Thinking again about unintended consequences and how oftentimes what you think is bad for you turns out to be good, this time in connection with education, specifically how what today is construed as “rigorous academic education” filled with AP classes, competitive tests, and loads of homework results in kids turned off from learning. This again based on personal experience.

For 10 years, starting in 1995, my family was engaged in an educational experiment. The experiment involved our son, Greg, who was enrolled at Peninsula school, an 85-year old progressive school in the San Francisco Bay Area. For about half of that time, mostly starting with 4th grade, my husband and I were nagged by doubt: yes, Peninsula is a great environment for kids; yes, Greg is turning out to be a creative, caring, thoughtful human being; but is he getting enough academics? Is he getting enough of the basics in math, writing, and sciences? Several times we seriously thought about taking him out of Peninsula and enrolling him in another “more academic” school. Usually this happened after a conversation with a parent whose child was doing algebra in 3d grade or writing 10 page essays in 5th. The only thing that stopped us from leaving Peninsula was the fact that Greg truly loved it—its teachers, its choices, its grounds, its smells, its music room (more about that later)—and that at some subconscious level we felt that for him, and for us, being at Peninsula was the right thing. We just didn’t know why—it went against all the prevailing wisdom of more accountability, more standards, more rigor, more home work, more time management for kids—all the prescriptions for improving our education system and preparing our kids for a world in which they will be competing for jobs with highly educated kids from China, India, and elsewhere. Unfortunately, noone at Peninsula was good at articulating for a couple of overeducated, analytically minded adults schooled in the “old” system why this was the best kind of education. We constantly saw examples of Peninsula’s success—poised, articulate, and reflective graduates who went on to high schools and did remarkably well. Every time, however, the nagging doubt was still there—yes, it worked for them, that doesn’t mean it will work for Greg. He still can’t do math very well.

The experiment ended with Greg entering a highly regarded college prep high school (Peninsula ends after 8th grade). All three of us held our breaths. Will he be able to function in an intense academic environment? Will he be able to adjust? Will he know how to take tests? Will he feel hopelessly behind his peers in math and sciences? When we came up for air after the first few months of adjusting to a new routine, new commute, new relationships, and everything else that goes along with the transition to high school, we realized that the magic of Peninsula school has worked for Greg. Like all those other Peninsula kids I was hearing from at yearly Graduate Forums, Greg was doing just fine compared to kids from “academically challenging” schools. To our great surprise, a kid who never took Spanish, was able to keep up with classmates who had several years of Spanish instruction. It made us wonder what were these kids really doing during all those Spanish classes in middle school? The greatest adjustment was to have grades at all. At Peninsula kids were not graded; instead parents were invited to meet with the teacher twice a year, mainly to talk about the child—how he was doing socially, emotionally, physically, what he liked/disliked. Each teacher had deep insight into the child, a deep connection with everyone and everything that goes on in the classroom. Academics was a minor part of such conversations, the assessment was about the child as a person.

The biggest surprise started to set in somewhere after the first year of high school and became apparent at the end of Greg’s high school career when we all realized that during the four years of being in a highly academic environment, instead of becoming inspired to learn, Greg, year by year had become increasingly turned off from learning, more and more cynical about teachers, administration, the whole system we call education. From learning being a joy, it became a chore, something you do because someone else is forcing you to do it, something you will be judged on and for which you will be rewarded or punished. To him education became a series of hoops you jump through—do this and you will get that. In other words, he adjusted well–this is exactly how most of his friends felt about school, in fact, they couldn’t fathom that there could possibly be another system, a different way of learning. Every semester I saw Greg get excited about the courses and ideas, and gradually lose interest in both under the pressure of simply having to do too much and under intense pressure.

So, after three years in a highly academically driven school, I found myself turning from a parent concerned with whether her child was getting enough academics, to a parent trying to buck the “academic” system that treats teenagers both as numbers (straight A student or 800 SAT score) and as products that need to be shaped, packaged, marketed, and ultimately sold to colleges. I have come to think of this as my recovery from being a concerned “academic” parent.

My recovery involved deep reflections on our Peninsula experience and why it is that a school whose approach to education flies in the face of today’s wisdom of loading kids with more academics at an earlier and earlier age and having their progress continuously measured to achieve “quantifiable” results, can produce remarkably successful kids open to learning. While it is impossible to sum up all the facets of Peninsula, here are a few things I realized were so important to creating a learning environment at Peninsula and ones sorely missing in traditional academic schools:

Learning is social—too many schools ignore or forget this. Peninsula’s success rests on one of the most intangible of things—relationships. When you visit the school, you find small mixed groups of teachers, students, and staff in the library, in the music room, in the gazebo eating lunch, in the classroom, or out on the Big Field playing games. Teachers and staff at the school are not some separate group that is there to “pour knowledge” into you, to assess, grade, or judge you. They are your friends, mentors, role models, co-discoverers, i.e. “teachers” in the best Socratic sense of the word. Everything at the school is highly personalized and relationship-based. The intense relationship focus is evident in names of classes—there are no 1st, 2nd, 3d grades; instead, there is Josie’s, Gail’s, Garv’s, Lynne’s. Each class has a strong imprint of the teacher who leads it. I always found it curious that people confuse the moniker of Mr. and Mrs. with a sign of respect. To me it is a sign of distance and hierarchy. At Peninsula, relationships—between teachers and students, between teachers who work closely and collaboratively, between parents, teachers, and staff– are at the core of everything. One consistent theme you hear from graduates is that the thing they value and miss most about Peninsula is relationships.

It is relationships that drive kids to learn. Because learning is about participating in a conversation, and kids want to participate in conversations with those who matter to them. If the conversation in their circle is about math or Chaucer, they want to know enough so that they can participate. It is amazing to what lengths kids will go to acquire knowledge so that they can shine in their social circle or in front of people who matter to them. In too many classroom settings, the focus on academics misses this social aspect of learning, in fact, most of the time it is seen as a distraction or an impediment. Instead of thinking so much about curriculum or in addition to that, many more schools should be asking the question “How do we create a social setting in the school to encourage the right conversations?” This involves thinking much beyond what material needs to be covered; it requires teachers to get into social dynamics of groups, individuals, and relationships.

Respect for kids creates respectful and empathetic kids. At Peninsula kids learn to respect adults as equals, not someone they have to obey because of their status in the classroom. Decisions large and small—where to go on a camping trip, how to raise money for a project, how to divide “workjobs” (various cleaning chores around the school), what play to put on, who gets to play what part, what music to perform—are all made by the kids with the teacher serving as a facilitator rather than the decisionmaker. I personally learned so much watching Peninsula teachers negotiate difficult social terrains with kids, I believe I became a better parent myself. In 7th grade, Greg’s class decided to stage “Phantom of the Opera.” Both he and his friend Sam wanted to play the Phantom. The teacher discussed various other options with them which neither one was eager to accept. It finally came down to drawing a straw and Greg won the part. Sam was visibly upset although he tried not to show it. That day in the evening without any prompting, Greg called Sam to offer him the part. “You really wanted it more than I did, so you should get it,” he said. “No,” was Sam’s reply, “you won it fair and square. I will be doing the scenery.” Greg hung up and said to me “We will make sure that next year Sam gets the part he wants. I will just have a smaller role.” Kids made the decision totally on their own, the teacher was there to suggest options but not to take the decisionmaking power away from the kids. How different would the situation have been if the teacher just assigned roles or made the final decision for the kids.

A consistent story you hear from Peninsula graduates is how surprised and shocked they are by the disrespect with which some of their new peers treat teachers in high school. Being disruptive in the classroom? Ridiculing the teacher or sneaking behind the teacher’s back, not to mention cheating, is something completely alien to most Peninsula alums. In my 10 years at Peninsula, I never heard the word discipline mentioned once. Not that individual kids didn’t have problems. These were not viewed, however, as “discipline problems.” Teachers spent enormous amounts of time helping kids “work things out” for themselves and with other kids. I saw remarkable individual transformations take place—a kid who was ostracized by his peers because of annoying behavior, become the most popular kid in class the next year; groups of kids reflecting on their behavior and apologizing to a friend or someone they hurt; a lonely kid getting involved in a music band and becoming a part of a group. This didn’t happen because kids were required to say the obligatory words “I am sorry” or assigned to a group but because they were given time and space to reflect, to figure things out, to work it out for themselves, often aided by adults carefully but unobtrusively guiding them in the process. This is from one of Greg’s essays: “School is not just about academic learning, it’s about learning about yourself as well. And at Peninsula I learned who I am.”

Passion is equally or more important than expertise. I’ve come to the conclusion that content, i.e. what is being taught may not be as important as igniting the passion for learning. And teachers are the ones who have the power to ignite that passion, to see that spark of curiosity in the child, feed it, tend it, and enable the child to create something out of it. More importantly, the teacher who ignites the spark doesn’t necessarily have to be the most knowledgeable about the subject, she is not necessarily the one who has all the answers. She is the one who is excited about it and in turn can pass that excitement to the child. Kids are natural scientists, natural discoverers, all they need is to have someone help them discover and co-discover along with them. My colleague Alex’s daughter came home from a field trip with her kindergarten class at Peninsula very excited. When Alex asked her: “So, what did they teach you on the field trip?” she looked at him quite bewildered. “Daddy, she said,” they don’t teach us anything, “they help us figure things out.”

There are many places for passion at Peninsula. Weaving room where Barbie presides over a collection of old-fashioned looms; library where Misha every year teaches a “choice” on tea, elaborately weaving history and geography into tea tasting ceremonies; auditorium where kids stage plays or perform in the annual rock concert (everyone who wants to plays); woodshop where kids make everything from houses to benches for the school; math room with Liz where you play games without knowing that you are also honing your math skills, and many others.

Every teacher at Peninsula has a passion for something and is allowed to teach to that passion without being told by the district or some bureaucrat who doesn’t know anything about a particular child telling him/her what to teach; every teacher is a colorful memorable personality with whom you have a special relationship and who you will probably never forget.

Kids learn most if they are allowed to learn on their own terms. You know how when your kid is truly interested in something, she can spend hours doing it? This in creativity literature is called the “flow state. ” Mihaly Csikszenthimalyi, a psychologist and expert on creativity defines flow state as the “feeling of complete and energized focus on activity, with a high level of enjoyment and fulfillment.” If the kid is truly interested in dinosaurs, she can in no time memorize all the dinosaur types and learn fine distinctions between them. The same activity may be impossibly difficult to do if it is “assigned” and happens at the time when the child is really into music. So you can spend hours forcing the kid to memorize the names or she can do it on her own in a few minutes if she is interested. Unfortunately, most schools force kids to learn according to structures and times set by bureaucratic imperatives rather than kids’ own timing and inner interests. In fact, most schools with their highly structured lesson times and sequences go against the whole concept of “going with the flow”— kids who are interested in something are rarely allowed to spend as much time on the activity as they need and at the same time are forced to sit in activities they are not interested in at all. This is another reason why so much time is spent on discipline–discipline issues are often a direct result of boredom—when kids are truly engaged in something, they don’t have time to be disruptive.

The less free time kids have, the more their days in school and after school are structured, the less time we allow for kids to achieve these “flow” states and to learn at their own pace. Instead of making learning easy for them, allowing them to pick up what they are passionate about at a particular time with ease, we cram what we think is appropriate on our, not their, time schedule.

Peninsula gifts kids their time—time to explore, be bored, or pursue their passions in their way and on their schedule. This is achieved through giving kids a lot of free time and a lot of activity choices during the day. Half of the day is spent in classroom activities (although these do not look at all like regular classrooms but more clusters of kids doing things together in highly hands on manner). What do kids do in their free time? Whatever they are interested in at a particular time. Some may play poker; others may play chess, someone might be reading, another digging in the sand, or drawing in the art room, or making a scarf in the weaving room, or just having conversations. Our neighbor Matt spent most of his free time in the science room with Linda, the science teacher, because he was really into science. He went on to study at Cornell and is how getting his PhD in engineering at Stanford while working at NASA. Whenever he is back home, his first stop is in the science room with Linda. He considers Linda the best science teacher he’s ever had and to him nothing compares to “doing science” at Peninsula.

Greg spent all his free time in the music room. John Fuller, Peninsula’s music teacher, encourages kids starting in 4th grade to create bands (mostly rock bands because that’s what most of the kids at that age are interested in). He doesn’t form bands, doesn’t pick kids for different bands, there are no signups or shuffling of who should be where or play what—all of this kids do on their own without any adult interference, and it is an elaborate social dance—music, after all, is a social activity. John helps kids figure out enough easy tunes (he doesn’t teach them to read music) so that they can make music together and “get hooked.” The rest is up to the kids. They can drop out at any time, continue playing easy pieces, or build on what John has given them and take it as far as they want. Music has become the focus of Greg’s life and his musical tastes are quite wide—he has studied with several accomplished musicians from whom he learned a lot but no one could’ve accomplished what John Fuller has with simple notes, a lot of time and heart, genuine passion and friendship with the kids. What Linda is for Matt, John has become for Greg. The place Greg goes back to at Peninsula is the music room.

Learning is not something that just happens in the classroom. So how does it happen that kids who spend seemingly less time in structured instruction and have a lot of free time to explore come away well prepared academically and enthusiastic about learning? The best way to explain it is that at Peninsula learning happens not just in the classroom for 45 minutes but everywhere and any time—during free time, in activities, after school when kids are hanging out together. At a recent graduates forum, where alums are asked to relate their experiences of transitioning into “regular” high schools, a sophomore from an exclusive private school on the Peninsula related how surprised she was to find out that at her new school “learning was something you did in the classroom”—kids didn’t continue conversations started in the classroom outside. Such separations are non-existent at Peninsula. Barbie, weaving teacher, told me about a child asking her while weaving “What is DNA?” Barbie’s answer was “Do you want a 10 minute answer or a deeper one?” which led to an impromptu discussion of the structure of DNA among about 10 kids ranging in age from 10 to 14. Same happens in woodshop where, unbeknownst to them, kids are introduced to basics of geometry while doing cool building projects. While on the surface it appears that kids are spending less time on academic subjects, in reality their days are filled with learning, learning that is meaningful to them and occurs on their terms. Conversations about civil war started in the classroom continue in the gazebo at lunch or in activities, they are also brought into homes because kids are not so exhausted from school that the last thing they want to talk about at home is “school.”

Another reason Peninsula kids do well is that although they may not cover the breath of subjects, what they do cover, they cover in depth and in a way that is hard to forget. How can one not remember the Spanish Armada if part of your study involves building paper warships and merchant boats and sailing them through a large puddle in the middle of the school serving as the English channel?

I know, it is hard for every school re-create the learning environment of Peninsula but I do think there are lessons from progressive education, of which Peninsula is just one example, that we are ignoring today. In our rush to compete with China and India, to get “measurable results,” to get our kids into “good” colleges, we are creating a paradox—kids turned off from learning, kids who, according to Denise Pope, a professor of education at Stanford, are “doing school” rather than learning.

At the end of his high school career Greg talked openly about hating school and never wanting to “do academics again.” How different this was from what he said at his graduation from Peninsula, “There wasn’t a day I did not look forward to going to school. I loved every day I spent here.” This says it all.

Why Do These Kids Love School
Peninsula School website
Denise Clark Pope, Doing School

Tags: education

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