Category: Educating Humans
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Post Industrial Schools

Post Industrial Schools

This article was first published in the Island Word in 2006.   It’s still one of our favorites.   

We are watching, with interest, the debates about school closures and consolidations going on in our district. Changing demographics, we are told, are the problem. Falling school enrollments mean some schools must close. Small schools are not efficient. Small schools cannot offer as many options.

At the same time, maybe it’s time to really ask some long overdue questions about education. As summer stretches out before them, students anticipate a wide world of learning opportunities outside of the classroom. “When the world is full of such richness,” a child might well ask, “what are schools for, anyway?”

Our present system of mass education has only been with us for about 100 years, give or take half a century. At the end of the 19th century, public schools and mandatory education were seen in large part as a way to address a pressing social problem: how to get the children of the working poor off the streets without locking them up in factories all day. An alternative to child labor and truancy, city schools were very much shaped by industrial thinking and modeled upon the factory system. Just as factories were set up for the mass production of identical products, schools were set up for the mass production of more-or-less identical workers, as interchangeable as cogs for the machine of economic enterprise.

There was some sorting, of course. Coal leaving the mines of the late 20th century moved along a belt, where it was sorted by size and quality into bins, useful for different purposes. Similarly, the Industrial-model school sorted children as they moved along through the grades; some would be suitable for clerical work, others for manual labor, and a few for overseeing and leadership. But the Industrial-model school was not designed to nurture diversity as a resource. Rather, it was very much attuned to standardization; grading was a single method for comparing children on their mastery of a common curriculum. Students may have remained precious individuals in the eyes of their mothers, but at school they learned to compare themselves for fit into a single mold. Report cards made their progress along this project more transparent, but in the absence of letter grades students still meticulously compare themselves against the standard, and against one another. It is a rare second-grader who does not harbor some anxiety about measuring up, and who cannot give a detailed account of where they stand in rank-order among their classmates on academic, social and athletic prowess.

Such sorting and quality-grading was always a harsh and cruel way to treat young humans, and it still is. But until well past the middle of the 20th century, there was still a place for those who fell off the conveyor belt, so to speak, without advanced literacy and numeracy skills. Those who were not cut out for academics could make their living with their bodies, through manual labor. Some found success in areas that required more experience-based learning, like mechanics or farming, where the best teachers were not books but patient mentors showing a lad how to do or make something with his hands. Girls were even less tied to mastering academics (although they tended to outshine boys in this kind of learning, possibly because they were taught to sit still much earlier); they were expected to eventually settle into domestic work, paid or unpaid, and to give up whatever joy they once took in reading and writing.

One of the biggest changes in schools over the last half-century is that they are now situated in an economy where virtually no one can afford to fall off the conveyor belt of literacy. The Post-Industrial economy is based upon the movement and production of information, not of things or materials. Consequently, there is precious little opportunity to make a living manually in “developed”, knowledge-based economies like Canada. Suited or not, everyone must read, write, and do math in order to successfully move from childhood into productive adulthood. Those who cannot face extreme odds of poverty and alienation.

Yet the basic design of urban mass education has remained unchanged. The conveyor belt is still there, the sorting still happens, and the assumption that everyone who graduates has some standard product of “education” is unchanged. The model is Industrial; the context is Post-Industrial.

We are worried about schools. There is so much that seems to be getting lost there. We’ve heard parents labeled as indifferent, uncaring, and selfish. We’ve heard teachers labeled as incompetent, blind, cruel and burnt-out. We’ve heard children labeled as lazy, oppositional, disordered and disabled. We don’t believe it. We see parents, children and teachers who are very caring, stressed, and desperate to do a good job against the odds. It seems to us that none of these people are really the problem. Rather, we are stuck in an old design that is out-of-date and not working as well as it could.

Here are some assumptions from the Industrial Age that our schools have inherited, and some suggestions for re-thinking.

1. Standardization is good; deviance is bad. In Industrial thinking, there are clear standards, and progress toward these standards is measurable. To reach the standard is the goal: perfection as a “perfect 10”.

In a Post-industrial world, we are rediscovering diversity as a resource. The preservation of biodiversity among plants and animals has become a new end in itself, as we learn the lessons of disease epidemics: too much standardization leaves us all vulnerable. Somewhere among the potatoes of Ireland’s fields in 1860 was a blight-resistant variety, from which the crop could be rebuilt. Humans, too, carry the assurance of a future not in their sameness, but in their infinite differences. Diversity is our storehouse of survival strategies.

The Post-Industrial School needs to value and nurture diversity. There needs to be a re-working of how we think and talk about children. We need less emphasis on “Disorders” and “Disabilities”, and more understanding of individual styles, strengths, and ways of learning. We need to notice and reject the obvious trade-off between individuality and group size: large classes require the suppression of diversity. If we want all of our children to be seen, valued, and allowed to develop as unique individuals, we will need to have smaller class sizes.

2. We can focus on the talented: those who won’t or can’t fit into the mold for success will eventually go elsewhere.

In the Post-Industrial world, there is no “elsewhere” for the non-academically-inclined to go to. The manual working-class has shrunk to almost non-existence. We have to learn to value and use our diversity, not just to spare children the harsh experience of failure, but also because we simply cannot afford to throw away any percentage of “non-standard” or “below-average” human. It is no longer acceptable to simply prepare humans to fit in someone else’s world. We need schools that help students to create niches for themselves; to create the worlds that fit them.

3. Humans, like cogs, should be interchangeable. The best model for units of the workforce (“human resources”) is one that can be moved about to where the work is. Ties to a particular place or to particular relationships are an impediment to efficient production.

In the Post-Industrial world, we are rediscovering what it means to be connected; to a particular place, to particular people. Because we are not standardized but diverse, our relationships are not replaceable. Like jazz improvisations, the interactions between people are not easily reproduced. When we try, the effect is stilted, without spark or life.

We need schools that value the stability and richness of human attachments, to each other and to places. Every time a group of children is re-shuffled into new combinations of classmates and new locations of learning, they lose the connections that they have started growing. Like plants, children can only be expected to grow roots a certain number of times.

One argument for larger schools is that they allow for the development of many different groupings of students by similarities. There is room in a large school for cliques of musical kids, athletic kids, dramatic kids, chess-playing kids, and so on. This is true, and many an elementary school “odd kid” has found a home with similarly “odd kids” in the larger arena of Jr. High or High School. But similarity is not he only basis for relationship building. Stable, smaller and diverse groupings of students can be coached and enabled to develop mutual appreciation for differences as well as for similarities, and the risk of socially vulnerable kids getting lost in the shuffle goes down.

4. The lines between work and play, mind and body, thinking and feeling, educating and taking care of children are clear and thick. Schools can and should attend to educating the working, thinking mind. They are not responsible to take care of the feeling, playful, heart and body of the child: that’s what mothers are for.

It is just as silly and blind to say that schools do not care for what’s in the heart of a child as it is to say that mothers do not care for what’s in the mind. Good teachers and good parents know that education and care-work are not separate. A child who is challenged but does not feel safe and cared for cannot learn. A child who is kept safe but not challenged is similarly stuck.

Parents are asked these days to step up to the plate of education, taking on all kinds of work from school fund-raising to drilling number facts and phonics at home and reading a story every night. They are expected to get their children to school on time and ready to absorb the knowledge passed out in a timely manner. Similarly, we need schools that step up to the plate of nurturing the whole child. If it takes a village to raise a child, then the school is, for most families, the face of the village. Nutritious meals, after-school child care, peer-relationship and social skills coaching, careful, compassionate playground interventions, and parent resource rooms are all imaginable as ways that schools could become a more supportive asset to family and child life.

All of this would require a truly revolutionary re-thinking of what schools are for in our society. But, why not re-think it?

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quilting

September Challenges: Building the parent-school team

September Challenges:  Building the parent-school team

This article was first published in the Island Word in 2005.  Since then, we’ve seen our local schools working hard to engage parents, and visa versa.  There is still too little money in schools, and parents still have too little time left after making ends meet financially for their families.  There is still a philosophical gap between the mandate of schools to educate minds, and the needs of children to be nurtured as whole human beings, all day long at school and at home.  But there is a wealth of creativity and good will in our schools, and the resourcefulness of individual teachers, principals, EA’s and others in and out of the school system never ceases to inspire us.

We believe that is the job of the whole society to raise its children; to surround parents and teachers with support and encouragement rather than to delegate and forget our shared responsibility for the young.  This collective attitude is a tough sell in these times:  calls for lower taxes seem to trump calls for better schools and government-supported after-school programs.  Nevertheless, we are unapologetic supporting the old adage that “it takes a village to raise a child.”  The challenge before us is to reinvent the “village” for the post-modern era:  keeping its attributes of collective support and belonging, while embracing the vivacity and creative potential of an urban, multicultural and global society. 

School is starting again. The children come through the path by our house twice each day. With their backpacks of school supplies, in their reds and blues or their purples and pinks, the children’s bright shiny faces look like picture books themselves. Each September starts with a heart-rending blend of sorrow for the end of freedom and hopes for the new year.

For parents and for teachers, there is surely a time when each new shining face is a miracle, a one-of-a-kind treasure. Yet, in the year-in, year-out hardships of making do with inadequate resources, the miracle wears thin for some kids. Labeled “lazy” or “from dysfunctional families”, these children fall through the cracks, losing their individuality and becoming the statistics of failure: the bottom quarter of the distribution of Provincial Test scores. In disappointment, parents and teachers can retreat into mutual blame—the parents didn’t care, the school failed, the child shut down.

We’ve asked both parents and teachers how things are going in the parent-school partnership for children, and the reports are unsettling. Teachers spoke of a reality that many parents have not caught up with; they simply do not have the resources to meet the individual needs of real children. Programs like school bands and sports teams have been cut back to where they depend upon parent fees and constant fundraising. Yet children show up more with more needs than ever beyond the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic. How, teachers ask, can they make up for parents who are not home?

And parents spoke of a reality that teachers are not equipped to deal with; today’s families depend on schools to provide not just teaching, but care to children whose houses are empty all day and whose parents will return exhausted at six. How, they ask, can they be expected to supplement the job of the school, on top of everything else they do? And, if they can’t keep up with the expanding role of parents as advocates, fundraisers, home-based tutors and school volunteers, will their kids suffer? Both spoke of their frustration with a one-size-fits-all, industrialized model of education, and with inadequate resources to do the job.

We asked Deanna Howell, a support worker at Glacier View School, and Serena’s classroom students who are themselves parents, how the parent-school partnership could improve. Then we dug into our own experiences as parent and step-parent, therapist and educational consultant. Here is what we came up with:

For parents.

1. Read the student planner every single day. See that assignments get completed and returned, and that school events get written on your home calendar.

2. Show up. Come to the parent-teacher interviews. Return calls. Stop by when you can after school. Be a familiar face.

3. Use email to communicate if you have trouble meeting the teacher in person.

4. Ask for clarification. Before you react to your child’s horror story, ask for the teacher’s version. Remember that children want to look good; that’s their job. It’s also their job to try to bamboozle you and rule the grown-ups through divide and conquer! Do get more than one version of the story.

5. Deal with your own issues about school, away from school. Everybody has their own memories of school, and many of us carry memories of shame from our own childhoods. Pluck up your courage; talk to someone; do anything it takes to keep your own bad experiences from interfering with your child’s education. Then go to your child’s school ready to be in the present. You belong there in your child’s corner.

6. Let teachers be individuals, and encourage your children to learn from all kinds of people. Judge lightly, and support what is good about your children’s mentors.

For teachers and school personnel

1. Remember how much courage it takes for parents to come to school. If parents were as comfortable with school as you are, they would all have become teachers! Some parents are literally shaking in their shoes when they arrive. Treat them well, and welcome them.

2. Ask questions, and respect a parent’s expertise about his or her own child. Be ready to take in, as well as to give out, information and advice.

3. Before you accept a child’s story that his or her parents “don’t care”, “don’t read notes”, or “won’t let me do my homework”, get the parent’s story (see point 4, under “parents”).

4. Respect family time. Don’t have important events and projects depend upon a parent’s daytime availability. Don’t over-assign homework. Most families have precious little family time to relax together and to pass along all of the practical skills and values that schools don’t teach (like making pancakes and cleaning up the kitchen).

5. Democratize opportunities for extra-curricular involvement. De-emphasize or scrap expensive trips and Cadillac opportunities that require families to pay large expenses. Re-invest in accessible activities in the home community, including sports, arts, public speaking, and volunteerism.

6. Don’t pre-judge families. They come in all shapes and sizes, with all kinds of challenges and strengths; just like children do. Try to understand, appreciate, and reach out to them.

For politicians and policy-makers

1. Make schools into a multi-purpose front line of services. Schools really are the “village” that it takes to raise a child. They are safety nets for whole families. Think broadly, and have the courage to dedicate enough money to restore and re-create a school-centered community for families.

2. Restore funding for extra-curricular activities that are accessible to everyone, including music (provide instruments to rent at reduced cost or free to needy students), sports (provide the uniforms, the “School Letters”, the facilities and equipment), performing and visual arts, public speaking and debate.

3. Follow through with promises of child-care, including high quality, affordable after-school programs. Add nutrition (healthy breakfast, lunch and snack programs) and health services (school-based nurses).

4. Encourage schools to do individualized planning for children. Don’t gate-keep with rigid criteria for special programs. Don’t rely on diagnostic labels that stigmatize some children as “disabled”; instead, seek to understand, accept, and teach children with a wide variety of learning styles, within the classroom whenever possible.

family lakeside

Summer Learning

Learning to Connect; Connecting to Learn

This article was first published in the Island Word in summer 2005. It’s still a favorite.

First Nations elder Mary Everson is a walking library on local flora and fauna. However she began a guest lecture in Serena’s class, not by expounding upon what she knew, but rather by telling a story about how she learned it.

“When I was a little girl,” she said, “I used to go walking all of the time with my grandmother. She would point to things, and tell me about them as we went. She would say, ‘here is a plant that is good for a fever’, or ‘here is a plant that you can use for burns’. Every day we would go walking together, and that is how I learned. Not from books, because we were not a culture of written language. Every thing we learned, we learned from another person.”

The more we think about this story, the more astounding it is to both of us. As children, we loved to learn, and our learning came from the written word. We sat at our schoolroom desks, unafraid of intellectual competition and eager to demonstrate our skills. But the real treasure troves were libraries, and both of us remember books as childhood companions. Between the pages we found our adventures, and we dreamed of far away times and places. Even now, when we are curious or need to know something, we usually turn to the printed word, and more rarely, to opportunities for experiential learning. What would it be like if everything we learned, we learned from a human voice? A voice that was familiar, and that loved us?

We live in an information-intensive society, and, within the mainstream of North American culture, learning and information gathering are largely solitary pursuits. Both of us have taken literacy for granted, but never stopped to question what was lost in moving from an oral to a written culture. The voice in a book is left to our imaginations to conjure up. And although many of us have wonderful memories of stories read aloud and shared with a cuddle, the book itself does not cuddle us. Computers and the internet are similarly un-cuddly; even when we use them to correspond and connect with others. The voice, the face, the smell and especially the touch of another person are not part of the experience. The need to learn and the need to connect with others are separate in a print-based culture. Stories exist apart from story-tellers; information exists in a disembodied state, apart from those who created it and from the natural world that it describes. No wonder loneliness is such a common condition.

Our natural curiosity and our natural affinity toward one another have not been separate throughout most of human history; they have been rolled together into the act of teaching and learning from one another. Technology has changed, beginning, perhaps, with the printing press, and taking further leaps in the invention of television and the internet. But we are still both curious and social creatures; we are tribal by design.

Both of us have summer memories rich in this kind of social and family bound learning. Monika recalls annual mushroom hunts and berry gatherings with her grandmother, parents and siblings. She remembers cycling over wooded hills riding on the kids’ seat on her father’s bike, learning the names and habits of trees. She remembers the summery scent of Linden trees in bloom and making tea of Linden tree flowers. She remembers when she and her cousin learned to crochet from their grandmother’s neighbor back in the old coal miners housing settlement in Gladbeck, and summer days spent catching shrimp in tide pools on the beaches of the North Sea with her siblings. Serena remember the word games that her family played on long car trips, the silly songs her mother taught her, and her best friend Annie, born before the 20th century, who told her about farming with horses and showed her how to quilt and take care of gladiola bulbs. Telling stories, skill and hobby sharing, and making music are human-to-human ways to reconnect our need to learn with our need to be close to one another. Nature walks teach us to feel our place in the web of things bigger than ourselves. Campfires are time-honored and beautiful settings for sharing between generations. Even books can be bridges between people when they are shared out loud, or talked about together.

For children and families, summer break is an important opportunity to experience more of this kind of learning; learning that connects them to the natural world and to the “tribe” of family and community. This kind of experience is not a luxury; it is an important part of becoming fully human. Brain development depends upon socially shared experiences, and having a sense of belonging on the earth depends upon knowing about our natural surroundings.

We hope you will take an opportunity to learn or share about all these interesting things: The sun and rain, water salty and sweet, local animals and plants, your personal stories and cultural history, night sky and phosphorescence, music and food and all the other things this season has to offer. Have a great summer this year.

 

 

 

 

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The Name Game: How and when diagnosis matters

The Name Game:  How and when diagnosis matters

“Well, what’s the diagnosis? Do I have a Learning Disability, or not?”

“Is is Autism? Asperger’s Syndrome?”
“Will this diagnosis disqualify our family for respite funding?”
“Does my child qualify to have an aid in school?”

In our office, we have a love-hate relationship with labels and diagnoses. Formal diagnostic language opens doors to services and validates disability claims. Because it summarizes many signs and symptoms, diagnosis can be a useful shorthand between professionals. But diagnosis is by no means an exact science, particularly in the field of Mental Health. And reducing an individual’s strengths and weaknesses, style and functioning to a single term can erase more than it highlights. What do we really know about Suzie with Bi-polar Disorder? Not much, but “Bi-polar” on a piece of paper may cause us to make all kinds of decisions and judgments before we find out.

We would usually prefer to go with a descriptive approach, de-mystifying the problems, identifying strengths, and brainstorming with families and/or school personnel for solutions. Describing people as individuals, rather than as belonging to a category, means trying to understand and connect with the person; to see the world as they do. Suzie’s family does not see her as a diagnosis, but as a whole person, with interests and motives and loves and frustrations of her own. How, they want to know, can they help?

When teaching Psychopathology at the local college, Serena carefully avoids what she calls the “going to the zoo” approach. Traditionally, students learn about specific psychiatric diagnoses one category at a time, with a strong focus on what is different, even bizarre, about each “illness”. It is too easy to be fascinated by difference and gawk at the unusual, like the freak-shows of old or the once-popular Supermarket tabloids: “See the giant woman, the thin man, and their alien child!” This is dreadfully misleading. The reality is that within every family there will be someone who fits some category in the textbook. And, so what? One person’s “abnormal” is someone else’s “normal”—just the everyday condition of their lives.

The second problem with the category approach is that it treats disability as something that belongs to the individual. We speak of a person having a disability as though it were carried with them all the time, like luggage only not so useful. In reality, being disabled is a function of two things: the capabilities of the individual, and the demands of a particular environment. Turn out all the lights in a lecture theatre, and suddenly the blind student becomes the only one who can still easily find her way around. A child who can’t sit still in a classroom has no disability on the playground monkey bars. And if a house cannot be accessed without stair-climbing, is it the person in the wheel chair, or the house that “owns” the disability? Why even speak of “Learning Disabilities” to describe bright children that a school is failing to teach? Couldn’t this be called a “teaching disability?” Or just a mismatch of the child and the methods available?

The third problem is that having a disability implies that one can’t get things done as efficiently or effectively as another, non-disabled person. It’s as if the entire person either is, or is not, “disabled”. Yet we know people with significant disabilities in one or more areas of functioning who can still out-perform most people in others. And doing something well shouldn’t be the criterion for deciding whether or not one should try it. Serena, who has fibromyalgia and scoliosis of the spine, is finding herself to be quite disabled when it comes to helping with house renovations. But she can think circles around most people, and her physical limitations don’t keep her from looking forward to winter skiing, which she enjoys immensely despite having no talent whatsoever.

A fourth, and very serious problem with the category approach to diagnosis is that it is used, and abused, to determine access to resources for both children and adults in BC. Unlike the United States, Canada does not have a law that entitles children to an appropriate education regardless of their abilities; nor do we guarantee all of our citizens access to the means to participate in their communities. In 21st Century BC (British Columbia, that is), we’ve seen a systematic withdrawal of services to people with disabilities. Even more seriously, we’ve seen access limited by an ever-narrowing list of boni-fide “disabilities”: If your disability isn’t on the list, you needn’t apply.

Take, for example, this paragraph from the Ministry of Education’s policy on K-12 funding for special needs:

“The Basic Allocation, a standard amount of money provided per school age student enrolled in a school district, includes funds to support the learning needs of students who are identified as having learning disabilities, mild intellectual disabilities, students requiring moderate behaviour supports and students who are gifted. Additional supplementary funding recognizes the additional cost of providing programs for students with special needs in the following categories: dependent handicapped, deafblind, moderate to profound intellectual disabled, physically disabled/chronic health impaired, visually impaired, deaf/hard of hearing, Autism Spectrum Disorder, and intensive behaviour interventions or serious mental illness. (emphasis ours)

In other words, schools can access extra money to meet the additional needs of students with certain special needs, but not others. A child whose tested IQ is above 70, but who has a severe learning disability such as dyslexia is not funded. Parents of children with learning disabilities have been fighting this ruling. They want schools to provide their children with an Individualized Education Plan (an IEP) and adapted instruction. Without this, their children will not reach their potential in public school. So far, this fight for legal recognition of their children’s right to an appropriate and publicly-funded education has failed.

At the adult level, too, Canadians are forced to play the game of “Match that Category.” In BC, such services to people with “Developmental Disabilities” are made publicly available through Community Living BC. But the door to services is even narrower than the one for Ministry of Education funding. According to the CLBC website:

“Developmental disability” … means: ‘significantly impaired intellectual functioning that
(a) manifests before the age of 18 years,
(b) exists concurrently with impaired adaptive functioning and
(c) meets other prescribed criteria’(as of the date of this policy, no further criteria have been prescribed)
(from the CLBC Policy Statement on Eligibility, posted on the Community Living BC website.)

“Impaired intellectual functioning” that begins before adulthood is the first criterion for funding; without it, the person is ineligible, no matter how severely impaired they may be in their everyday “adaptive functioning”. Intellectual impairment is, for the purposes of CLBC, defined as in IQ test score of under 70.

The problem with this is threefold. First, no Psychologist who went to Ethics class will tell you that a single test score can be an adequate measure of functioning. IQ tests are good for many things, including helping to determine one’s learning style, predicting school success, and, when combined with other measures of adaptive functioning, helping to assess one’s general ability to cope and learn in a variety of specific circumstances. But they cannot, with a single score, tell us how “smart” a person is, or whether or not they need assistance in order to participate in the world that they live in. CLBC is relying on a single score to give too much information, and Psychologists should not be participating in this pretence of objectivity.

Secondly, the “Impaired intellectual functioning” standard leaves out those whose intellectual functioning is just fine, but whose physical and/or communication problems make it difficult for them to perform the every day activities of self-care, social life, and employment. This standard is perhaps most cruel to those with Cerebral Palsy that affects both movement and speech. After 19 years of advocating for the tools and support to help their children to communicate their intelligence, it must come as a cruel joke to parents to have those children excluded from supports as adults because they are too smart.

Finally, CLBC does not offer help to those who become disabled after the age of 19.

Having access to the means to become our best selves, and then to participate as meaningfully as we are able within our society, is a fundamental human right. Ironically, impoverished countries often are more, not less, inclusive of people with disabilities. The reason is fairly obvious: they can’t afford to leave anyone’s talents untapped. It is an affluent society that can afford to sideline those who don’t meet a narrow standard of “able”. In doing so, we sideline also an experience of what it means to be human: vulnerable, interconnected, and infinitely diverse.

In the long run, almost everyone lives some part of their life with one or more disabilities. The TAB’s (Temporarily Able-Bodied) might do well to remember this, and to make their doorways a little bit wider, both structurally and metaphorically.

 

 

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Grünberg Patterson Centre for Counselling & Assessment has been providing services in counselling, psychotherapy, and education since 2004.

It is an honour and privilege to live and work in the traditional territory of the K’ómoks First Nation.

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