Experiment in Learning

The study of the humanities has a new look at Jefferson High School, a look designed to help young people trace the connections that the real world makes between the various things they are learning. It seems to work.

For example, 10th-grade humanities students at the school at 41st and Hooper have been reading Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” At the same time, the students learned in biology about immunology, that if Frankenstein were real he would reject the patchwork of parts of himself because so few of his tissues matched. In art, the subject was the Romantic period of painting that blended with Mary Shelley’s time. One student, Oscar Garay, likes the classes “because when we do our final, everything just comes into place.”

That is the way the teachers in what Jefferson calls the Humanities Interdisciplinary Education program hoped would happen when they planned the close relationship among courses. Even though students switch from one class to another, they are building on knowledge gained in each of those classes. It is the way education ought to work but often doesn’t.

This program started in Los Angeles schools in 1986 because students weren’t doing well in the humanities and furthermore showed too little interest in history, languages and the arts. Teachers from the Cleveland High School Humanities Magnet in the San Fernando Valley help teachers at other schools who show interest in the approach.

Similar programs are in place in nine school systems across the country where teachers in each school work together to plan the best approaches for their own students. A team of 10 teachers and one counselor, for example, is working on the program at Jefferson, with social-science teacher Cathy Nadler as coordinator.

The program is in its second year at Jefferson and is under way at a dozen other Los Angeles city high schools. The Rockefeller Foundation, working through a private coordinating group known as the Los Angeles Educational Partnership, has provided a grant of $500,000 over three years to give the teachers extra pay, cover staff time to develop the courses and buy some educational materials. Other substantial grants come from the Ahmanson Foundation and the Stuart Foundation.

Jefferson started in the fall of 1986 with 35 10th-graders. This year 27 of them continued into the 11th-grade program and another 67 began the 10th-grade curriculum. Enrollment in the program is about three-fourths Latino. Most of the others are black students and there is a sprinkling of Asian Americans. The 11th-graders are reading Walt Whitman, learning about the United States in the period immediately after the Civil War, and discussing philosophical and ethical questions as they have emerged in science, especially as the country industrialized.

The students are not necessarily honors students; the program is open to anyone who maintains a 2.0--or C--average. But when they sit in class talking about what a Romantic painting should look like or when they turn in poems in the style of Whitman, they are of a mind with honors students. And that cannot hurt.