A More Beautiful Question (8 page)

When teachers are under this kind of pressure to follow mandated guidelines, it can cause them to be less receptive to students’ ideas or inquiries—as one researcher demonstrated in a fascinating study. Susan Engel of Williams College did
¹⁶
an experiment with two sets of teachers: One group was not given specific guidelines on how to teach a science class, while the other group was “subtly encouraged” to follow a worksheet. The first group of teachers tended to respond with interest and encouragement when students expressed their own ideas. The second group said things like “Wait a minute. That’s not on the instructions.” Engel concluded that “teachers are very susceptible to external influences; their understanding of the goal of teaching directly affects how they respond when children spontaneously investigate.”

While some of the problems involving overloaded curriculum and “teaching to the test” seem to have been exacerbated in recent years, the more general problem of schools favoring memorized answers over creative questions is nothing new. Some point out that it’s built into an educational system that was created in a different time, the Industrial Age, and for a different purpose.

As a number of education critics have pointed out, schools in many industrialized nations were not, for the most part, designed to produce innovative thinkers or questioners—their primary purpose was to produce workers. The author Seth Godin writes, “Our grandfathers and great grandfathers
¹⁸
built schools to train people to have a lifetime of productive labor as part of the industrialized economy. And it worked.”

To create good workers, education systems put a premium on compliancy and rote memorization of basic knowledge—excellent qualities in an industrial worker. (Or, as the cartoonist and
Simpsons
creator Matt Groening puts it, “It seems the main rule that
¹⁹
traditional schools teach is how to sit in rows quietly, which is perfect training for grown-up work in a dull office or factory, but not so good for education.”)

And not so good for questioning: To the extent a school is like a factory, students who inquire about “the way things are” could be seen as insubordinate. It raises, at least in my mind, a question that may seem extreme:
If schools were built on a factory model, were they actually designed to squelch questions?

Logically, as we move from an industrial society to more of an entrepreneurial one, it makes sense that we would want to trade in the factory/obedience model of schooling for more of a questioning model. But as the world changed and the workplace changed with it, the old educational model hasn’t evolved much—and for the most part hasn’t adapted to the modern economy’s need for more creative, independent-thinking “workers.”

Godin and others believe that in attempting to modernize old models of schooling, we should start by asking some basic questions about purpose. Godin offers up this query as a starting point:
What are schools for?
(That question could also be phrased as
Why are we sending kids to school in the first place?
)

With all the current debate around education reform—discussions of conflicting models for schools, competing educational philosophies, differing ideas of how to test, design curricula, evaluate teachers—somehow the fundamental Why questions, which can help frame a larger discussion, don’t seem to come up much.

If we do stop to consider Godin’s question, although there’s no one answer to it, many would agree that at least part of the answer could be summed up as “To prepare students to be productive citizens in the twenty-first century.”

That, in turn, raises another fundamental question:
What kind of preparation does the modern workplace and society demand of its citizens—i.e., what kind of skills, knowledge, and capabilities are needed to be productive and thrive?

The answer to that, again, is not simple, but among those who’ve studied the needs of the evolving workplace from an educational standpoint—and two people at the forefront are Tony Wagner and John Seely Brown—the consensus seems to be that this new world demands citizens who are self-learners; who are creative and resourceful; who can adjust and adapt to constant change. Both Wagner and Brown put “questioning” at the top of the list of key survival skills for the new marketplace.

(As for skills
not
needed in this new environment? Ability to memorize and repeat back facts—because, as noted in the last chapter, new technology puts many of those facts at our fingertips, eliminating the need for memorization. Indeed, this prompts another of Godin’s provocative questions:
Should we abandon the failed experiment of teaching facts?
)

If we simply zoom in on that one Why question regarding the basic purpose of schools, and if we agree that one of their primary purposes is to enable a twenty-first-century citizen to be a lifelong learner, able to adapt to constant change in the modern world . . . and if we also acknowledge that the ability to question effectively is among the most important of the critical skills needed . . . this question naturally arises:

What if our schools could train students to be better lifelong learners and better adapters to change, by enabling them to be better questioners?

How might we create such a school?

To start answering those questions—attempting to envision a school of tomorrow with questioning baked in at its core—it is instructive to glance back at New York’s Harlem neighborhood in
²⁰
the 1970s, where a substitute-teacher-turned-principal named Deborah Meier created a radical model for a school designed to foster inquiry.

Can a school be built on questions?

In education circles, Meier, now in her eighties, is seen as a legendary figure. A pioneer of the “small schools” movement that emerged several decades ago, she was the first educator to receive a MacArthur “genius” award in recognition of her work at the groundbreaking Central Park East schools in New York.

Today Meier remains involved with a number of schools she started in the Northeast and writes a popular blog about education, where she poses unfailingly interesting questions:

Is a test-driven education the most likely path for producing an inventive and feisty citizenry?

What would it look and sound like in the average classroom if we wanted to make “being wrong” less threatening?

And this one, which I particularly like:
What might the potential for humans be if we really encouraged that spirit of questioning in children, instead of closing it down?

I asked Meier about that second question, and she said it originally popped into her head about forty years ago, when a third-grade student at her Harlem school said to her, “What’s different about this school is you’re interested in what we
don’t
know, not just what we do know.” Meier was very taken with that comment; it confirmed to her, more than any of the impressive test results her school was achieving, that she was doing what she’d set out to do when she started the Central Park East schools.

Meier opened the first of her schools
²¹
in 1974 in a dilapidated, old school building in East Harlem, an area that, at the time, “epitomized the collapse of the New York City school system,” according to Seymour Fliegel, a former school official in that district. Meier was herself the product of a tony New York private-school education. After getting her master’s degree she eventually found herself teaching in a Chicago public school and was dismayed by the conditions. She began working on experimental approaches to education, which brought her to the attention of a New York school superintendent—who, faced with a desperate situation in Harlem, offered Meier a chance to try out some of her ideas.

Meier felt that instead of just pushing information at kids, schools needed to teach them how to make sense of what they were being told so they would know what to make of it and what to do with it. She said in an interview at the time, “My concern is with how students become critical thinkers and problem solvers, which is what a democratic society needs.”

Five learning skills, or “habits of mind,” were at the core of her school, and each was matched up with a corresponding question:

Evidence:
How do we know what’s true or false? What evidence counts?

Viewpoint:
How might this look if we stepped into other shoes, or looked at it from a different direction?

Connection:
Is there a pattern? Have we seen something like this before?

Conjecture:
What if it were different?

Relevance:
Why does this matter?

Meier’s core questions came out of her own connective inquiry; they blended elements of her early education in an Ethical Culture school with ideas she picked up from other well-known education innovators, including John Dewey, Jean Piaget, and Theodore Sizer.

Before settling on her five habits of mind, Meier started with two particular ways of thinking she wanted to emphasize—skepticism and empathy. “I believe you have to have an open-mindedness to the possibility that you’re wrong, or that anything may be wrong,” she said. “I’ve always been very concerned with democracy.
If you can’t imagine you could be wrong, what’s the point of democracy? And if you can’t imagine how or why others think differently, then how could you tolerate democracy?”

As Meier established her question-based schools, the classes were run in unorthodox ways, with students given much more autonomy and freedom. Upon visiting in the late seventies, Fliegel encountered “an astonishingly rich educational program,”
²²
which, for example, “included extensive mapmaking, studies of Native American woodlands culture in seventeenth century Harlem, Egyptian and Roman history, the Dutch settlement of New York, printing and newspapers, the emergence of cities (including a mini-study of the neighborhood around the school) and African American history.”

A third-grade class studying medieval society “not only read books but built castles and made armor,” while a first-grade class “developed the idea of building a mythical city.” Students were taken to the local museums and studied nature in Central Park; Meier felt that “outside the classroom children tend to observe things more keenly and ask more questions.”

In some ways, Meier was trying to extend the kindergarten experience through all grades. Teaching kindergarten “was such an extraordinary intellectual experience, and I thought,
Why couldn’t we just keep doing that?
” Only in kindergarten, she told me, “do we put up with kids asking questions that are off-topic.”

Meier learned to listen carefully to students’ questions, finding that they often contained insights that prompted her to rethink her own assumptions and occasionally reconsider the curriculum. “We had one of those world maps with the U.S. right in the middle—remember those? And one of the students looked at it and said,
How come the East Indies are in the west?
And that question got me thinking about the impact of what you put in the center, and what it does to everything else. And it became part of our curriculum. It had so many implications for how you see yourself.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, the students warmed to Meier’s approach—but the parents were another story. Some did not know what to make of the unorthodox lessons and the kids’ autonomy; an environment such as the one Meier created suggested to some a lack of discipline and structure. As Meier pointed out decades later, however, while it’s counterintuitive to many teachers and school administrators, often when you give kids more freedom to pursue what they’re interested in, they become easier to control. The much harder thing is forcing them to sit still for five hours and pay attention to information they don’t care about.

The complaints at the time led to an inquiry. Fliegel (who wrote about his experience several years later) was sent by the school superintendent to investigate. He came away thoroughly impressed and recommended that the school board back Meier, which it did. In the years that followed, the remarkable success of the Central Park East schools became evident. Over the next decade, in a city with a dropout rate that ranged between 40 and 60 percent, only 1 percent of Meier’s students failed to finish secondary school.

Meier’s question-driven schools struggled after she left, and there were few imitators—until recently. Today, around the world, a growing number of schools are embracing some of the principles Meier was trying to teach: that students must develop the “habit” of learning and questioning, that knowledge cannot be force-fed to them. But such schools still represent just
²³
a “drop in the bucket” in terms of the overall education system, notes Nikhil Goyal, New York–based author of a book on modernizing schools.