Only Two Kinds of Dancers

[Excerpt from manuscript.]

We, as a society (that is, Americans of various stripes), have a rather narrow definition of what we mean when we say “dance.” Here’s what I’ve heard from students and teachers:

• Dance is a guy and a girl doing partner stuff
• People in tights doing things on tiptoe
• All that stuff they do on “So You Think You Can Dance”
• It’s people in tight costumes doing something no one understand
• Dance is just like mime with more people

We have so many encounters that we don’t even recognize as dance. I remember the late Hunter S. Thompson’s description of the circular patterns that reporters traced in hotel lobbies while phoning in their stories from their mobile phones. He called it The Cellular Waltz, and I’ll never forget that image.

There is an aesthetic thrill to carving the smoothest line down the mountain on skis, to riding the waves on a surfboard, to feeling the rhythm and flow of a soccer game at field level. When we boil down the essence of something to its motion, we enter the world of dance.

The human body is the Swiss Army Knife of evolution. We don’t do any one thing all that well (except perhaps for mucking up the environment, but that’s another book), but we can do many, many things, and we keep learning new things we can do. One thing we do extremely well is to move expressively. And with endurance.

Have you ever wondered how the Native American dancers from the Southwest can keep going for hours and hours, seemingly tireless through a night-long dance of great complexity and significance? Why are there no horse or dog races for 26 miles, 385 yards? How many non-human mammals have been to the summit of K2?

The human body is built from time immemorial to be in motion, and the human brain is to a very great extent developed and shaped by the body’s movement. Anne Green Gilbert, the great dance teacher and Brain Dance originator, says, “Movement is the architect of the brain.” (http://www.creativedance.org)

One tasty bit of research shows that learning to juggle helps you build more white matter (axons, or connecting tissue) in your brain, as well as adding to your supply of gray matter (the “thinking” cells). You not only now know how to juggle, you also have the ability to learn more things than you did before. [Research citation to follow.]

Be that as it may, up until this moment in human history, we have had three types of dance. The first pre-dates language, possibly, the second is ancient, and the third is relatively recent:

Ritual dance: Most often either rituals of tension (asking, needing, supplication, such as the stereotypical “rain dance”) or rituals of release (celebration, thanksgiving, memorials to past events). The movement of this kind of dance is closely drawn from observations of nature, in the sense that imitating something can draw it to you (harvest, animals, rain, etc.) and from a sort of ecstatic, intuitive connection to the world both seen and unseen.

Social dance: Partially an avenue for members of the opposite sex to find one another and begin the mating process. Partially a “night out” activity in which couples can be together and yet interact with others in a structured, public way. Unattached singles can find one another and blend into the social whole. There is a “high” to dancing in unison or concert with other members of your social group that is hard to equal.

Theatrical dance: Gradually, various social dancers became so skilled at their craft, and they and their choreographers so adept at devising complicated rules, steps, and sequences for them to do, that a new sort of dancer emerged: the entertainer. Regardless of whether we are applauding for the virtuosity of technically perfect dancers or the depth of an artistic experience beyond words, we are in fact being entertained.

Now, we are evolving a kind of dance that is both new and old at once.

Like ritual dance, it contains iconic patterns and knowledge that govern the universe and can be passed down through time.

Like social dance, it helps integrate all members into an active and cohesive unit that shares common values but also encourages individual expression and success.

Like theatrical dance, it engages the observer in an aesthetic experience that can transcend any simple verbal description and can connect disparate facts and ideas into a coherent and transformative whole.

Yet it is none of these things, or it is all of them. It is constructive dance, and it is the key to solving the education dilemmas of the present, and to preparing our whole society for the future. At least, that’s my argument.

Oh, and… the two kinds of dancers?

Trained

and

Untrained.

Both trained and untrained dancers can participate in constructive or creative dance equally well, as long as they share some common vocabulary to use as they construct, discuss, and revise their dances. I’m going to call this vocabulary the elements of dance, and we’ll look at each of the elements in detail in another chapter. [end of excerpt]

Teaching Advertising Literacy

From the New York Times, April 27, 2010:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/business/media/27adco.html?emc=eta1

“A federal agency is undertaking an effort to school youngsters in the ways of Madison Avenue. The initiative seeks to educate children in grades four through six — tweens, in the parlance of marketing — about how advertising works…”

My first thought on reading about this new effort was, “Wow! Great idea!” The initiative comes with its own Web site (of course), that is the jumping-off place for all the other parts of the program. (http://www.admongo.gov) There is a game that kids (or you) can play online, a section for teachers with classroom materials and curriculum guidelines, and an area for parents and families. The sample ads for fake but very realistic products (like the “Smile Meals” served at “Fast Chef” restaurants) are slick, entertaining, and excellent fodder for dissection and analysis.

But my post, “Not Tested and Not Taught” (http://classroomchoreography.wordpress.com/2010/04/26/not-tested-and-not-taught/) was fresh in my mind, and soon I was wondering just which children were going to have a chance to explore this topic in school.

First, there is the issue of time. As I said in my recent post, schools increasingly cut out anything that does not focus on what will be tested on those standardized exams that all children must suffer through each spring. The lowest-performing schools most often also have the most difficult populations (special education, English language learners, highly mobile families, etc.), and arguably these are the children who most need more diverse experiences and who are at the greatest risk of falling prey to unscrupulous advertisers. Yet these schools are the least likely to include any enhancements to curriculum like the Admongo campaign. They have already cut out physical education and recess; where are they going to find the time to experiment with this curriculum?

Then there is the higher-level thinking skills issue. Remember that the high-stakes tests only measure factual knowledge and a few basic, rote-type skills in reading and math (and soon, science). There are a few questions on more recent tests that allow students to show their thinking and to get partial credit for answers that are judged by human readers, but this is only a tiny fraction of test content. These tests have no way to ask or assess more open-ended, discursive questions like, “What does the ad want me to do?” Questions with multiple correct answers drive test-makers crazy, yet in real life those are by far more common than multiple-choice, right-or-wrong ones.

Since few teachers have the time or the training to engage students in this type of dialogue, how many will actually lead an exploration of advertising language? My guess is that the schools that are already doing okay (for now) on their Adequate Yearly Progress toward (unachievable) perfection may encourage this curriculum, and perhaps some teachers who are looking for something to occupy the rest of the year now that testing is over will try it. The stratification of public education will continue, with most children toiling under pressure to perform on tests that don’t really measure what we think they do.

My point is that the system, and the ever-tightening restrictions of No Child Left Behind, discourage inventive and thoughtful curriculum in favor of “drill and kill” strategies that amount to the insanity of doing more and more of what has not worked, in the hopes that eventually it will. And now that I put it that way, it sounds like of like certain military and diplomatic strategies of the recent past.

If we could harness the power of cognitive dissonance, we would never need another drop of petroleum, foreign or domestic, to power our machines.

Not Tested and Not Taught

The current debate about whether and how to apply merit pay principles to teacher compensation makes this a good time to think about the measuring tools that “No Child Left Behind” requires schools to apply to student “achievement.”

That word, “achievement,” in itself is misleading shorthand. It sounds as though there is some clearly measurable way to state what our children know and are able to do. But in reality, the federal law requires that schools make “Adequate Yearly Progress” toward one hundred percent proficiency in only two subjects, reading and mathematics, with science being phased in next.

Anyone who has spent time in public schools in this awful last decade knows that the pressure to do well on the tests is paramount. Teachers are “teaching to the test” from the moment students walk into school in August or September, until the tests are done by mid- to late April. The school and district budgets are deeply affected by student test scores in reading and math, and the public image of the school is at stake. No one wants to be branded a “failing” school.

Of course, as I may have mentioned before, the game is rigged. The NCLB law requires that all students, even students in “subgroups” like special education and English language learners, must reach 100% proficiency by 2014 at every grade level, or sanctions kick in. But that is a patently absurd if noble-sounding goal. How wrong is this?

• Each child learns at her or his own natural rate. Good teachers can be ready to assist that child when the child is ready to learn. But there is nothing about being six years old, or eight, or twelve, that will convey some magical ability to read or reason or work well with others. It is a process, and everyone walks that path at their own speed. Some children are ready to read at age four, and others won’t be ready until closer to seven or eight. One size does not even begin to fit all, but we get children who are praised for precociousness that is no more their doing than another child’s seeming slowness. Human learning cannot be forced or rushed; it happens, with effort, on its own time.
• But let’s play the game their way for a minute. Let’s assume that all second graders, regardless of socioeconomic background, first language, and possible clinical factors, could actually all reach a hypothetical target performance level on a written, standardized test. The question is, what does the test tell us about their understanding of the subject? Standardized tests live and die by computer scanning and numerical analysis. Where do important learning skills like brainstorming, using convergent and divergent thinking, making choices and decisions, listening, speaking, thinking and symbolically fit on the test? What about social skills like cooperating, working in teams, accepting responsibility, resolving conflicts, giving and receiving praise, and using appropriate nonverbal behavior? How can we tell if they know what it feels like to do a job well, to enjoy working, or to motivate themselves to excel? Even in reading and math, these tests can only give us a blurred image of student “achievement,” seen through a glass very, very darkly. Strike two.
• Let’s stay with the lawmakers one more step. Let’s pretend that all students of a certain age can be ready to score at a proficient level on a test that measures something important about their learning (in reading and math). How do we take the artifact of the actual testing process out of the equation? In scientific terms, the act of observation changes what is being observed. We know this in daily life: raising the camera to take a picture results in altered behavior in those who see the camera (goofy smiles, hiding, showing off, etc.). The act of testing, especially when the schools have made it abundantly clear to the children that this is deadly serious, creates its own artificial environment that may prevent many children from doing their best. When our brains go into “fight or flight” mode, no learning can go on, and facts formerly at the fingertips can vanish like smoke when needed on the test. So the method of assessment is incomplete, inadequate, and counterproductive. Strike three.

The real point of this post, all that being said, was to explore the choice of testing only reading and math for the first half or more of the NCLB law’s existence. Why was science shuffled down to third place and a later implementation? Why was social studies completely left out of the picture? Why are the other parts of language arts other than reading (writing, speaking, listening) not mentioned?

My theory is that the perpetrators of this law, from its genesis in the Texas backrooms of then-Governor Shrub Bush, had a couple of things in mind to serve their ultra-conservative agenda. They just needed to dress it up in the sheep’s clothing of concern for the educational well-being of our children, make it look like tough, principled reform, and skulk slowly off into the shadows while their little time-bomb ticked away.

Goal number 1: Increase profits for textbook manufacturers. Texas has a huge population to supply with textbooks, so it stands to reason that it is a very much sought-after market. We all know the robber barons of capitalism are the friends and beneficiaries of the political right, and they were not the least bit bashful about sending more business to the textbook companies. Why books? Well, the texts exist to teach the new, “tougher” standards, and by the way it is these same publishing companies that make and sell the standardized tests that so neatly mirror their texts. So it’s a tail-eating worm of greed at that point.

Goal number 2: Privatize American public education. Hey, it worked in Iraq, didn’t it? (No.) Well, never mind that. Private enterprise can always do the job better. (Hack. Kaff.) My contention is that the fact that the game is rigged, that all schools are destined to fail under the strict terms of the law, and that’s when the perps were going to step in and “save” education with vouchers and other ways of farming out education to money-making corporations. Probably owned by Halliburton.

Which brings us to Goal number 3: Take control of the content of education. Now, there is not much in mathematics for conservatives to object to, and everyone agrees it is important to learn, so full steam ahead. Almost the same with reading; the trick here is to be sure that the texts kids are reading are approved for all audiences. State boards of education (Hi, Texas!) could always go farther with censorship of certain texts than the federal law could do anyway, so reading was pretty safe.

Now, science, there’s a tricky one. How to test science without encouraging those commie socialist science teachers when they get into evolution, the age of the earth, and other sensitive subjects with the flat-earth set? I think they needed time to get enough Republicans onto the various state boards, and to raise enough money for things like the Creation Museum (http://creationmuseum.org/), a “state-of-the-art 70,000 square foot museum” that “brings the pages of the Bible to life, casting its characters and animals in dynamic form and placing them in familiar settings. Adam and Eve live in the Garden of Eden. Children play and dinosaurs roam near Eden’s Rivers.”

Hey, if there’s a diorama of kids playing near dinosaurs just outside Eden, it must be true, right?

So now there’s a good-size group of nutballs (hello, Tea Party!) who can agitate to get creationism taught right alongside evolution – except they’ve recently found that creation “theory” doesn’t hold up to the scientific method. Kind of inconvenient, but not a real obstacle to the true believers out there. Meanwhile, though our kids don’t know squat about science, so we have to start testing it.

The rule is: if it isn’t tested, it isn’t taught.

Which brings us to our last little moment of wondering about choices of what to test and what to teach: social studies.

This was an administration that issued blanket rebuffs to any suggestion that we ought to look at history when pondering important decisions. The sad tales of other invaders in both Afghanistan and Iraq held many lessons that might well have saved tens of thousands of lives, had we listened to them. Our history with Europe and Asia was old news to these hot-to-trot neocons.

My theory is that they thought teaching all that history stuff was only going to confuse the populace. After all, what they needed was a blindly obedient public, not a critically-thinking, historically-aware future electorate that might object to their hubris. So I think they deliberately chose to push social studies to the side while they began a surprisingly public campaign of disinformation (i.e., lies).

I mean, the Texas Board of Education choosing to give the study of Thomas Jefferson the boot on the grounds that he was too firmly in favor of clear separation of church and state? The governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia proclaiming Confederate History Month while saying that slavery was an “insignificant” cause of the Civil War? If people haven’t learned about the Constitution in school, isn’t easier to claim that President Obama is “running roughshod” over it?

Otay, that’s my cheerful thought for the day. Schools have been set up to fail, and the curriculum has been dumbed down in critical places. And all children are being left behind.

The Passing of Arnold Spohr

Until yesterday, I didn’t know the name of Arnold Spohr. Then I came across an obituary in the New York Times, naming him as the artistic director of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet for 30 years. Those years included the event that changed my life forever. I have Arnold Spohr to thank for my life in dance, and I’m sorry I didn’t think of reaching out to find out about him before he left us all behind.

The long version of this story is in my manuscript, but for now here’s what happened.

In 1971 I was starting out my sophomore year at Briar Cliff College, a small school on the bluffs above Sioux City, Iowa. We had, as part of our student activity fee, tickets to the college’s Lecture / Concert Series. This was an eclectic series of scholarly lectures and cultural events that fit the school’s liberal arts curriculum. That fall, the big event was a performance by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet at the Municipal Auditorium.

I had been to numerous theatrical events in my young life, including symphony orchestras and big-name musicals like “The Man of La Mancha.” I had both acted (briefly) on stage and been part of our high school musical stage crew. I had taught myself to pick out tunes on guitar and piano, and I had dabbled in some visual art history courses. I considered myself an arts appreciator.

But professional dance was something I knew nothing about, other than a nodding acquaintance with the June Taylor Dancers (look ‘em up!). My only dance experiences were:

• A horrible stint at the age of five in tap dance classes held in a woman’s basement. All the other students were girls, and I did not seem to have an aptitude for the art form. I was so glad when I got to quit after our first, undoubtedly excruciating, recital; and
• The memory of watching our oafish upperclassmen in my all-male high school, stumbling their way through dance routines being taught by the all-female high school dance team for our spring musicals.

So my experience of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet was profoundly unsettling. I found that I had no idea what I was looking at, or how to respond. I even had to watch my fellow audience members to figure out when it was time to applaud, because the cues were so different from any other form of stage show I had ever seen.

My embarrassment over that experience was what led me to take a dance class at the college. That in turn led to my first dance performance, in a little ballet called “The Nutcracker,” that Christmas. By the spring, I was dancing 30 hours a week in addition to my college course load, learning jazz and ballet and performing in several productions. From then on, I knew if there was any way in heaven or hell to make it happen, I was going to become a professional dancer. Which, it turns out, I did.

So, Arnold Spohr, I raise a toast to your memory, and send my thanks into the universe to mingle with your atoms. If you had not been aggressive about getting ballet to wider audiences in smaller cities, I might not have discovered my passion for dance until too late to fulfill it. My mission is to pay your gift forward.

RB

Ancient Becomes Modern

Introduction

Excerpt from the opening chapter of the manuscript.

Light is blocked out of the ceremonial chamber. Shadowy figures enter from a hidden opening. They take up places in the open area, in front of those already assembled. They settle into active stillness, shapes that are motionless yet shout action to the observer. For the duration of  four slow, deep breaths, no one moves.

The near-silence is interrupted and organized by a steady drumbeat. Voices join in, intertwined with more musical instruments, including rattles and cymbals carried by the dancers, who have leapt into age-old movement patterns and who tell of tales and truths and teachings passed down across generations.

Quiz: Which of the following does the preceding text describe?

1. An ancient Puebloan ceremony, taking place in a kiva
2. A Japanese Butoh dance/theater event, held in a covered outdoor arena
3. A classical ballet performance in an opera hall
4. A choreography showing in an American elementary school classroom

Okay, you get it — It could be ANY of the above. Let’s try another one:

Q: How are the arts viewed in US schools today?

1. As invaluable preparation for the challenges of the 21st century
2. As important ways to focus student attention on what they need to learn
3. As essential parts of the school day, with plenty of opportunity to move
4. As a waste of time, money, and space that could be better spent on more books and more prepackaged curriculum

All of you who chose “4,” please pat yourself on the back, with mixed emotions. Those of you who chose otherwise: You must have an extraordinary school in mind. Please cherish it!

But the question is, what does this really look like in practice? How can it be worth the time it takes to go through all this when we should be “covering” the mile-wide, inch-deep curriculum? Let’s take a sample peek…

________________

It is a sultry day by noon already, one of those late-October heat waves that used to be called Indian summer. The Waterloo, Iowa fifth-grade classroom seems to swell with the humidity in spite of the recently refurbished air conditioners’ best efforts. But the students seem barely to notice. They are intent on finishing up their final drafts of the dances they have choreographed to demonstrate various systems of the human body.

At this point in their unit on human physiology and the needs of creatures, the students are demonstrating their understanding of the complex systems that keep us alive by showing (and being able to explain) their science-based works of dance art.

Working in small groups of four to five, the students drew their system at random from a deck of assignment cards, and had a short working period — about seven minutes! — to create a choreographic interpretation of their assignment. For a sample of what these cards look like, see the Appendix at the end of this volume.

Despite the amazingly good quality of the first drafts, given the short deadline, each group had ideas for revision after exchanging ideas with their audience (the rest of the class) after their first showing. These ideas resulted in a dramatically improved set of second-draft studies. Now the students are polishing their work for a final showing and video-recording.

“One minute remaining!” proclaims the teacher, her voice penetrating over the excited conversations and stage directions of the rehearsing groups. “One minute to curtain, Dancers!” There is only a slight increase in the hubbub as the deadline approaches. These are experienced choreographer/performers, as we are about to see.

”Who would say, ‘It’s not perfect, but we think we’re ready to put it on stage?” The teacher pauses, notes that everyone’s hand is raised, and smiles as she says, “All right, then — Showtime! Who wants to go first?” Since all the hands are still raised, she chooses a group at random; they make a bee-line for the “stage” while the other students move into the “house.”

The students can all identify the limits of the “stage,” which is the section of the classroom they have chosen for most of their formal choreography showings. It has the least distracting background of all the walls, and has the most usable space in the room. The students chose it as the best space to present a visual art such as dance.

The place in the theater building where the audience sits to view the happenings on the stage is called the “house,” and the students love knowing this. When the teacher says, “Quiet in the house, please!” all the chatter stops and the audience focuses on the stage area as the first group goes to “places.”

The teacher acts as the stage technician, bringing up the classroom lights and pressing “play” on the classroom iPod simultaneously. The iPod is connected to a high-fidelity speaker unit that is capable of filling a much larger room with sound, so she keeps the volume reasonable for the sake of both her students and those in the neighboring classrooms, but the sound is solid and hefty as the Circulatory System group performs a dance that shows how the blood moves through two valves and two chambers in the right side of the heart, and how it is oxygenated in the lungs before passing through two more valves and chambers on the left and into the aorta.

The dance they have created has its own characteristic “lub-dub” rhythm, so the background music simply supports the dancers’ movements without dictating them. The audience has seen the prior versions of this dance, and they applaud the spin move Jamaal does to demonstrate the re-energized (with oxygen) blood coming from the lungs back to the heart. This group has made only cosmetic changes to their choreography, but their performance is honed to near-perfection, and they are clearly pleased by their own efforts, not to mention the enthusiastic response of the audience.

Group by group, the class shows their final draft studies to the audience and the camera. “I can’t believe I’m having an aesthetic experience,” the teacher mutters to herself as she watches the last of the beautifully thoughtful and imaginative interpretations of what had been prosaic science topics only a week before.

How did this class arrive at this point? What is the value, if any, of this approach to learning? We are blending a subject area with an artistic process, and that act of creation is where the true alchemy occurs. Is it truly worth doing?

That, esteemed reader, is the subject of this book. [excerpt concludes]

Book Excerpt: The Education Factory

This post is an excerpt from a first draft of my book manuscript. I am posting it in order to gather comment and test my writing on a larger public.

The working title of this book is:

No Children Left on Their Behinds:

How Creative Dance Can Save American Education

© 2010 Randy Barron. All rights reserved. Re-publication in any form whatsoever is not permitted without written permission. Please direct readers to this site rather than to copy and paste from it.

Chapter : The Education Factory

What does teaching and learning look like in a school in the USA, ten years into the new millennium? If you haven’t stepped into a school building in decades, you might be surprised by some of the changes you would see, but it would not seem all that different from schools you remember from your youth.

In fact, schools still operate in many of the same ways they did when public education got its start here. Students still often sit at individual desks arranged in rows. There are colorful bulletin boards and posters on the walls of the rooms, and there are usually shelves of textbooks in each room. Discipline policies and classroom management tools are prominently displayed. Student work is posted in the hallways, often with little explanation of its purpose or hints about assessment.

School buildings are variations on rectangular boxes, rooms are smaller boxes, and there is an office, a cafeteria / multipurpose room, a library (“media center,” now), and sometimes a gymnasium which might contain a stage. Typically, such stages are not used for performance or practice but for storage of things that won’t fit anywhere else in the building. The boxes-within-boxes theme is the standard for school design.

Announcements come over the school PA system first thing in the morning. (The higher-tech schools use video, sometimes with students doing the on-camera announcing.) They also regularly interrupt during the day, usually with the preface, “Please excuse the interruption…” There are various similarities to military, industrial, and even prison life in the daily routine. There is a lot of attention to security. The teaching and learning environment is segregated from the surrounding community and natural environment.

Some classrooms are organized around table groups: four to six students sit together around a common table, or push their individual desks into a rectangle. But all testing and much of the other work students do is solitary and silent — or as silent as today’s troubled and distracted children can manage.

With all the powerful research about how humans learn best, why do we still put our children and our money into structures and strategies that do not work? With literacy and “numeracy” rates dropping like stones, year after year, why have we not transformed schools the way that major corporations have re-designed themselves to meet 21st-century needs?

The answer lies partly in the ignorance and cowardice of legislators who cannot be bothered to learn how we learn. They serve the economic machinery that says testing and textbooks are big business and we can’t afford to monkey with the system. And the answer also lies in the continuing reverberations of the industrial age that spawned public education in the first place.

Until the Industrial Revolution kicked into high gear in the 19th century, there was no such thing as public education. Schooling was for those who could afford it, not for the lower classes who were destined to serve out their lives as laborers and menials.

But the vast new factories required many thousands of new hands to work the machines and to assemble the products and to package them for shipment or sale. Workers needed to perform their mind-numbingly repetitive tasks for hours upon hours, mostly in isolation. Workers toiling side by side could barely hear one another over the roaring and clatter of gigantic machines, and collaboration and creativity were regarded as distractions rather than advantages.

Factory workers needed basic literacy and a few simple numeric skills. Also, many poor families were sending their underage children to work in factories, where they were often maimed, killed, or poisoned in the harsh environs. To make sure that children were not lost to the labor force at such a young age, and to train them in the skills they would need in the factories when they became old enough to work, the captains of industry agreed to allow the government to institute a system of free public education.

Much in the spirit of noblesse oblige, the investment in “bettering the great unwashed” was seen as what an enlightened society could do for its citizens — and as a source of labor for the ever-hungry factories that were multiplying at breakneck pace across the country and around the globe.

Schools were designed like factories, with orderly rows of desks for students to “produce” their work, and the students themselves seen as “products.” As a way to assess quality control, educators devised “tests” for the students to pass. The diploma at the end of high schooling was like the union sticker on a toaster: a certification of basic quality. Tested and ready for use.

Behavior management was simple. The pioneering behaviorist B. F. Skinner later explained and refined these techniques, but essentially educators used the “carrot and stick,” or reward-and-punishment method of keeping control of their young charges. It was Dickensian, it smacked of penal institutions the world around, and it led to horrific abuses of all sorts, but in general it worked fine, for the purposes of industry. If people wanted better education than that, let them earn the money to pay for it.

In the early 20th century, educational theory began to get some much-needed infusion of humanity and creative thinking. Leading theorists such as Jean Piaget and John Dewey began to question how humans learn and to challenge some of the basic tenets of the Factory Model of education. They postulated that we each construct or build our own understanding, based on experiences more than on information. But the industrial juggernaut was rolling on full speed ahead, thrown into a higher gear by the nation’s experience with the First World War and the intriguing idea of making weaponry for profit.

Then, in the 1930s, the Great Depression canceled any hope of reform or change in the educational system. School was a luxury once again, and many families put their children into menial jobs that paid a pittance but a pittance that might mean the difference between survival and abject poverty. Just as the nation was beginning to pull itself out of this downward spiral, the world was at war again, and war once more proved to be a way to enrich the factory owners while employing a new generation of consumers who would buy what the factories put out once the war was done.

Gradually, though, some of the fundamental inequities of American society also came floating to the top as a result of wartime realities. If women were no longer second-class citizens, by law, then why were there such large pockets of blatant discrimination against African Americans? Why were inner-city schools allowed to crumble into chaos while suburban schools became lily-white academic meccas?

Rather than looking at the fundamental strategies of teaching and learning in our schools, we as a nation became obsessed with the mechanics. How new and nice were the buildings? How many textbooks could we buy? What kind of furniture should we have in the classrooms? How far were we busing students to the “magnet school” of their choice, and what “magnet” themes would attract white-flight students back into minority-majority schools in the cities?

So the Factory Model of education went unquestioned, and was further aided and abetted by the Cognitive Approach. That approach, simply stated, was: bring the child into the classroom; “teach” the child correct information in an approved way; test the child; move the child on to the next grade.

This was similar to the factory approach, with some tweaks from the Computer Age: the brain was now not a reward-and-punishment machine, but a computing machine. Correct inputs would lead to correct output. Conversely, Garbage In, Garbage Out. The task was to figure out what was correct and what was garbage, and the student would magically absorb information if teaching was done correctly.

At this point the system started to experience what we could compare to the “caterpillar” phenomenon on the highway. That’s when the traffic slows down up ahead, and then speeds up again, but meanwhile the slowdown ripples backward along the path of travel, like a caterpillar bunching itself for the next extension.

Waves of “reform” passed through the system, sometimes going East to West, sometimes West to East, sometimes Central to Coast. The latest and greatest idea (New Math, Phonics, Whole Language, Reading First, yada yada yada) splashed down and the ripples gradually subsided after a brief notoriety in Reader’s Digest and Parade Magazine and Time or Newsweek.
Finally, the system was clearly bending under its own weight. Some might see that as an opportunity to transform education, rather than merely to “re-form” it, using the same old broken parts.

But, in the year 2000, a combination of ingredients conspired to bring us the most serious attempt ever to dismantle and bring down the public education system, while simultaneously rewarding test-makers and textbook publishers with a huge public trough of money for increasing “student achievement” as measured by standardized tests.
And it was based on one of the biggest lies ever perpetrated on the American public. It was titled “An act to close the achievement gap with accountability, flexibility, and choice, so that no child is left behind,” but Public Law 107-110 immediately became known as No Child Left Behind, or NCLB (often pronounced, “Nicklebee”).

[I am making dissection of NCLB the subject of its own chapter.]

RB

Classroom Choreography (SM) blog launched!

This blog is dedicated to discussions of dance integration in the classroom: in other words, exploring the tools and techniques of dance-making to drive learning in classrooms.

The posts in this blog, and the comments, will be used in the development of a mass-market book I am writing about the importance of movement for brain development and the power of creating art (in this case, dance) about what we are learning in school, to make it experiential, relevant, motivating, and memorable.

Posts will include excerpts from the manuscript of the book, related thoughts that seem worth putting out into the ether, and anything else that may help raise the consciousness of Americans about this transformational issue.

Randy Barron, Teaching Artist

For more information about me or my work, please visit:

http://owldancer.net/RandyBarron

Comments are always welcome, but please use thoughtful and polite language, or risk having your posts deleted. Thanks for reading!

RB