Discussions of school restructuring often come down to rearranging some familiar elements: Let's add these programs and get rid of those; reallocate these funds or those resources. They ignore just how radical changes will have to be if we are to make school work for the many youngsters that have given up on it. I'm talking about the kids who sit in the back row of the class and look out the window -- when they bother to come at all: the in-school dropouts. And I'm talking about the ones who are just marking time till they get a piece of paper that will prove they made it through high school. There are a lot of these kids. Unless we figure out how to reach them, we'll be abandoning a large and significant group of kids. But reaching them will take more than reshuffling ideas that have already failed. It will take visionary thinking that is firmly rooted in the realities of the problem -- like Tam Dalyells's proposal for ship schools.
Dalyell shows a real sense of what kids are and what they need in The Case for Ship-Schools (Glasgow, Scotland: Civic Press, 1960), which he wrote when he was a young teacher in Scotland in the late 1950's. The government was getting ready to raise the school-leaving age by a year, a reform that looked like a step forward. But Dalyell wondered what an extra year was going to do for the many kids who were already turned off by school and were set to quit. What was forcing them to stay in school for another year going to do for them?
The problem Dalyell defines here sounds much like ours. We'd probably explain it differently, but his observations about what the kids need are right on the money. These students, who are three or four years beyond puberty, want to be independent, treated like adults, he says. They want to see that what they are doing makes some sense in the real world. But most school work doesn't make that kind of sense, and most classrooms are the "antithesis of independence."
Dalyell's ingenious answer to these kids' problems is ship schools -- sea-going vessels big enough to accommodate 400 pupils and a staff of 40, plus a crew. They'd be fitted up as schools, but kids would also take part in the work of keeping the ship going. The four-to-six-month cruises would make up a ship-school term would begin in coastal waters and go on to various foreign ports where students could go ashore and learn about the places first hand.
As Dalyell well knows, the excitement of working and living aboard ship as you were headed toward Malta or the Suez Canal would do a lot more to bring the most apathetic teenager to life. But of course there's a lot more to Dalyell's plan than a glorified class trip.
Ship-school students would follow regular classes with a curriculum adapted to life aboard a ship. So learning would have a real context, unlike the way it is in most schools. What kids studied would be applicable to what they were seeing and doing. Dal yell compares the standard kind of math problem -- "how many days would so many men need" to do such and such -- with asking students on board a ship to do real-life calculations about how much fuel the ships needs to take on for 6 1⁄2 days at sea or how much flour or fruit juice will be needed to feed the people aboard.
English lessons would focus on describing ship-board activities and shore visits in a journal that would be bound at the end of the trip and retained as a permanent part of the student's records -- much like the student writing portfolios that some school districts are experimenting with now. And, of course, geography and history would concentrate on the countries where the ship school was to dock. Imaging learning about Roman engineering and then stopping at a port from which students could head out to see some of the great monuments that remain.
The connection between learning and working that was absent in the schools where Dalyell taught -- and is certainly foreign to most of ours -- would be crystal clear in ship schools. And seeing this connection, Dalyell believes, would make an enormous difference in student motivation: "For most pupils, it is one thing swatting away at a text-book, with no very meaningful end in view, in a stuffy classroom -- it would be quite another, busily reading dials, checking log-books, making calculations on which the steering of the ship in the open sea could (momentarily) depend.
"The point is that the pupils [ would] be made to feel by every possible means, that they are doing a job of work and something depends on whether they do that job of work, competently or incompetently."
Doing this real work aboard ship -- everything from cleaning up to assisting with piloting the vessel -- would teach kids other things they wouldn't learn in a conventional classroom -- like how to work together to get something done. And Dalyell believes it would help them break the "vicious circle" of school failure to which a lot of them -- like a lot of our kids -- become accustomed because it would get them used to the possibility that they could be successful.
Tam Dalyell's ship schools never happened. They depended on a kind of Peace Dividend that some people were looking for at the end of the 1950's. And we know how uncertain Peace Dividends are. But that's not the point. It's that Dalyell was able to look at a familiar institution and its problems and see them in a new way. If we're to succeed in restructuring our schools, we, too, need to cultivate this visionary way of thinking.