Introduction

                In the mid-‘70’s, I was admitted into a prestigious public school, Rufus King Middle & High School, located on Olive Street in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA.  This school had recently been chosen to be a college preparatory school, so they had extra money, lots of high quality teachers (which we students especially noticed when substitute teachers came in), and good facilities, which included a large auditorium with a proper stage for dramas and musicals, AV room, computer lab, stadium and running track, band, music and wood shop rooms (although there was no swimming pool, archery range, shooting range, horseback riding or other things that some other schools had).  They offered a wide variety of subjects, and they were even able to offer some International Baccalaureate classes, from IT, Maths & Sciences to sports and shop to Fine and Performing Arts, to choose from – even non-standard “subjects” like AD&D could be chosen to fill up your schedule instead of study hall!  Over the 6.25 years that I attended RK, it routinely ranked as one of the best on the city’s list of schools, even beating out several private schools – a fact that contributed to our school pride, and our arrogance.

It was indeed, in many ways, a school with higher standards – but then mediocrity crept in.  One day, one of our teachers announced to us that they were going to implement a new system of grading that would make it “fairer” and provide an incentive for struggling students – the grading bell curve.  As the teacher explained how it worked, I couldn’t help but feel that this wasn’t a good thing for us students, although I suppose those students on the bottom end felt a bit cheered up.  Giving extra tutoring to students with academic difficulties would have been more helpful, as would counseling for the bullies and bullied.   In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I came to believe that the bell curve was a mistake that would negatively impact the quality of education nationwide, because this wasn’t just limited to our school.  This was just one instance of the dumbing down of American education, and you can do your own research to find out about that.

                That was one of the things that was a weak point – albeit a shared one – but it wasn’t the only one.  Like the substandard substitute teachers who came in were often treated very poorly by the students if they couldn’t quickly assert themselves and demonstrate their qualities.   Students weren’t always nice to each other.  In fact, the school had its fair share of bullies in my years there in middle school, but most of those were weeded out at the end of middle school based on case reports, and the weakest performers were also sent packing at the same time.  This left a void that the faculty didn’t realize would be filled, and students filled it in as that is the natural way of things in schools which lack a good social program (and, in those days, almost all schools lacked one).  Other students replaced the bottom echelon of students who’d been kicked out, either because of poor scores or lack of effort.  And, along with them, a new cadre of bullies emerged, among them alcoholics and abused children.  Despite the academic prestige of the school, it had no effective way of dealing with these problems – school counselors can only do so much when fear  and taboo prevent the bullied from speaking up , and there were no programs to unify the student body (pep rallies did not do this).  You were in or out, popular or a loser, and academic excellence wasn’t a criteria for being popular.  I knew one straight-A student who, after a few semesters of extreme pressure from his less academically inclined peers, gave in and disappeared into anonymity to avoid their ire.  One attractive young lady, an early bloomer, disappeared after junior high school and rumor had it that she was pregnant.  Other rumors, of students caught having sex in the staircase, or using drugs, or other crimes, were sometimes heard, but not that often.  There were no metal detectors in our school, nor was there need for them since the middle to lower class neighborhood in which the school was situated was kept out, although I once witnessed another student being robbed of his portable radio on the walk from the bus stop to the school.  The biggest problems seemed to be related to popularity and arrogance.  When I had to move to another school during my senior year of high school due to a car accident, I quickly came to realize just how snotty I’d become because of the prestige and achievements of my school.

                I don’t remember at what point this last problem became clear to me.  Certainly, we had a few teachers who were technically expert but as pedagogues they left a lot to be desired.   However, the problem that plagued us all throughout most of our classes was boredom.   Except for subjects in which personal obsession allayed all feelings of boredom, students felt bored most of the time.  I remember hearing of teachers who inspired their students to be interested in topics through engaging personalities and fun activities, but I admit being hard-pressed to remember more than one teacher who did one, let alone both, of those feats.  Most teachers were far too content with teaching what they knew in the traditional way to attempt to use techniques that were fun and interesting, let alone those that were considered progressive long before my parents were born.  It was a thorough education, but a boring one and, once tested, I often forgot things – especially trivia and mathematics.

                The final flaw in this fine school which is relevant to my book is that there was far too much teaching of trivia, and subsequent testing of it.  A large amount of information, names, dates, and places and similar types of information that weren’t actually important or relevant to our future became required material.  In one history class, we were required to memorize not just the Bill of Rights, an important document for all citizens to know, but irrelevant trivia about the Bill.  Trivia may be useful in a game show, and for completing things like crossword puzzles but, in general, it’s garbage that is used in education to make it look valid.   Trivia is a waste of the students’ and teachers’ time, but many don’t seem to realize it.

                Don’t get me wrong – I was grateful for the chance to be in the best public school in Milwaukee, flaws and all, and to be able to participate in band, choir, musicals, stage crew and competitions.   It’s just that, for the best public school the city had to offer, it still managed to miss the mark.  I never achieved the grades I could have because I never felt the desire to do so.  My B average could have been higher if I’d felt intrinsically motivated, shown the relevance of what I was learning, taught how to study effectively and been endowed with skills to help me in my personal and work life.  My education was purely academic and marred by what it lacked as well as what we endured.

                I never intended to get into education.  My father was a teacher and I saw how much time he had to put into his work, and how little he had left over for his family.  The song “Cat’s in the Cradle” by Harry Chapin struck a chord with me, and I determined not to have so little time for my family that that song would become my life’s story.  I didn’t want that for my own family and yet, when I had opportunities to do teaching or training in companies I worked at, I found that I enjoyed helping people by sharing what I knew and guiding them.  After I moved to Indonesia and found myself a job as a teacher, I wondered if an educational system based on making education fun, interesting, enjoyable, challenging and practical existed.

                As I moved along in my career, I got hints of educational systems that seemed to hold potential.  Montessori, Waldorf (Rudolph Steiner) and others all seemed to be going in the direction I dreamed of.  It seemed, though, that these systems were mostly being used in private schools with little hope of them being made available to the general public.  Given that they’ve been around for 100 years or more, and have had almost no impact on public education, it made me feel like there is little chance that this situation will ever change and that, perhaps, there are forces at work keeping them “privatized”.

I came to believe that a teacher is ever-so-much-more than just a person who imparts knowledge and manages the classroom.  I believe that teachers should be interesting, humorous, entertaining, challenging, fun, observant, very creative and innovative, and multi-talented.  They must be able to facilitate, counsel, advise, gently guide, and provide the support they may not get at home.  I also believe that teachers should spend much of their time with their mouths shut and their eyes open, allowing students to learn in a more natural way – the way children learn when adults aren’t meddling with them – by doing things.  As in the Montessori system, teachers should allow the children to do what interests them, observe them, adapt the classroom to the students’ needs, test through projects and teaching their peers, and be more of a facilitator in an environment geared to the needs of the students rather than those of the teachers and supervisors.  Similar to the Waldorf system, I see a strong need for the early development and usage of the arts to promote creativity, aesthetic understanding, flexibility in thinking and other skills that are often found in the arts but are, strangely under-rated  despite their great importance.  Creativity in school is something one British expert, Sir Ken Robinson, feels is exceedingly critical and is not just ignored but actively destroyed in most schools.   I also firmly believe that the teaching of theory should be done in a practical way, by praxis, where the students directly experience the theory they’re learning about so as to better understand it (science experiments are an excellent example of this) and make it grounded in real life so they can see the relevance and importance as it will apply to them.  One of the key points of some of these “old” modern systems is the focus on the development of the character, individually and socially, their ability to think independently and, thus, become independent and fully functional members of the society they live in.  There have been some steps in the direction of a more natural learning style suggested by cognitive neuroscientists, and adopted by teachers of  pre-primary students, such as indirectly learning about physics by performing activities that demonstrate the laws of physics, such as while making a cardboard bridge.

                In this book, I’m going to present a multi-stage plan to switch from traditional education to truly transformational education, but I will provide a choice of methodologies.  I do so because I realize that a sudden switch is both impossible due to the strong resistance of entrenched classical pedagogues and impractical because of their lack of knowledge and training.  In some countries, teachers are so entrenched in the Confucian and classical ways of teaching that programs sponsored by organizations such as UNICEF disappear as soon as that organization launches them into the independent stage of the program and walks away.  To switch so suddenly would create such a backlash for both teachers and students that administrators would find themselves overwhelmed with problems.  To be sure, there are undoubtedly places which could almost immediately switch to the final stage of my plan, and I hope there are many such places.

                Education as most people know it, as most people endured it, is a system so different from its predecessors and so focused on the needs of industrialization that it tries to put students in neat little boxes based not on apparent ability, maturity nor measured intellect, but on age.  Just like boxes of products that are batched by age, students are placed together - whether they are ready and able to or not.  In some countries, such as South Korea, this is reinforced by an age culture wherein you are generally only friends with people of your age or younger, unless you get permission from someone older than you to be friends.  Such a system might work if everyone was born with the same skill set, level of maturity, intellectual capacity, sensory preferences, social type, ability to learn and develop, not to mention the so-called emotional intelligences being the same but many people who have gone through school and are more aware than a potato can tell you this is not the case.  The system doesn’t work well because it’s based on a grossly erroneous premise – that we’re all the same – and it is founded on the desire to create a passive, easily manipulated, homogenous workforce.  A child who struggles in the beginning will continue to struggle year after year unless given special help – and that might not make a difference if it is an area in which the child is inherently and irreparably weak (which isn’t actually very common).  If we assume that Gardner’s inaccurately named Multiple Intelligences theory is accurate in the basic belief that we are all born with different strengths and weaknesses (even if the organization is wrong), which it is, then traditional educational practices become that much more laughable.  If we also assume that Goleman’s inaccurately named Emotional Intelligences theory is also accurate, that multiple senses must be stimulated to maximize results, that skills for life must be developed, and that creativity is of critical importance in most jobs, then it becomes clear that classical education is incredibly inept and even damaging.

                Make no mistake – when I say traditional, I don’t mean the apprenticeship system or home-schooling (both of which preceded public education) nor do I refer to the private tutelage of the wealthy’s children by highly skilled experts (although there’s no guarantee that they were any more interesting than current teachers); I refer to the educational system that has come to dominate most public, and many private, schools around the world for the past 2-3 centuries or so.  To differentiate between Confucian and the so-called “Western” style is like differentiating between two flavors of vanilla.  Each has strengths and weaknesses but, in the end, both are still based on the factory assembly line of age, rigid scheduling of subjects, lack of creativity and heavy reliance on direct transfer of knowledge via lecture and rote memorization, domination of the students by the teachers and other flawed techniques which all help to create a fossilizing system that not only damages students but also society and the advancement of humanity into a golden age.  Saddest of all are the schools where young, enthusiastic teachers are systematically robbed of their spirit by older, lazy teachers who don’t want to be “shown up”.

                I do not presume to think that I am knowledgeable enough to come up with the perfect system which will launch us into that golden age, nor am I naive enough to believe that educators worldwide will suddenly jump onto my bandwagon just because I’ve hit the sore spots that bother them.  I do, however, hope that this book will awaken enough citizens in enough countries that a true revolution of education will occur, which will force teachers and administrators out of their current complacency.  If you are one of thoe educators who already employs the tactics and strategies mentioned in this book, I applaud you and exhort you to continue to expand your repertoire until you are launched into fame and lead the way for other teachers!

                Naturally, just as there are teachers who have already started using better technics, so too are there schools which are creating an example worthy of following.  However, as with Waldorf and Montessori, some of these systems price themselves out of the public market - which is ironic considering that Rudolph Steiner gave a condition to the Waldorf factory that sponsored his first Waldorf school that the school had to be open to not just the children of the workers but also be affordable by the public, and Maria Montessori first started by developing a system for mentally retarded students, and then opened her first school for the children of the working poor.  High quality education that has  a primary goal of helping each student reach his or her full potential should be available to all – from pre-primary to senior high school, and beyond – it should not return to the system of bygone eras when only the rich could afford it.

Parents must also understand education, and an appropriate evaluation must be developed so that parents and teachers will know what is best for each student.  Relying on the opinion of equally uninformed family members, friends, co-workers and neighbors, or following the trend of moving your children to the newest school that pops up is foolhardy, short-sighted, insensitive to your kids, and bound not to get you the results you desire for your children.  Most people do not know what a good school, curriculum, teachers and facilities should look like, so asking them is often going to get you the same result as not asking at all – bad results.

The truth is, classical education, especially public education, is one of the main reasons I’ve written this book for you.

This book is organized so that anyone can benefit from it.  You can read this book cover to cover, skip from one area of interest to another, or read it however else you want – I’ve tried to make this helpful for most people.  What follows next is especially for parents, but can be useful for others, too.