Every day I am deluged with discussions about education
and how to make it effective. I know
many people who are absolutely enraged at the public schools and how they treat
kids. Almost all of these people have
some kind of solution, running the gambit from advocating for extremely rigid institutional
models with set curriculums and standardized goals to homeschooling and
unschooling. I think there are merits to
all of these systems, so I don’t see any one as the ultimate threat or the
magic pill. Rather than seeing any one ideology
as the solution or the ruination of education, I tend to think that the real
problem is absolutism. So many
educators, politicians, and parents want to believe that their ideas about
education are the only worthwhile ones.
For the most part, I see this as the real problem with education in the
United States.
In the 1990s, I spent a few years as a teacher in a
daycare that was working to get NAEYC accreditation. At the time, NAEYC
(National Association for the Education of Young Children) was the Grand Poobah
in charge of regulating wisdom regarding in the education of preschoolers. I suppose you could say they were the
champions of Special Snowflake ideology.
In the infant room, we were no longer allowed to give the kids coloring
book pictures to color in, because kids should not have their creativity
stunted by result-oriented artwork. All
artwork was to focus on the process. We
completely purged hundreds of carefully collected templates and coloring sheets
from our cabinets. All projects that
even suggested some kind of “teacher input” were stripped from the room. Did it matter that some of the kids preferred
to do result-oriented artwork? No. The
assumption was that kids who wanted coloring pages needed to be freed from
inappropriate conditioning.
Honestly, I liked many of the elements of NAEYC’s
program. I had no problem with allowing
for a focus on freeform art and giving the kids more options instead of
constantly trying to get a room full of children ages 4 months to 15 months to
produce snowman ornaments to decorate the room.
I loved the emphasis on cultural diversity and the standards for
classroom equipment that focused on the developmental needs of the age groups. What I disliked was the absolutism of the
program: the idea that anything that didn’t fit within in their philosophical
goals was automatically deemed inappropriate.
There is a value in coloring in images and doing result-oriented
work. While no infant should be forced
to engage in any project, the attitude that these kinds of projects have no
benefit for any infant ignores the fact that many infants like these kinds of
projects and do benefit from them. As an
education professional and a parent, I’ve encountered this kind of absolutism
over and over again: an insistence that a particular method is the best way to
intellectually empower children while ignoring the reality that no way is the best way for every child.
While I was a daycare teacher, I repeatedly saw a
scenario that I vowed not to repeat as a parent. Bluntly put, there are many small children
who do not do well in daycare settings. Unfortunately, there’s a horrible
stigma attached to having a child who doesn’t belong in daycare. That and the fact that most schools try to
keep their classrooms at maximum capacity means that few parents are told that
daycare is not a productive environment for their child.
Two children in particular still stand out in my mind even
though it’s been almost twenty years since I’ve been their teacher. One was a child who was absolutely terrified
to be “abandoned” at the daycare. The child
literally shrieked and cried non-stop for two months straight the entire time she was in the classroom. Most children stop
a few minutes after their parents leave.
This child never did. Nothing
could distract her. Nothing could
comfort her. She wasn’t just angry or upset. She was paralyzed with fear. The only time she was quiet was when she had
screamed herself to sleep. Typically a
child adjusts to being in daycare within a few days. She never did. The day her mother gave up and decided to
keep her home, I cried with relief mostly because I felt I was participating in
the torture of the child merely by being the person who had to hold her
flailing body while her mother walked out every day.
The second child was aggressive. There are lots of children under the age of
five who are not good at playing nice.
When they mostly engage with adult caregivers who can stop them from
doing too much harm, they can gradually be guided to develop self-control and
find more acceptable ways of expressing and/or entertaining themselves. When they are in a group setting with two
adults and seven to eleven other small children, they become a real physical
threat. This is not their fault. They’re not consciously deciding to inflict
pain and suffering on all around them.
They simply have not developed enough emotionally or intellectually to be able
to stop themselves.
One little boy in
particular was so constant and so intense in his attacks that we sat down to
document his behavior in an effort to get the administration and the parents to
recognize that we were not exaggerating his behavior. In a half an hour, we counted 60 acts of
aggression. He would grab a
toy from one child, hit another child over the head with the toy, throw the toy
into a third child’s face and then run and belly flop onto a fourth child all
in one minute’s time. Our choices were
to assign one teacher the full time task of keeping him from attacking the
other children (not a completely feasible option when there were nine other potty
training children in the classroom who needed care as well) or accept that he
was going to occasionally hurt another child.
The third option, asking his parents to withdraw him from the program,
was not something the administration was willing to support. Eventually he ended up dislocating another
child’s arm when he moved up to the Twos.
In the meantime, it was abundantly clear that not only did he terrorize
the other children, but he wasn’t happy or thriving in the daycare environment
himself. The program didn’t have the
resources to guide his aggression: instead, it inadvertently helped accentuate his
aggressive tendencies and provided him with endless opportunity to exhibit this
behavior. No behavior modification
strategies we used had any effect on him.
The truth was that he needed to be in an environment where he had plenty
of focused attention and less access to people who were smaller than him and
unable to defend themselves or ward off his attacks.
Although the daycare stated that they treated each child
like a special snowflake, the ideology manifested itself as something just as
rigid as “every child must follow these rules”.
Ideologies strip away the ability of teachers to look at the individual
needs of their students and sometimes admit things like “I am not the right
teacher for this child”, “This school does not have the resources to deal with
this child” OR “This method is a completely inappropriate tool for this child”. Whether the idea is that every child is a special snowflake or that
every child is a mental soldier in training, the ideology is allowed to
override the teacher and convert education from a means of enlightenment to a
brutal trap that almost everyone complains about.
