is segmented away and placed at his very own and very different desk, with his own very different set of adult tools – apparently to highlight the already painfully obvious difference. (Because age, size, weight, physical strength, appearance, social status, title, responsibility, freedom, vocabulary, experience, skill-set, knowledge, resources, and their name on the door are not enough?) To further ensure disconnect and lack of attention on all fronts students are also packed into classrooms in a student-to-teacher ratio of 25 or 30 to one. (With four-year-olds in pre-school, and even for dog walkers you might notice, the ratio is never more than 5:1 or 10:1; but a one month difference in a kid’s birthday, amounting to nothing in terms of maturity or developmental change, and suddenly 25:1 is perfectly cool...) And, as is clear, all of the above is just the setting: we haven’t yet begun, officially, teaching these kids anything.
It’s from this hyper-exploded place that the real, overt segregation and fracturation begins. In class, children are typically asked to be quiet and not associate with one another unless otherwise ordered. Additionally, students are even discouraged from feeling or having agency to respond to the vital internal workings of their own bodies. In all my school experience a teacher must grant permission to a student wishing use the washroom; and a bell must first ring to indicate that students are allowed, if first all of their work is done and their desk is clean, to feel hungry or thirsty and to satisfy these pangs. In other words, in a twisted form of psychological warfare unseen outside a maximum security prison, children are clearly and systematically made independent from one another (in every conceivable way) and then forcibly prevented from having any autonomy at all. Further, these kids are often, all too often, made to sit still and focus their minds on the narrow content of a dry, uninspired lesson (something most adults find difficult.) To make matters worse, the lesson will likely be framed within a solitary subject, cut off from all its innate embeddedness. Of course the lesson itself is, as has been the expectation for a generation or more, focused on a single “prescribed learning outcome”. So their teacher may insist they focus on a discrete element of their learning (in Language Arts: reading or writing or speaking or listening) as if that could actually happen. And, further, just to make the whole experience as fragmented, unnatural, and unrealistic as possible, the lesson is commonly delivered in a forty-five minute segment; as though this is some kind of divinely conceived temporal ordinance, the Eleventh Commandment or something, under which all sanctioned processes will rightly unfold.
But it doesn’t stop there. Then comes the affect, the absorption and reflection of all this programming. On the personal front, students slowly internalize all of this codified atomization. And they can only do so as all experience is learning and school is such a long-lasting, engrossing, an formative institution: that place children are sent explicitly for the development of cognitive and communicative processes. Sadly, more than any specific theme or skill, this separation, this easy and eager divisibility, appears to be the dominant and essential education, the experience, schools deliver. Is dis-integration not the thematic common denominator from kindergarten through grade twelve? Students are (en)trained year after year after year to partition things off into as many little parts as they possibly can. And you can watch them as they begin to believe and act as though this paralyzing and impossible fragmentation is how the world (in all its facets, forms, and functions – themselves included) actually works: independent and divided. Yes, this social interaction becomes more than mere influence, it evolves into mental processes that are then reproduced and reinforced by these students.
Finally – and just to bring the whole crazy mess to a level of pure psychopathy – parents, teachers, communities, and governments (while simultaneously enforcing every possible division, rigidness, and conformity) demand that students be flexible and creative, able to collaborate and think from others’ perspectives, make connections and see the bigger picture, and tolerate ambiguity (as though these things will happen spontaneously and don’t have to be modelled or formally taught.)
Given all of this, could there be, I ask you, any more disjoint and disconnect within a school without there being an operating room carrying out regularly scheduled amputations!? In fact, is it impossible to believe that future generations, or an off-world anthropologist, would learn of all this and not chalk it up as a form of ritualized brutality – something akin to circumcision – what with all the splitting and cutting off, all the dramatic and lasting deformation and dulling? I don’t think so. (Was that over the top? Perhaps. But the volume and variety of needless, elaborate, and excruciating separations seem a touch outrageous too...)
Now, there are two obvious arguments that, on the surface, may appear to dispel the assertions I’ve made here; however, I feel these are easily dispatched just by looking at them.
The first is the “Ya, but I liked school” argument. Yes, it is undeniable that there are people who learn to thrive in this environment. But notice the similarity between this argument and the one that goes, “I was spanked (or otherwise physically and/or psychologically abused) by my parents and I turned out just fine.” Sadly, it’s unlikely that you turned out as well as you believe, and it’s also unimaginable that you would’ve turned out worse for not having been hit by the adults you were forced to live with and rely upon for your survival. (If you did turn out well, is there really any doubt that it was in spite of and not because of the abuse you faced?) Following this logic, you could make a similar argument for the value and necessity of going to prison. Prison inmates, while being denied most their rights, freedoms, and human dignity (with many suffering physical and psychological abuse as well), also manage to gain valuable work and life skills, find friendship and mentorship, and even improve their health and fitness. Does that mean we should all do a decade or two in prison?
The second augment says, “Ya, but there are amazing schools and teachers out there.” True. I know of some as well. However, I think it’s obvious that they are exceptions and not the rule. And, further, in my experience, (despite the excessive number of meetings and professional development days) there’s no coordinated effort to seek out, nevermind emulate, schools or practise that we might all agree approximate a best case. I have never seen or heard of this happening but some kind of system-wide, coordinated correction can’t start quickly enough.
Again, just to be clear, I’m not arguing for some impossible ideal but merely for us to abandon practises that appeared out of touch and even inhumane to respected education scholars at the turn of the last century... Unreasonable, I know.
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