Teaching to the Test, the Masses, and the Individual

Colored chalk dust, a thirty foot may poll covered in colorful ribbons, pentatonic flutes, refrigerators filled with jars of watercolor paints, and children without technology in their classroom. From Kindergarten until 8^th grade I attended a Waldorf-inspired school in California, and this was my life. Over the years we painted, drew, wrote, gardened, sang, knitted, played, and learned in a variety of different ways. We danced around a May Pole every spring, we had enough flute, recorder, choral, and violin concerts to last anyone a life time, and younger grades had a wonderful coming of age Winter Spiral (Kitania is walking to get her little light, all the stars are watching her by day, and by night. Now she has her little light, and her face is shining bright, carefully she’ll guard it all through the winter’s night.) and that was from memory. Memory, especially memorizing verses, songs, stories, and plain old facts was highly encouraged. We learned to read in second grade, had two years of Kindergarten (I am old for my grade), and switched from instrument to instrument depended on one’s age and focus. These various techniques were designed by Rudolf Steiner in the early 1900s as an attempt to fine-tune education to a child’s development, some would argue in an inefficient or misdirected way of teaching children. Steiner argues that although a child may have the ability to learn a new way of thinking, they may not yet have the maturity level ready to tackle it yet. Online education is profoundly efficient as it gets readings, tests, slides, videos, lectures, and grades to many people quickly, without the added cost of teachers, materials, and facilities.

In classic Waldorf schooling, one has the same teacher from grade one to eight, allowing each student to form a very close, trusting, and lasting relationship with the teacher. This teacher sees each student grow up from childhood to graduation as young men and women, and each student is able to grow as he or she did naturally with little push or pull from that teacher. This close relationship is lost in many education systems, but is especially lost in an online education where the teacher has little interaction and absolutely no physical contact with his or her students. The respect and trust I cultivated for my teachers I brought with me to my high school, an almost hilariously academic and rigorous  public magnet school in San Francisco. The teachers, students, and classes were very different, the sense of mutual respect and trust between student and teacher that I was used to was completely lost to me here and I had a lot of trouble with that. I did find a few teachers I felt comfortable with, but they were few and far between.

My respect and focus on teachers I think is what makes it difficult for me to completely accept and wish to follow the pedagogy of Paulo Freire. His book Pedagogy of the Oppressed discusses issues with the traditional and long practiced style of “banking” education. Continuing the current practices and attitudes of the oppressing class upon the oppressed create a new class of oppressors. The basis of banking education survives on the idea that teachers are the source of knowledge, and must fill the empty vessel that is every student with this knowledge. It assumes students have nothing to bring to the classroom, and that the teacher doesn’t learn anything from the process. It also makes for a very stagnant classroom set up, consisting of the teacher lecturing at the front with dutiful students writing all that is said down, no room for questioning or discussion. In the context of an oppressed class, questioning is seen purely as challenging authority and therefore a threat to the social status quo. I personally have a lot of trouble with the fact that the US education system today, although not entirely a banking system, still has a trend of the educated getting more educated which perpetuates the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Even though I appreciate Freier’s conclusions for their attempt to eradication class division and disrupt the oppressive status quo, I can’t get behind all his conclusions. Another aspect of his pedagogy, is that the classic model of teacher lecturing/students listening had to be upended and that teachers and students should be in a constant discussion, with room for questions and challenges from any student for the teacher. What goes with that is a labeling of a lecture style set up as sustaining any oppressive status quo that may be affecting. This is what stops me from completely agreeing with Freier on the role of a teacher, I feel like there can be something beneficial about just listening to a teacher and hearing everything they know about a subject, lecture style. But I think this is an example of my Waldorf schooling coming out, where lectures, stories, and performances were a big aspect of how we learned things. It therefore cultivated in us an instinct to give respect to whoever is the teacher in the situation. So I tend to have focus on the lecture portion of any given class, whether this is because I believe I learn better by ear (rather than by visuals, or reading, etc) or because I have this deep rooted inclination to give my full attention to anyone at the head of a classroom.

The classroom set up practiced by so many does not fit in with the pedagogy practiced by “free” schools whatsoever. Schools like the Brooklyn Free School have a completely free curriculum, where each student can use his or her democratic vote to decide where, when, what, and with whom they want to study. This turns lecture style teaching on its head, with no room to force lectures on students and no traditional classroom set up. Every day is different, anyone can call anything to the school’s attention, and everything is up for debate. A big aspect of Freier is his emphasis on debate and discussion, things that are practiced and encouraged at the Brooklyn Free School. The truth is, not all educations are the same. Many people don’t need an education fine-tuned to their individual needs, but if one gets a chance, different education techniques can be amazing. For the entire system to keep creating individuals ready for college or work, however, a stable and consistent system must be in place, and this system could soon become online only classrooms, with its cost and time efficiency. As seen in NPR’s piece about Coursera, it is difficult to argue there is anything bad about opportunities to take classes from top universities online for free. A balance must be struck up, of student to teacher, of specialized to standardized teaching, and most importantly between the maintenance of the status quo and progress.