A pledge to please but not to teach

When my son was 3, my wife and I sent him to a progressive preschool, one that claimed to value autonomy and personal development, and encourage self-esteem. I’d attended a private school, where the uniform included a coat and tie and final exams were given beginning in the fifth grade. For my son I wanted something more free-form, more child-centric.

The school promised an environment in which students set the agenda and learning was geared to individual needs and abilities. If my son wanted to read, he would be taught; if not, that was OK too. It sounded great -- until a year or so later, when my son complained that he wanted to read but nobody at school was helping him. The next day, my wife and I went to see the school administrator, who did her best to deflect our concerns. Perhaps, she suggested, he wanted to read at home rather than in the classroom; in any case, no teaching was ever done.

I couldn’t help thinking of this experience as I read Elizabeth Gold’s “Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity: One Season in a Progressive School.”

First published in 2003 and recently reissued in paperback, the book details her four months as a ninth-grade English teacher at the School of the New Millennium in Queens, N.Y. It is something of a primer on the fallacies of progressive education. Gold was not a teacher but rather a poet in need of a paycheck. As a result, her account is remarkably direct, a report from the trenches of the education wars.

The School of the New Millennium is one of the “New Visions” schools, a charter-like program of small community-based campuses within the New York City Public School system. (“Big institutions can be alienating, and the special qualities of each child can be lost,” a brochure tells us.) “I had read the ... brochure,” Gold writes. “It sounded great.... A New Visions school ... why not? A lot of the old ones didn’t work very well.”

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more succinct argument supporting progressive education. Most people know all about the problems facing public schools, including violence, overcrowded classrooms, low test scores and high dropout rates. Yet almost from the instant Gold starts at New Millennium, she recognizes that progressive schools face significant issues of their own. In the first place, as is true in other public schools, resources are scarce, which means students often have to do without basics. One of the most poignant moments occurs when Gold comes up with a set of English textbooks, to which one student utters rapturously, “At last, a book!”

The classroom itself is a “Lord of the Flies” setting, where order is a lost cause and the only rule is that of the mob. For every student who wants to work, two or three come to school for no other reason than to be as disruptive as they can. Gold admits that she is not good with discipline, and her inability to control her students becomes a running theme.

This is exacerbated by New Millennium’s philosophy: “Every child has a voice.” Student empowerment has long been a hallmark of progressive education, but where is the line between empowerment and chaos? And how does one educate when, as Gold tells us, “I am looking at a blizzard of paper and kids banging their chairs around and howling.... This is the moment I am supposed to say the words that will whip some into even greater frenzy ... but it is too loud for me

For anyone who has stood before a high school class, such a moment resonates with the force of revelation, highlighting the conflicting emotions that come with teaching -- the peculiar mix of idealism, frustration and (at times) fear. In Gold’s case, that’s compounded by New Millennium’s agenda, which is less about education than making students feel good. When she gives grades, for instance, she alienates both students and administrators by failing several kids. “Do something about these grades,” her principal warns. “When little Johnny comes home with these grades, Mommy and Daddy are going to be very upset.”

It spurs a parent meeting -- “WE WILL NOT ACCEPT FAILING GRADES FOR OUR CHILDREN!!!!!” screams a flier -- at which the subject is not lack of student achievement but Gold’s unrealistic standards. “You are in big trouble,” a 17-year-old ninth-grader shouts the next day as Gold’s tenuous grasp on authority erodes further still.

How does one build up children who may not get much emotional support? What is the school’s responsibility: to offer facts, ideas, curricula, or to create a setting in which kids are nurtured, where they can feel good about themselves? Gold confronts these questions at an all-school meeting, when one of her students announces that the problems in her classroom all stem from an inability to bond.

“Oh. So it’s like that,” Gold writes. “Funny what a good tool Sensitivity Language is. What a brutal tool. You can’t argue with it, you can’t say that feelings are not important, when we know, of course, that they are the only things that count.”

This brings us to a fundamental flaw of most progressive education programs: that what we feel is more important than what we do. It’s an understandable error, especially in a culture that relies increasingly on testing, under the Orwellian rubric “No Child Left Behind.” In reality, empowerment and empathy are often little more than buzzwords, excuses for not getting the job done. “While I won’t take the School of the New Millennium as a paradigm,” Gold notes, “I suspect that its struggle to please all parties, to offend no one, because someone might start griping about his rights, is reflected in textbooks and in schools all over the country. The result is mediocrity.”

That casts the idealism of progressive schools in a complex light. Or, as Gold puts it: “Once I entered the School of the New Millennium, I lost the luxury of distance. Maybe I, too, once dreamed an ideal dream of what people were supposed to be, and how, through the simple force of my goodwill, I could reach them. Now I know it’s far more complicated than that.” *