Reflections on Learn and Life, Chapter One:

Building a Bridge to Knowledge for Every Child

The introduction to this chapter defined learning as “an active process of sense making, not just fact gathering,” and I think most of the educators I know would agree with that definition. However, many think that a certain amount of factual information must be presented before the process of sense making can take place. Herein lies the dilemma; teachers spend 12 years trying to build a factual baseline that they never get to the rest of it. In this article the fictional King school has taken the opposite approach to education. This school seems to be a prefect example of deductive thinking rather than inductive thinking. King school would involve students in activities that have a clear value and from there the facts will unfold. I have never seen a school that approaches this and I know there are many reasons why it would not work, but it is an ideal that I hope we can continue to reach for.

A Hundred Times More Rewarding

The Schools described in this article are as close to a “King” school as we have come. The author’s experience reminds me of an “experiment” that my own high school tried in 1973 when I was a senior. I went to a small parochial school and we used a modular schedule my senior year. There were 15 minute modules and some classes were 2 modules long and others 5 or 6. Journals (as they were called then) were a large part of our assessments. If you weren’t blocked for a module you were free to go anywhere in the school. You could use the library of music room, the dark room or just sit in an empty classroom and do homework. I loved it and thought everyone else did to. However, a few years ago I went to a class reunion and this subject came up. Some of us had fond memories and others had hated the “hodge-podge” schedule. A school like CPESS doesn’t work for everyone, but may work better than anything for those “driven students.” If my students had to do 14 portfolios and major projects their senior year many would drop out. This is one reason why I worry about state goals and standards. There is a real possibility that they will dumb down education. We have to be realistic if we expect all students to come out of high school with our so-called “outcomes.” I don’t believe in tracking students, let them take whatever classes they want, but I do believe that the same thing doesn’t work for all students. At Chester High School we offer many traditional classes, several tech prep classes and a few A. P. classes. They can take any class that they meet the prerequisite for. I really think we are trying to reach all students. However, just in the last few years there is wave toward mediocrity developing. Some of the administration wants to get rid of the AP classes, and parents don’t want students taking classes that are “challenging” because it may be detrimental to their GPA and class rank.