Future Schools: And How to Get There from Here.
1994; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 75; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1940-6487
Autores Tópico(s)Teacher Education and Leadership Studies
ResumoIf we want to change the school significantly, we must smother it with a of changes in rapid succession, Mr. Dixon maintains. But instead, year in, year out, the education industry offers the public Band-Aids for whatever school wound is suppurating at the moment. In the summer of 1992 I received a phone call from Theodore Sizer. He told me that my new book, Future Schools, is important and should be taken seriously. Elation at my end. But he also said that he hadn't had time to read my 500 pages closely enough to write comments. Disappointment at my end. Something about that elation-to-disappointment sequence rang a forgotten bell in my mind. When the memory operator finally connected my mental line, I remembered a call some 33 years before - in November 1959. The Kappan had just planted the seed that grew into Future Schools by publishing my article Are Principals Obsolete?' In it I proposed replacing principals with committees called Adcoms, which are essentially governing committees composed of elected representatives of the teachers, students, and community. My phone rang that long-ago November, and a professor at Columbia told me that he had read the Kappan article and thought my concept an important one that had to be taken seriously. Elation at my end. But he also said that he doubted anyone was ready for it. Disappointment at my end. For years responses to that Kappan article have trickled in from far and wide, all more or less positive. In 1969, a decade after its publication, I received a letter asking whether any schools in Canada or the U.S. had the Adcom arrangement in place. My answer was no in 1969. But I remain hopeful for 1999 or 2009. Metropolitan Miami, Chicago, and a few other places are inching in the right direction - even if they haven't yet got a clear picture of the whole road that leads to good schools. Their problem is the same one that confounded my 1959 proposal, the same one that plagues Sizer's Coalition of Essential Schools, the same one that has bedeviled all education reformers since Dewey: the changes proposed are too narrowly conceived to kill off the old model of schooling, so it eventually kills or cripples them. The school as an organism routinely accepts cosmetic changes and even a bit of plastic surgery now and then for the sake of appearances. But it hemorrhages away transfusions of fresh blood and rejects transplants for its diseased vital organs. It remains forever alive on life-support systems, even though it is brain dead. If we want to change the school significantly, we must smother it with a of changes in rapid succession. A critical mass implies so many changes as to constitute a new model of schooling. Unfortunately, nobody has the specs for such an entirely new model. Academics and innovators have been too busy with patches for the old model. Year in, year out, the education industry offers the public Band-Aids for whatever school wound is suppurating at the moment. Meanwhile, other industries always have new models in the wind tunnel. Purveyors of everything from cars to computers flaunt their new feathers in a mating dance intended to whip up the public appetite in time for the consummation. It's called creating market readiness. But the education industry has no new feathers, so we can't dance. Critics of my Kappan article never suggested whole new models. Educators don't typically think that way. Instead, they complained that changing the principal's office wouldn't change the classroom. So I proposed a different classroom method, an improvement on the concept of open education. The critics then lamented that changing classroom methods wouldn't change teacher education to match. So I came up with a different kind of teacher training, rather like the studio method of training actors. Critics said that wouldn't make any difference, because it wouldn't change teachers already in the schools. …
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