In Experience and Education, John Dewey writes:
"I am not romantic enough about the young to suppose that every pupil will respond or that any child of normally strong impulses will respond on every occasion. There are likely to be some who, when they come to school, are already victims of injurious conditions outside of the school and who have become so passive and unduly docile that they fail to contribute. There will be others who, because of previous experience, are bumptious and unruly and perhaps downright rebellious."
Dewey goes on to say that neither the traditional "battle of wills" method of bringing non-participating students into participation, nor the straight out exclusion of these students from the school, are solutions to these kinds of student situations. He also goes on to discuss the need for sufficiently thoughtful planning on the part of the school, so as to make room for and have resources to deal with such students.
But the assumption I'm hearing is that students start out wanting ever so much to learn and participate democratically and prepare ahead and strike the optimal balance of respect for authority and confidence in their individual positions. This I tend to agree with, but only within the context of students' developmental levels. There is likelihood of student disengagement, rebelliousness, passivity, and poor previous experience no matter where students come from in the socioeconomic spectrum. These things are part human variant, part developmental stage (like separation from authority in high school or devotion to black & white thinking and social group definition in middle school), and part -- not all - environment.
In our next conversation, or one of the next anyway, I'd like to chat more with the group about how, if at all, we would like to continue exploring the implications of targeting specifically disadvantaged student populations for any school endeavor. Ditto the boarding school. There's quite a bit students lose when they are removed from their home environment into one created by, and consisting solely of, their school environment. The kind of students we start talking about when we talk about the benefits of a boarding school will need much more infrastructural support than just a caring set of teachers and a dorm dad.
(Just having an anti-Stand and Deliver backlash moment, and wondering if we can talk about who we want to be as educators without creating straw orphans to save by the sheer power of our great teaching and school administration in the process.)
Have at it with me in the comments?
