In 1977, a mere decade away from the summer of peace, love and flowers, one of my assignments as an education major at Florida State University was to create my first classroom bulletin board. Tracing stencils, cutting out letters, I chose the words of Kahlil Gibran from his masterpiece The Prophet to display:
"On Teaching: If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind."
I was very young.
Not that Gibran's words are entirely untrue. But as much as I long to emulate the Lebanese philosopher – or at the very least Yoda (the force is strong in this one) – after 29 years of teaching, consulting and training experience, I can't think of one instance in which I led a student to any threshold, except the exit door, without first insisting that he enter the house of my particular brand of wisdom, which included a curriculum, performance objectives and standards.
Apparently, the majority of educators in America disagree with me. The Center for Survey Research & Analysis at the University of Connecticut conducted a national report, which concluded, among other things, that 56 percent of teachers "describe their teaching philosophies as leaning more in the direction of student-directed learning, rather than in the direction of teacher- directed learning." This is a clear contradiction of President Bush's "No Child Left Behind Act," which endorses standards-based reform as America's chief tactic for advancing student achievement.
Student-directed learning places a greater emphasis on the circular route that enables students to "learn how to learn" rather than on facts, specific information, math computation skills or even correct spelling. Although the student may or may not have a designated time limit to complete his work, he takes responsibility for circulating from activity to activity and from task to task. Every child follows his own educational path at his own rate. As the owner of a local Montessori school explained to me, "Here," she said, "if a child sees a spider on the way to school, and he wants to learn about spiders all day, that is what he does."
Although all teachers make time for such delightful diversions, I have no doubt that, decades ago, Bernie Madoff of Investment Securities and Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom Inc. would have spent an inordinate amount of their classroom time learning how spiders spin webs, trap prey and suck their life's blood out of them.
Teacher-directed learning, on the other hand, requires instructors to do more than just facilitate. Instead, such learning requires teachers to set goals and standards based on their training, content knowledge and years of experience to teach students reading, writing, science, geography and math. They look for the correct answer not "the right approach." They base final grades for students on a single, class-wide standard instead of each student's individual abilities. They lead their students into the fray of facts instead of endlessly meandering down rabbit trails.
Decades of educational training emphasized cooperative learning, a fine concept initially, but one that now seems to mean that children learn more from each other than from direct instruction of the teacher. When I was in elementary school, this is what I enjoyed learning from my peers: to spit, to blow gum bubbles and to snort milk out of my nose. Call me crazy, but I believe that adults can motivate children, and that they can do a better job than another child.
Intellectually, I embrace progressive education and student-directed learning. On a practical level, though, I have gained a lot of experience about what students should know and what they should be able to do. Gibran's ideas and Montessori's ideas were uplifting and should have a place in the overall fabric of educational philosophy. But none of them are certified teachers, which is something instructors need to remember when force-fed a particular brand of theoretical baloney.
Left to their own devices, what students gain are gaps in their educational outcomes.
