How insanely contrasting City Springs is to the Free School and the previous readings! First off, I admire the drive of the principal and her strong ambitions to save this school. However, having the knowledge that there exists schools where creativity and play and collaboration exist, the implementation of Direct Instruction makes me cringe a little bit.
I understand the merits of DI. It is a uniform system, it is neat and tidy and fast, it produces results, and it validates schools and makes parents proud. In this regard, DI is a perfectly credible form of education. In many cases, without a strict structure, schools will decay into chaos, just as City Springs was doing before DI was implemented.
But could these students also have flourished with a system like the Free School? With their living situations, would they be up to the task of self-motivated learning, or do they really need to be regimented and controlled to learn anything? Obviously, the environment of these children plays a huge role in their education.
City Springs had a great load of pressure on it to produce tangible results. The Free School had time and leisure. In my mind, I can relate City Springs to a vegetable garden in the midst of a famine. They must produce, and produce quickly, or the people will go hungry. So they implement all of the tricks they know: green houses, pesticides etc. The Free School is like a flower garden. Each plant is tenderly nourished so that it will, and will want to, produce elegant flowers, each allowed to bloom at different times. The priorities of each are different. City Springs is training kids to be a part of a well-oiled machine (they must answer to the all-mighty standardized tests and ultimately to a system of hierarchy) and the Free School is geared towards the children developing as a person (problem solving, exploring, inventing).
I must also comment again on the principal herself. Like I said before, I admire her drive, but I feel sorry for her. She believes in this system, she feels so strongly about education, but she has taken this CRAZY HUGE load solely onto her own shoulders. She states that she has to show a face to the students, teachers and parents that, “I’m made of steel…but I’m not.” I can’t imagine how stressful this must be for her, and I really don’t think that it is necessary. She has made it that no one is her equal. She reprimands the teachers in the same way that she does the students. Moreover, the students are not encouraged to solve their own conflicts (quite unlike the council meetings in the Free School). I do think that she is respected, that she is kinder than she lets on (some scenes in the movie show this) but there’s something about this that makes me so sad. This may sound cheesy, but to me her love of educating has been overshadowed by an addiction for control, and once that power is no longer in her hands, she will have nothing.
Students at Sherman Institute, 1919. Courtesy Sherman Indian High School, Riverside CA.
1 comment:
Conflict resolution: that is one of the great differences between this school and the Free School and the less radical Farm School near Soka. If you notice, none of the children's conflicts are resolved, though we see many taking place. And the documentarians are uninterested. A child cries on the playground, while the teacher rubs her back... what is that about? Children squabble in the kinnygarden and the teachers pull them and shush them without hardly a word--even in the groups of children containing 7 or fewer kids to one adult.
Also, a comment I am leaving on many of the blog entries this morning: practice criticism of the strategies our films use. In what ways does the film create a rhetoric of success? Analyze it with careful critical reasoning as rhetoric and argument: what claims for success do they make and what evidence do we see in terms of incidents and numbers (data)? What does the camera show us? What does it not show us? Anything left out?
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