Most of the great high school movies - my list includes The Breakfast Club, Election, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Heathers, Pump Up the Volume, Fame, Grease, Mean Girls, Carrie, Napoleon Dynamite, Elephant, Back to the Future, American Graffiti, Dazed and Confused, Clueless, Boyz 'n the Hood Fast Times At Ridgemont High - have nothing to say about what teachers do in classrooms, and lots to say about the horror that results from places where students and adults are completely alien to one another. If I have to watch a movie about high school, I prefer these movies because they focus on the point of view of those being "educated". They are more raw. They are distorted. They shake me up. They remind me that too often the school "does stuff" to kids, who feel institutionally dis-empowered to act independently, in a legitimate way. So they turn to subversion, and inversion. They subvert power by keeping those who carry it out of their lives, and thus irrelevant to them. In these movies, teachers and principals are caricatures and stereotypes, drawn from the view of the powerless. And in these movies, the power structures are inverted because we root for the kids, the underdogs. We want them to win, because we all have a "bad teacher" or a "bad school" experience. Hold that memory.
A smaller, subset of the high school movie is that in which the teacher becomes a hero, taking the kids on some kind of epic learning journey: Bang Bang You're Dead, Dead Poet's Society, Donnie Darko, The History Boys, Precious, Stand and Deliver. These films usually do more harm than good to the cause of sustainable education, because the students end up depending on heroic teachers (we're supposed to believe these teachers are "inspirational" when really they're more self-inflational) who convince one or a few brave, gutsy students to respond in some rebellious way to flout the institution and the power of "the man". The kicker in these movies is that the teacher usually is the biggest "kid" in the movie. It's inspiring in a sense, but it's an infantile fantasy really (for the adult who wants to be cool with the kids all over again). Anyone who's worked in a school knows that these stories of inspirational talks, or wacky activities, followed by full student compliance and soaring heights of academic, or creative, crescendo just don't happen. At least not for any sustained amount of time. And if it happens to you once in a while, you recognize immediately that you've set your own bar too high, that you won't be able to match that euphoria, and that you don't want to have that conversation with the principal to explain why you've done what you've done, much less be confronted by a parent about it. (To be fair, each of the movies I've listed in above do include the teacher in the throes of those painful moments, and what happens next is that the teacher loses his or her job! This is not sustainable for most of us. We need to work. We need to pay mortgages.)
The truth is that somewhere between these two there is a kind of real, ho hum, school experience. A third school movie type, that includes only one film in its category, as far as I can tell, is The Class (it's a French film). I watched this movie in late August last year. It was so painfully real that I had to stop it half way through, breathe, and decide whether I wanted to watch until the end. It wasn't what my bad dreams are made of, but it was made of the good days and the bad days, the staff meetings and the parent conferences, the triumphs and the injustices. The movie shows schools doing what they actually do: failing and succeeding, but failing more than succeeding.
Now's the time to bring back that memory you were holding. I'd rather it weren't so, but it seems to me that we've, as a society, decided to accept that the institution we call school (especially high schools) will fail to work well for the majority of those who attend. We've accepted that old adage, in an inverted form: It didn't work for me, so it doesn't have to work for you which is a variation on the "I went through it, so you should too" song and dance. This, my friends, like most widely accepted lies, has some truth in it, just enough to make it dangerous.
At the inservice on school innovation I attended today the presenter said that the phrase "school reform" has been in steady use since the 1920s. And the truth is that the basic "industrial model" format of educating has not changed significantly since that time. Though young people develop physically, mentally, and emotionally at markedly different rates, at school we insist that they all enter at the same time, learn the same things, and do the same sorts of assignments and tests. Worse, we insist on measuring them for it, and then labeling them. (Does your child who plays third line centre need any more of an indication of his ability to play hockey than that? Does he need to come home with a report card that gives him a C in "wrist shots" and "playmaking," and a C+ for "hustle"? And if he did get those reports on paper, would that encourage his love of the game, and make him want to play it just for fun? (I know, I know, playing hockey is voluntary. Exactly! At least you can quit at PeeWee and save your dignity and sense of self.)) For 90 years we've known that schools do not work for the majority of the students in them, or worse, that many young people don't, in our wealthy, privileged society, want to go to school at all!
Where am I going with this? Well, the next time you hear about a school, or a school system, trying to make a change, encourage them in it. Don't assume that it "ain't broke." Just because we're used to it, doesn't mean it's good. Ask any successful company about the need for change. Ask any farmer about the necessity of innovation. Ask him if he wants to return to using "back-in-the-day" techniques and machinery. Ask him if he thinks those would work for him today. You know the answer you'll get.
1 comment:
Saying that a school fails more than it succeeds is a slight overstatement. Schools are all part of a greater picture. In our greater picture (privileged, free rights, first world,), schools only succeed as much as we expect them to. By the looks of our economy we do not expect our students to develop their potential or use the things they have learned beyond the practical application of the ho-hum jobs they will do for the rest of their lives. Can we really expect students to take their education seriously judging by the fact that ‘service’ jobs require almost zero education yet they make up a majority of jobs? If we (as a society) don’t expect them to do much with their lives, then it’s hard to fault the school system itself. Why don’t students want to be there? Because they can’t see how the lecture on Dorian Gray or Holden Caulfield will help their lives. Because the value placed on learning is minimal compared to the value placed on having the shiniest car or the fanciest house.
Maybe instead of reform we need to think in terms of simplification. Why do we teach? Is it to make clones of ourselves? Are we preparing kids for work? Are we preparing them for success? Of course there are going to be kids who have “bad” experiences. This is where simplification might come in handy. While kids are forced to learn the multiplication table by heart and the difference between their, there, and they’re, they are rarely taught to set high expectations, have self-respect, or learn how to overcome an obstacle. In a normative world students would be taught values over practicalities, and to learn for the sake of knowledge not for a skill set. This, unfortunately, is much too idealistic for our materialistic world. While the practicalities are necessary for our country to continue to prosper, it would be nice if we valued humanity more than a job or industry.
This all being said, you do an excellent job teaching. You have more of an impact than you think. Don’t get too discouraged!
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