What's the most important thing young children learn when they begin school? According to Schooling: The Developing Child (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990) by Sylvia Farnham-Diggory, it's to forget-forget about the personal learning programs they developed as they figured out how to walk, talk and understand their world-and assume the role of pupil in the school bureaucracy.
Children's learning in the five years before they begin formal schooling is incredible. And much of it is stuff they work out-or at least practice and perfect-on their own. They learn to walk, talk, feed themselves, ride a tricycle, climb stairs. (And in urban neighborhoods, many young children learn to fend for themselves in the face of many dangers.) All of this learning takes place according to children's own schedules. Some kids learn to walk or talk or drink from a glass earlier than others, but everyone learns.
Suddenly, says Farnham-Diggory, who teaches at the University of Delaware, after all this excitement and achievement, children enter school and find that school will handle the process of learning for them. From now on, their real job is to learn the role of the pupil-how to sit still, listen and answer questions when they are asked.
Under this new system, children quickly discover that their own questions are a nuisance and their learning strategies are irrelevant. Feedback about how they are doing is often too abstract and too late to be useful. Though children learned to walk and talk in their own time, school learning has to be done according to the school's schedule and in the school's way. The school is saying: "We don't accept your techniques for learning things; do it our way or not at all."
One of the characteristics of this rigid school structure, as Farnham-Diggory points out, is that both time and work are "fractionated." That is, days are subdivided into periods; periods into lessons; and lessons into objectives. This makes it easier for the administration to keep tabs on teachers-but it also makes it harder for kids to learn. What is "covered" in one class period is unlikely to be related to what was covered the last hour or will be covered the next. And students might not come back to a particular subject again for several days. As a result, Farnham-Diggory says; children who know reams of baseball statistics and can tell you all kinds of details about science fiction struggle to remember the unrelated material that gets thrown at them in the course of a school week or day.
The way learning is conceived is another problem. In most of our schools, the only learning that counts is the kind that can be put into declarative sentences (and tested on a standardized, multiple- choice test): A cat is a mammal and so is a whale. This academic learning, which is mostly acquired through the spoken or written word, is important, but it is only a small part of the complex knowledge human beings are capable of -- and need. And it's often not very useful because it is so abstract, so removed from children's own lives and interests.
A child with a new bicycle doesn't learn how to balance on the bike because he wants to know how to balance (he may not even know what balancing is); he learns because he wants to ride his bike. And he doesn't manage the feat by reading a manual or following someone's instructions. He learns by trail and error -- and probably with the help of someone's steadying hands.
Farnham-Diggory does not believe that the organization of school and of learning in this country is the fault of teachers. In most places, as she observes, both have been prescribed at the district or even the state level. And teachers have to do their best to make sure students learn the material so they don't perform badly on standardized tests or fail the year: "Teachers, like children, are exhausted by the relentless pressure of the fractionated school day."
The solution Farnham-Diggory suggests -- she calls it a "cognitive apprenticeship" -- radically alters the relationship between teachers and students and gives students back an active role in their own learning. In Farnham-Diggory's model, teachers correspond to the adult experts in a traditional apprenticeship. They are not simply the source of factual information; they are resource people and guides. The students are apprentices, working toward a goal that is important to them and that calls for all the intelligence and resourcefulness they showed when they were learning to take their first steps.
Farnham-Diggory' s suggestions are not just theoretical; she spends a good part of her book describing curriculums -- many of them teacher-made -- that allow children to be apprentices instead of "very small cogs[s] in an enormously complex educational machine." And for those who associate this kind of learning with a neglect of the basics, she discusses techniques for teaching-reading, writing and arithmetic to children who are actively engaged in their own learning.
We know our schools aren't working; Sylvia Farnham-Diggory shows us exactly why they aren't and why they never will. But she also shows us what schools could be like it we had a system that paid less attention to keeping the educational bureaucracy going and more to the way children learn.