Choice Theory (35 page)

Another example of real-world, useful math that schoolchildren could start learning by the third grade is how much families, especially large families, could save if the students were taught the value of clipping and using grocery store coupons. Teachers could go to the stores and pick up the flyers with the coupons in them and explain where else these coupons are available. The children could take these coupons to the stores with their parents and figure out the savings as they shopped or at the checkout counters. Parents would be impressed with this useful knowledge and might share a little of the savings with the children.

The basics of education-useful learning—not schooling—as taught and practiced in a quality school, are learning to speak, listen, read, and write and to use these skills to solve problems. Once you learn these skills, you can keep practicing and improving them for the rest of your life. After graduation, it is a rare day that you do not use these skills to solve problems. In school, to prepare for life, you should be taught vocabulary by using better words, not by memorizing the meaning of words you don’t use.

Problem solving is basic to history and literature, as well as to math and science. It is not who, when, where, or what in history or literature that is important, but the problems the characters, real or fictional, were struggling to solve and whether they succeeded. If they succeed, why? If not, why not? In a quality school, students are asked these questions, the core of using knowledge, from the beginning. These are the questions that are now asked on proficiency tests, and quality school students do well on these measures.

The arts do not ordinarily suffer from the ravages of schooling.
Students enjoy recognizing paintings by studying what the artists were trying to portray. Recognizing the Mona Lisa is only the beginning. One useful discussion about who she was and why Leonardo painted her smiling will lock that enigmatic smile into a student’s memory for life. Students are more than willing to memorize music or the lines of a play for performances. The whole basis of art and music is to do it or to appreciate others doing it.

There
is
a place for memorizing in education, but not if students are forced and have no choice in what to memorize. I memorized the last paragraph of Lincoln’s second inaugural speech in the eighth grade, and it was so beautiful that I still know it almost sixty years later. But I was asked by my teacher what I wanted to memorize; I had a choice. I was given time to do it and I enjoyed doing it perfectly. The teacher, who knew all the pieces by heart, prompted the students who had difficulty and got them through it. No one was flunked or threatened. The class liked memorizing their chosen pieces, and it was a good experience. A good experience with a good teacher is the key to learning anything well.

Right now if your second and third graders are memorizing and calculating and love doing it because it is new and exciting and they like you, I can’t criticize. But when this initial pleasure in acquiring knowledge begins to wear off, as it will, don’t force them to continue. Move quickly from schooling into education, and you’ll set them on the path to real learning for life.

I use the unisex name Stacy to refer to a large group of students who begin to take schoolwork and teachers out of their quality worlds as early as the second grade. It is that they had so few Stacys that made the high schools that came to the Pittsburgh conference so outstanding. They may have had a lot of students who didn’t do much schoolwork, but these students still had their schools, some teachers, and some schoolwork in their quality worlds. Although they may have wanted the school to be better,
they had enough support from both their teachers and parents that they didn’t put up much of a fight against the coercion they experienced even in their good schools. If there were no coercion, the number of students who worked hard would have been double or triple what the students I met with reported. Many of the students in these good schools, who do enough to get by because school is in their quality worlds, get into college. There, with more choices and much less
schooling,
they may do very well.

The Stacys are a different story. Usually, they don’t get much support for education at home, and they frequently don’t receive as much love and attention at home as they want. They need to get this support and attention in school if they are even to do enough to get by. Without what they need at home, they are extremely vulnerable to the forcing, schooling, and punishing they encounter early in school and that they resist by taking school-work; teachers; and, eventually, the school itself out of their quality worlds. Like almost all students, Stacys start school with teachers and schoolwork in their quality worlds.

Many do quite well in kindergarten and first grade, and the schools, their warm and caring teachers, and the need-satisfying schoolwork become even stronger in their quality worlds than when they began. If their teachers are patient, flexible in their approach to teaching them to read, and read a lot to them from interesting books, they learn to read and write. If their teachers make an effort to talk and listen to them, both individually and in class meetings, the students quickly improve the way they speak and listen.

But by the second grade, teachers begin to add a little coercion and a lot of
schooling
to their approach. Acquiring knowledge, doing calculations, and being assigned homework, accompanied by grades and the threat of failure, begin to intrude on what was mostly love and fun. This change is subtle, but the students who are to become the Stacys begin to detect it and to resist. The students who are not to become Stacys may also rebel a little at this change. The teachers see this behavior as a disciplinary problem
and begin to prod them a little. The difference is that when the students who are not to become Stacys are prodded, they choose to work a little harder. The Stacys take some of the schoolwork, usually the
schooling,
out of their quality worlds. When this change occurs, the two groups begin to separate, a separation that will increase markedly when they reach middle school.

Until the two groups separate, there is no way to tell the difference between the Stacys and the other students. More than thirty years ago, when I worked in Watts, a low-income, segregated section of Los Angeles, I saw students who had been eager, involved learners in kindergarten and first grade gradually stop doing school-work in the higher grades of elementary school. I was puzzled then, but now that I know choice theory I am no longer puzzled. There was nothing wrong with their brains; it was the coercive system that they rebelled so self-destructively against. As I mentioned, in the beginning, the change is uneven and hard to detect, especially by teachers who don’t know about the quality world and how vital it is for the children to keep them and what they teach in it. But as the change continues into the third and fourth grades, it becomes easier to see.

The students who will become Stacys start to pay less attention. They talk and attempt to socialize by forcing themselves on children who are trying to learn and disrupting if they don’t get the attention they want. For whatever reason, they need more love and more patience in school than do other students. But as they begin to behave in ways that frustrate their teachers and to force themselves on other students for attention, they fail to get what they want from the teachers and the students. Then they increasingly resist doing what they are told to do by using a lot of behaviors that are labeled disciplinary problems.

The third, fourth, and fifth grades are a vital time. If the potential Stacys continue to take schoolwork, teachers, and good students out of their quality worlds, they are on their way to becoming full-blown Stacys. The process of becoming Stacys can be reversed comparatively easily at this early stage. Many good teachers in our punish-them-if-they-don’t-do-what-they-are-told
schools are able to recognize this resistance early and immediately stop the punishment. They give them a little more attention, for example, a friendly greeting in the morning, a few pats on the head, an assignment they can do, help them to do it well, and then a little praise for doing it. All of this may reverse this disastrous process.

These students need to form satisfying relationships with loving, patient teachers, who may be the only reliable source of love they have. Good teachers know how to give students what they need, and it doesn’t take that much time. In the end, it saves time because the students buckle down and go to work. Having classrooms with only twenty children in the first three grades, as has recently been funded in California, is a wonderful step in the right direction. It frees the teachers to give students the attention they could not otherwise get.

These good teachers also send messages home asking the parents to read to the children or send games home that the parents can play with them. They have enough sense not to blame the families for the children’s problems in school. Most parents have enough problems of their own; they don’t need more from the school. But knowing enough choice theory to realize what is actually going on is also vital if teachers are to help more children stop choosing to become Stacys.

But many teachers don’t recognize what is happening and either phone the parents or send home a barrage of messages telling, almost ordering, the parents to do something about their children’s behavior in school. They expect parents, who know little themselves but force, to punish the potential Stacys. Now the lonely children become desperate. Less and less loved both at school and at home, they turn more and more to whomever is available, other Stacys like themselves. Yet most of those potential Stacys are still in their deciding stage in the elementary schools.

The big change comes in middle school where there is an abrupt shift to more schooling and more coercion and much less time for teachers to give students individual attention. The process can still be reversed, but it is much harder now than if it
had been noticed and dealt with in elementary school. If a student is a full-blown Stacy and has somehow gotten into high school, it is unlikely that this choice will be reversed. But occasionally it happens. It is really never too late as long as the student comes to school. It just gets progressively harder the longer the student is thinking about giving up and becoming a Stacy.

In middle school, the Stacys do poorly academically, often skipping class. They quickly begin to lose ground and may be less prepared for high school than when they entered middle school. Schoolwork and teachers are no longer in their quality worlds, and now they begin to lose or give up on the few good friends they still have who like school. It is these friends who are the incentive to keep school flickering in their quality worlds.

Now, if they stay in school, the Stacys are attached to one another because of their common interest in disruption, violence, sexual activity, and drugs. They may not drop out for another few years because occasionally there is a teacher whom they can relate to, a subject like art or music that they still enjoy, or athletics. Even if they don’t get along well with them, the Stacys rarely give up on their mothers, who continue to tell them to stay in school and try to graduate. But in most cases they are so far behind that their mothers are not enough to help them stay in school.

The Stacys are increasing in number because to succeed in our society, education is more and more necessary, and they have none. They will not succeed in our present one-school-fits-all academic system. Even if these schools are improved, most Stacys have little interest in all-day academics. They need to be offered something that they can do—hands on—at the middle school level. Our present excellent vocational schools take only senior high school students, but for most of the Stacys, that is too late; they have already taken school out of their quality worlds.

We also need to enlarge our vision of what vocational education is and expand apprenticeship programs down to the middle school level. What is already obvious is that when they are in a
vocational school setting, Stacys often renew their interest in academics. As we enlarge the opportunities for nonacademic education, we also have to publicize the idea that this is not second-class education. Students should understand that although vocational education is not the direct route to college, that route is still open to students who begin to see themselves going further. All this can be done for far less than we are spending now on the Stacys. But schools will have great difficulty doing so alone; they need community support.

In poor neighborhoods, urban and rural, Stacys make up much of the total school population. Right now, hardly anyone in the nation has the slightest idea what to do with them, in or out of school, beyond punishment, which increases their number. When the male Stacys are in their late teens, many go to prison. Most of their offenses have to do with drugs, from which they obtain both pleasure and money.

A significant number of the male Stacys are incarcerated for what we consider senseless violence. But it is not senseless to them; it is what they are looking for. Putting them in prisons, especially the more punitive ones that the society is now demanding, almost ensures that they will give up totally on happiness and concentrate on what pleasure they can get for the rest of their, often short, lives. These are dangerous people. Violence that would horrify most of us means little to them.

While the Stacys are the visible products of the present system that runs our schools, they themselves are not the problem. What needs to be changed is the system. Almost all the Stacys who go to school would be willing to learn if we would change to a choice theory system, which means changing from schooling to education, from punishment to friendship, and from having to, to not having to make up for past failures. If they are willing to learn the useful skills of reading, writing, and problem solving now, we will forget the past.