Progressive Education for Democratic Society

I did get to the junior high school and through high school, reluctantly, as I will later explain, and without enthusiasm enough to gain value from study in which I hardly engaged. Value came later as those early experiences with the tedium school authorities forced me to tolerate led me to thinking about school and why it was ever devised, why it was as it was, and what could be done to make it better or whether it should exist at all. I have thought a lot too about me, as a student-nonstudent and how I was and who I was, who I thought myself to be, as my experiences with school taught me to think of that self. School, in our society, influences a student’s sense of who he or she is and what it means to be the particular me one understands oneself to be.

I did become an educated person, in spite of the system, I believe, and I went on to earn higher degrees from good schools despite many warnings that my low grades and bad behavior would likely prevent such from happening. I studied English as an undergraduate because in my last years of high school I met characters in books who were at least as bad as I had come to think myself to be, but really good deep down in their souls. They introduced me to the possibility of looking at the world academically in ways that were liberating, that upheld liberation as a path to being not just good but very good. I became an academic of, and for the possibility of, liberation, and my purpose was to offer the gift of liberation to others from a repressive system of education that serves a repressive society that could be a democratic one with the help of a decent system of education.

The school is on the river, but feet from that magnificent spot, a school situated in a setting of natural beauty but, at the time I was there, serving a community in considerable stress. The timber industry was in rapid decline, and good numbers of people who live in Glide and the surrounding hills were either out of work or on notice that they might soon be out of work. It was a place filled with fear and resentment, the fear reasonable, the resentment somewhat misdirected to blame those trying to save what was left of the forests instead of the huge lumber companies that had greedily cut as quickly as possible without concern for the demise of the forest. Even without the rules government was beginning to impose, the end of the logging industry as a bonanza business for the lumber corporations and a provider of living-wage work for residents was eminent. The near future hung over Glide parents and Glide students as a dark cloud that no one could escape from being under. There was a monumental transition taking place there, and the students, sons and daughters of lumberjacks and millworkers, were coming to realize that their futures would not be what they had always expected they would be. Few who lived in Glide and around Glide—some students spent hours on busses to attend, the Glide school district being, geographically, the largest in the country—because of their histories, took seriously what the school had to teach, not very important to the lives they had lived, were living, or expecting to live.

I taught English and was told to do so carefully. English was a subject that, more so than math or home economics, was understood to have the potential to introduce suspect ideas. Science, at the time, was another because it was known to most in the region that it was being used to support initiatives that were or could affect life in Glide in unpleasant ways, politically and religiously. Those teaching in the controversial disciplines knew well of the sentiment and were warned regularly by the administration to avoid the kinds of controversies that the board and community communicated loudly were to be avoided. The community-friendly approach took the heat out of the curriculum and enforced a dullness that made excusable students’ lack of engagement with what was going on in their classrooms and an unwillingness to spend time outside of school doing the work assigned them. The state curriculum, always designed to be teachable using the commercial texts, was, for the most part, safe enough to satisfy most communities and, therefore, dull enough to deny students across the state any kind of deeply relevant and exciting learning experience.

They struggled and I struggled. Shakespeare was mandatory, of course; the words of the Bard are absolutely meaningless unless one is willing to do the work necessary to understand them. My students had nothing they could come close to liking in the content, works of Shakespeare, taught to them; no matter how hard I tried to help them develop it, no matter what devices I employed to make Shakespeare relevant. I knew the tricks published with great frequency in the English journals, tricks created in such abundance because of the problems most English teachers knew Shakespeare to present, of how to make it interesting enough for students to engage in a very difficult process of interpreting archaic language by helping them to understand the value of stories that were, to them, considerably less compelling than the stories available everywhere around them, told in language they already understood. My students insisted on being their stubborn selves, willing only to do the work if the work was meaningful to them, not in the abstract for an abstract future, but in and for the here and now. They had little use for what seemed to them, and often to me, sappy moralistic textbook stories. I knew of better works, better at getting at the same or better morals, but was prohibited from sharing them. They lived in Glide, Oregon where Ken Kesey could not be taught! They could be assigned Emerson and Thoreau but never poems with such lines as

Ginsberg was not exactly their lives, but their lives enough, enough that I could help them see relevance in the most detested literary form—poetry. With a few hard-hitting writers, I could have shown them the real power of poetry and prose to convey deep and powerful feelings to make them meaningful to others, their poverty and pain experienced by others elsewhere in many different forms.

I did reach some of my students, sometimes, but not often enough to feel that I had succeeded with them or for them. I took chances, tried to reason with administration and sometimes with their parents. I did bring in unsavory literature that some came to savor, and I pointed many to books and newspapers and films and such that they could access if they wanted to on their own. Some came back with stories, their own and found ones, that were told in class for the sake of showing what they thought to be good stories, stories they wanted to tell or have told but had never been made comfortable enough in school to tell them, stories they understood to be of a kind not acceptable for telling in school. Stories of their own experiences and of their own imaginations they understood would get them in trouble for the telling.

I have asked myself continuously, or at least time and again, throughout my educator’s career, what I could have done differently and understood then and henceforth that much of what I could have done and should have done would have gotten me fired.

I needed to think about the problem that was mine as a teacher and for those I taught, and I couldn’t do this at Glide. I quit and enrolled at University of Oregon doctoral program in education. I wasn’t there primarily to become a professor. I wanted to study the problem and find a way to do what was necessary to make school good for all students, good enough to get them involved deeply enough into the process of becoming educated so that they would understand it well enough to use effectively to get meaning from their experiences in life, those in school included, that would allow them to live better, as well-informed and highly thoughtful human beings. Most of the courses I took at Oregon, those required for the degree, helped a little to answer the questions I needed answered, and some, exhilaratingly, pushed me deeply into theory and philosophy to ground the rest of my life’s work. Chet Bower’s course was one of these, and my reading of his book, The Promise of Theory: Education and the Politics of Cultural Change (Bowers, 1984), was a journey into the kind of thinking I needed to be doing to get where I wanted to be. I also took enlightening courses from Christine Chaille, an early-childhood-education professor who became my doctoral program advisor even thought my stated area of interest was secondary education.

Dr. Chaille created an early-childhood center where kids played the day away constructively, using their minds to figure out how to get interesting things done by their own means in collaboration with others whose thoughts and actions they came to appreciate and respect because they were useful in getting those interesting things done. As a result, I came to think about secondary education in a very different way. I came to consider how instructional practices in terms of how they would affect how students learned what was taught, but, more importantly, I was keen to study the way students thought, not only about the material being taught but also about how students thought of about themselves as thinkers. I came to understand that those who learned well knew themselves to be good enough thinkers to do what was necessary, thought wise, to learn well. Chaille’s colleague and good friend, Christine Pappas, served too as a mentor, she is the author of the book, An integrated Language Perspective in Elementary School: An Action Approach. She too was directed in her thinking by what she learned from paying attention to children, and the English language arts methods she advocated were very much like those I considered best for older students—student-centered and problem-solving-based methods.