The NAIS office will be closed Monday, December 23, through Wednesday, January 1, for Winter Break. We will reopen at 9:00 AM ET on Thursday, January 2.
At a memorial service for Ted Sizer this past winter, I was surprised to discover that I felt great relief. I was saddened by his death, of course. I much prefer a world in which a Ted Sizer is still walking about, urging sensible and thoughtful educational reform, to a world without him. Yet, I was heartened to find myself in a room full of people who not only admired Sizer and could speak eloquently about his influence on their lives and work — TedHeads, one speaker called us — but who also were dedicating their professional lives to quality education. Here we were, a small legion of people in the Manning Chapel at Brown University who shared a common purpose of getting school right.
Before entering the chapel, I had been weighed down with frustrations over the direction public education has taken in this nation — including frustrations with the people in the Obama Administration who seem to have forgotten the sort of education that got them where they are in life.
Two roads diverge in the educational woods and many schools are following the road where subservience to the economic machinery of the nation takes precedence over human connection, over education for social responsibility, local community engagement, creativity, individual expression, and real problem-solving. This is the road where economic efficiencies rule and where the child’s interests must conform to the school’s interests. This is the road that flat-out ignores much of what we know about intellectual, social, and emotional development.
As Kath Connelly, one of the speakers at the service for Sizer, put it, “Our elected officials are borrowing from the success of Walmart and Home Depot to rethink school…. We have figured out that we want our food to be local; what about the education of our children?”
The other road, the one less traveled these days, is focused on human relations, on learning that arises out of real interests, real emotional connection to the world, real human needs. It is one where locally developed courses matter more than AP courses, where the arts haven’t withered away to an occasional afternoon of crafts, where science is anchored to compelling questions. Yes, there are tests to be taken, and college admissions looms on the horizon, but most days these pressures take a backseat to more engaging and lasting learning.
Some of the speakers at Sizer’s service spoke directly of these things. But they also spoke of the specific influence that Sizer has had on their lives and work. Although my interactions with Sizer were limited, I count myself as one of those who was influenced by his work and encouraged by his mentorship. He barely knew me back in 1996 when he agreed to read the galleys to a book I had just written and offered to write a blurb for the back cover.
As Nancy and Ted Sizer write in the start of The Students Are Watching, “All of us still struggle to be ‘civilized,’ and we need institutions which will nurture our humanity…. In the end, we teachers and other adults who care about children should attend to even the humblest of these actions and dangers, so that we may teach our students — and ourselves — a worthy way of life.”